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No Action Without Emotion — On emotion as operating system

• [article] Stress and Creativity — 28 Mar 2025
  Stress promotes bias—stereotypical thinking and behaving. Less stress promotes cognitive flexibility—an openness to new ways of thinking and behaving. Neither is better than the other. It’s about the situation you deploy them in.
• [article] Giving in to Fight or Flight — 22 Nov 2024
  Stress is a good thing before it’s a bad thing. It motivates us to act. We are scared of the f’s, but we don’t need to be. We should fight for things worth fighting for and fly from things that aren’t. Use the f’s as guides to action, not just things to avoid.
• [article] Why do people kill themselves? — 16 Aug 2024
  Suicide is the interaction between personal despair and the failure of communities to provide reasons to live. We can’t answer Camus’ “one truly serious philosophical problem” for people, only they can. But we can provide an argument to live, by showing people where they fit.
• [article] Overengineering 'calm down' — 21 Mar 2024
  Pop-psych theories on stress often use complex jargon to describe fundamentally simple concepts. They act less to inform, and more to reassure us, fascinate us, and absolve us of responsibility.
• [article] Active listening is misleading — 11 Jan 2024
  Active listening isn’t about ticking boxes in conversation; it’s about diving into emotions to transform surface-level chit-chat into deep, collaborative dialogue. Forget models, focus on feelings.
• [article] No action without emotion — 19 Jun 2023
  Our nervous system transforms senses to feelings long before they become thoughts and behaviours. One can’t talk about them in isolation. Our aversion to emotions is just an aversion to passionate emotions. But just remember that your body is better at your life that you are.
• [article] Solving the say-do-gap — 12 May 2023
  To close the say-do-gap, we need to feel some ownership of the problem, we need the social support to support the change, and we need to know how. Anything less will make us focus on how good thinking about changing feels and not actually putting in the work.
• [article] A Science of Discontent — 31 Oct 2022
  We regularly create ‘psychic predators’, choosing to concentrate on the uncontrollability of events or concentrating on events we can’t control. A far better way of approaching this is to exercise our ‘psychic muscles’.
• [article] Useful Pharmacology — 28 Jul 2022
  We absolutely love some drugs. Others terrify us. The difference is familiarity more than any other single thing and the result is confusion. A much more principled framework for thinking about drugs is thinking of them as tools.
• [article] Our success is not our own — 23 Jun 2022
  The success of the people we surround ourselves with directly influences our performance and sense of accomplishment. It’s worth paying attention to how we balance this, both with those more successful but also those less.
• [article] The five stages of grief are a lie — 12 Apr 2022
  The five stages of grief were never supposed to be an orderly process, despite the common wisdom of many clinicians. Rather, anyone can experience any stage at any time, and the best support recognises this.
• [article] The beauty of stress — 30 Nov 2021
  Stress is one of the most valuable pieces of biological technology we own. Don’t confuse ancient lion chases with email notifications. Our responses to modern stressors are just as well calibrated then as now. The difference is that some stressors we choose.
• [article] The Value of the Sacred — 24 Aug 2021
  The sacred isn’t a social myth; a delusion of the religious. It is what happens when we bind moments of personal meaning and power to something greater than ourselves. And, without the sacred, we are left unable to transform meaning into purpose.
• [article] Emotion and the Mind — 2 Jun 2021
  The rational mind is new, and it is weak in the face of emotion. Emotions motivate us to act, but our mind takes these visceral feelings and tangles them. Pay not attention to the mind or the emotion, but to the source of the emotion and its meaning.
• [article] The loneliness epidemic — 20 Sep 2020
  One in five people are lonely. This is not trivial. Loneliness is emerging as one of the greatest threats to physical and emotional health. And it shouldn’t be, because unlike many of our most intractable problems, this one seems so solvable.