When something overwhelms us, the nervous system has two ways out, up into alarm, or down into shutdown. Between them is a band where you can still think and still feel. The work is to widen it.

There is a moment, in fear, when you stop being the one deciding what you're doing or saying. The body has already moved. Your mouth has said things you didn't mean. Your thinking only catches up afterwards, often confused about what just happened.

Data floods into us without pause, through every sense at once: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and the "spidey sense," the felt sense from your body. All of it funnels up through the brain stem, the oldest part of the brain, the part we share with everything on the planet, including reptiles. Sitting in there is a small structure called the amygdala, and the simplest way to think about it is as a smoke alarm. What it does next, and why, is worth understanding properly.

You know that internal feeling of “don’t tell me what to do” when confronted by certain phrases or tasks? Or that moment when you’re about to do a thing, then someone tells you to do the thing, and now you can’t. If you are living with ADHD or Autism, you may know the feeling I’m referring to, and it may be causing more difficulty than is needed. It’s what is referred to, pathologisingly, as Pathological Demand Avoidance, or PDA. And it is very common.

You may have heard of Occam's razor. How about Occam's broom? Bear with me as I attempt to link how these concepts apply to anxiety, confirmation bias, and psychotherapy.

For decades, if you went to your GP feeling down or depressed, you were probably told some version of the same thing: that your brain had a chemical imbalance, probably involving serotonin, and that medication would correct it. It was a convenient explanation that seemed to make sense, and so it stuck. By the early 2000s it had moved from clinical shorthand into everyday language, the kind of thing that people took as a given when discussing mental health.

But we now know that the evidence never really supported it.

Something is shifting in the English-speaking world, and it's not especially easy to put your finger on. It's not a single event. It's more of a slow deterioration — a background anxiety that keeps rising, a sense that things are more divided, more exhausting, more hopeless than they used to be. The sense that it's getting worse, that "it's all crazy," is becoming something I hear daily in therapy sessions. The 2026 World Happiness Report has put some numbers to what a lot of people have been quietly feeling. For the second year running, not one English-speaking country made the world's top ten happiest nations. Finland first. Iceland second. Denmark third. Costa Rica fourth. Australia fifteenth. The US twenty-third. The UK twenty-ninth. We are, as a group, falling behind — and the people falling fastest are the youngest.

My digital spaces have recently been swamped by ads and testimonials for lion's mane extract, and claims of significant benefits to those living with complex trauma. For people in that situation, some of those claims will sound particularly appealing: better memory, reduced anxiety, clearer thinking; a brain that just works better. This post is an attempt to look at it as objectively as I can.

If you're in therapy — or thinking about starting — you may have wondered why healing feels so different for different people. Why some people seem to be finding their way back to themselves, while others feel like they're building something they've never quite had. One of the reasons for this has to do with when trauma first began. Understanding this difference won't speed up your healing. But it might help you be more patient, and more compassionate, with yourself.

If your relationships often feel painful, chaotic, or unfulfilling — if you keep finding yourself in the same dynamics with different people — it may be time to look at something that runs much deeper than the choices you're making. One of the most powerful, and most often unconscious, influences on how we love and connect is our attachment style.¹ Understanding it takes courage. But it also opens a door.

Fear is one of the most powerful forces in human experience. And one of the most misunderstood. We tend to think of fear as a response to something dangerous — and it is. But what happens when fear becomes the lens through which we see everything?