How to Get Your Parents Out of Your Head
The human mind between the ages of one and ten is infinitely attuned to its environment. A somewhat cold forbidding father or an erratic mother really may be all that are required to breed an elevated degree of anxiety or…
How to Stop People Pleasing and Be Happy
One of the more curious aspects of the ways we are built is that it can take us a very long time indeed to work out what we need in order to be happy. Sign up to our mailing list…
In Praise of Introspective People
However healthy it often is to try to fit in and assume we must just be like everyone else, there are also benefits in sometimes accepting that we might in the end not be and this needn’t be a cause…
Why We Can’t Learn Without Making Mistakes
Part of the pain of growing older is that we can start to see how much, at certain points, we misunderstood ourselves, what the costs of missing self-knowledge were and how beautiful it could be if we could just build…
Why We Are Lonely
It’s an embarrassing confession, but many of us spend a great deal of our lives asking, week after week, always with the same blend of frustration, despair and puzzlement: Why am I so lonely? The real answer is likely to…
How to Tell If You Have Been Gaslit
We’re unlucky enough if we meet with people who want to do us wrong, show us contempt and take advantage of us. But this is as nothing next to the monumental bad luck of encountering people who do all this…
We Have a Big Announcement…
iPhone: Android: Learn More: The School of Life App is a digital resource for making time for your mental wellbeing. It gathers the very best of our teaching – our films, essays, audio lessons, practical exercises and interactive media –…
Trauma and Forgetting
The word ‘trauma’ captures an acute paradox in our relationship to our own histories: some of what is most significant in our lives is inaccessible to day to day memory; the more important something is, the less we may be…
Why It Really Is All About Your Childhood
The founding principle of modern psychotherapy – that it is all to do with one’s childhood – can sound especially irritating. Why should we be forever tied to things that happened infinitely long ago? Sign up to our new newsletter…