“The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.”

I had this saying wrong. I thought it was: “The best time to plant a tree was yesterday. The second best time is now”. But it came in very handy when I was explaining the importance of the quote. Even though I got it wrong (which makes me feel like my mother.)

The benefit of getting it wrong actually helped me to understand the real crux of the quote.

When you fuck up. As we do. Often. And you wake up from a 10 year drug / drunken filled haze, full of regret, sorrow, self-pity and repeats of ‘why have I wasted so much time??!!’ (Fill in your own regret / moment of realisation above.)

Stop.

Because although the best time to start getting your shit together was 10 years ago, the second best time is now.

We all have times in our lives when we struggle with an overactive mind - it won’t shut off at night, it’s stuck on an old memory or trying (over and over) to figure out a solution to a problem that may not be able to be solved. Sometimes it’s just re-hashing a hurtful or painful event over and over for no apparent good reason.

Sometimes our problem solving mind just needs to stop ‘trying to work it out’ so we can get some peace and quiet, get off to sleep, focus on what we need to do in the here and now or simply to allow some calm to help reduce an anxious state.

Below is a super simple and super effective way to interrupt negative repetitive thoughts and reduce ruminative thinking - those times when a thought continues to go around and around in your mind.

I have had a number of clients who have come to me after feeling that they haven’t made much progress in long-term therapy.

They come to me to try a different approach.

They have worked through a lot of their psychological issues and may have made some progress - but they still feel there is something holding them back.

I’ve heard on several occasions of people who have had months or years of psychological input who - once they try a different approach - find their mood finally lifts. For example, a young male who had over 12 months of psychological therapy added some omega 3 into his regime and within a couple of weeks noticed that he felt less irritable, less aggressive and calmer.

Recent statistics report that our suicide rates continue to climb. Psychiatric hospitals are bursting at the seams, mental health hospitals are understaffed and staff are overwhelmed. It’s difficult unless you are in the most urgent need of care to get psychiatric help. The burden is often left to families to cope with the struggling person - if the struggling person is lucky enough to have a family member to support them.

It’s all a little depressing (no pun intended). So what’s so wrong with what we are doing? And how do we do it better?

We all think and perhaps even daydream about our future – how it all might look – and try to hope for the best. Many times we can’t see a clear path from now to that gleaming future.

The ‘Best Possible Self’ exercise was developed to help us visualize what we might be in the future and through increasing optimism and improving mood, help us get there. The best possible self is a researched and studied approach to changing our mindset, improving coping skills and elevating levels of happiness.

To understand how to implement the Best Possible Self Exercise in our daily routine, we will first discuss the origin of this approach and then move on to the instructions and step-by-step guide.

New Year Resolutions

How to make them. How to Keep them!

We often enter the new year with new resolutions - something we want to change, do differently, a behaviour or a goal we want to attain - be it health, wealth or happiness related. Here a few hints on how to make that happen!

It is not only the season to be jolly - it's also the season that can cause an awful lot of stress /distress. Family, food and Far-too-much-Fun can all add up to feeling a little worse for wear. Here are 10 helpful hints to help you get through:

I think a lot of us at times feel that there is something more to us than we are currently experiencing – but feel overwhelmed and unsure of what it might be - so given the choice, we choose to do nothing. A while ago, I wrote about the changes I had to make to end up doing what I now do. I had left work due to 'burn out', and decided to take a year off. I had no idea what I was going to do, but felt that I really had to the potential to do something different. Better. More satisfying. However, after a few months I began to wonder whether to forget about my plan and instead return to the status quo. Although I felt that there was something 'better' out there for me I did not know what and I certainly had no idea what my ‘potential’ was. I was getting nervous and feeling a little unsure of what I was doing.

And then this poem was read out to me:

This has been something that has been on my mind for quite some time.

And something I have been trying to get my head around for a while.

I know so much has been written about it and I know that there have been all sorts of ideas and suggestions to 'throw away your day job and travel the world'. And that's all very well and good (if that's what you want to do). But it's not at all possible.

Is it?