Informing Your Choices
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Being You Lounge

The interior life — self-understanding, personal growth, identity, and resilience. Content for those who take their own development seriously.

Understanding Yourself How your brain works, why you behave the way you do, and what your body is telling you
Library Essays
How the Irrational Persists
Why a warm, vague description feels like it was written just for you — the 1948 experiment that fooled a classroom with an identical horoscope, and what it says about personality tests, pattern-seeking, and a great deal else.
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The Three-Pound Supercomputer
Understanding the brain’s computational power — what it can do that no machine can replicate, and why your mind is not what you think it is.
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When Your Brain Has a Mind of Its Own
Understanding stress, memory, and behaviour — and what happens in the body when the survival brain takes over from the thinking brain.
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The Completion Compulsion
How an Ordovician drive became a trillion-dollar industry — why finished never feels finished, and what the seeking brain is actually looking for.
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Living in a Fabricated World
How the brain constructs a version of reality and calls it perception — and what that means for the certainty you feel about anything.
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A Funny Weapon
Humour, laughter, and the weaponisation of biology — what comedy is doing in the brain and why you use it the way you do.
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Want vs Need, Shame vs Guilt: When Precision Matters
Four words that get used interchangeably — and what you lose when you do. The difference that makes a difference in how you understand yourself.
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No Time for Goodbyes
What a child's exit from the room tells us about play, parenting, and the dance of reciprocity — and what your own nervous system is doing in every exchange, not just theirs.
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In Other Words
In Other Words… Why Do People Believe Their Star Sign Knows Them?
The same identical horoscope, handed to an entire classroom, and everyone thought it was written just for them — what that says about you, not the stars.
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The Brain Was Never Designed to Feel Satisfied
Why finishing something doesn’t feel the way you expected — and what the wellness industry does with that neurological fact.
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Some People Genuinely Cannot Feel Time Passing
Time blindness is real — how the brain tracks time, and why for some people that mechanism runs very differently.
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Why the Best Thinking Happens When You Stop Trying
The default mode network — what your brain is doing on a walk that it genuinely cannot do when you are staring at the problem.
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Your Body Doesn't Need Bad Luck to Age
The quantum physics writing random mutation into DNA — why ageing starts long before anything goes wrong, and it was never a punishment for anything.
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Hey! Want To Know
What Every Superstition Has in Common — a Brain
Why rituals, lucky objects, and pre-match routines aren’t irrational — they are exactly what pattern-seeking brains do under uncertainty.
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Why Some People Have an Unreliable Sense of Time
The brain’s internal clock — what it is, how it works, and why it runs at a different speed for some people.
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How Your Body Talks 24/7
Before you say a word, your body has already spoken — what it is saying, who can read it, and what you give away without knowing.
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How Bodies Tell the Truth When Words Lie
The science of what leaks through when someone is trying not to show it — including what you reveal without intending to.
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Ambition, Readiness and Change The poised moment, the leap, resistance, and what it takes to move
Library Essays
Poised: Ambition, Risk, and the Nervous System That Gets There First
What it means to be genuinely ready — not certain, not fearless, but poised. Why the body’s assessment arrives before the conscious decision.
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The Evolutionary Roots of Resistance
Why you resist change even when you want it — the inherited survival mechanism that mistakes growth for danger.
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In Other Words
Your Body Has Already Decided
The somatic signal of readiness — why the thinking that returns at 3am is neurologically purposeful, not anxious noise.
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Why the Leap Is Never Just Yours to Take
Every significant move you make sends ripples through the people around you — the relational weight of changing your life.
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The Science of ‘Feed the Solution, Starve the Problem’
Why attention given to a problem strengthens it — and where to put the resource if you actually want something to change.
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Hey! Want To Know
How a Brain Sees the Target Whilst the Body Counts the Cost
The cheetah before the sprint — why knowing what you want and being ready to go are two completely different things.
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Why Ambition and Anxiety Feel the Same in Your Body
The identical physical signal — and how to tell whether it is pointing toward something you fear or something you want.
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Health, Recovery and Resilience Natural healing, pain, sleep, and the body’s own capacity to restore
Library Essays
Natural Healing
Understanding recovery across physical, psychological, and social dimensions — the stage model that applies whether the wound is physical or emotional.
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Pain as Evolutionary Communication
What pain is actually for — the evolutionary logic of a signal that nobody wants and everyone needs, physical and emotional alike.
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Sleep as Biology
The logic beneath the lullaby — what sleep actually is and why your body insists on it in ways you cannot override for long.
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Sleep as Culture
How a biological flexibility became a medical emergency — and how the eight-hour norm you feel guilty about missing was invented, not discovered.
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In Other Words
The Body Already Knows How to Heal — and So Does the Mind
Natural healing explained plainly — the stages, what helps and what hinders, and why recovery has its own logic.
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Where the Idea of Eight Hours Sleep Actually Came From
The eight-hour norm isn’t biology — it’s history. What that means for the guilt you carry about your own sleep.
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Hey! Want To Know
Why Your Body Sleeps Differently Depending on What It Needs
Sleep flexibility — how the body adjusts its sleep across illness, stress, seasons, and life stages, and why that is the design.
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Identity and the Self Who you are, how you became that person, and what you carry without choosing to
Library Essays
Why Delusions of Grandeur? — of all things?
Why the mind sometimes builds a settled, unshakeable belief in its own exceptional importance — from Don Quixote through Kohut’s mask, megalomania, and a platform economy built to manufacture the recognition it promises.
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Authentic and Inauthentic Behaviour
The gap between who you are and who you perform — and why the performance costs more than you might realise.
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The Borrowed Self
How the need to belong moves from admiration to assimilation — and what you borrow from others when your own identity feels insufficient.
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When the Cat Rules the Dog
The psychology of confidence in social groups — why the most confident person in a room is rarely the strongest, and what confidence actually is.
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Narcissist, Misogynist, Misandrist — Beyond Lazy Labelling
Positions, not pathologies — what these terms actually describe and why using them as insults closes down understanding rather than opening it up.
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Parkes, Bowlby, Freud, Keats and Me
An April walk through Hampstead and life — on grief as a rupture of identity, and what it asks of the self that remains.
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YoungFamilyLife at 100: Following My Nose
A personal reflection on following curiosity without a map — what 100 published pieces taught about how work and identity grow together.
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A Year Since the Doors Opened
One full orbit of the sun since the first essay went live — the course that didn't book, the two real reasons why, and what a year of writing anyway actually built.
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In Other Words
In Other Words… The Drop-off at Uni
Hope and homesickness aren’t opposites — what four decades of research says about leaving home for university, and the identity reorganisation that comes with it, on both sides of the front door.
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What “Delusions of Grandeur” Actually Looks Like
Confident, big-headed, or genuinely delusional? What actually separates ordinary confidence, megalomania, and the real thing.
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Why We Never Tire of Watching the Pompous get their Comeuppance
Nebuchadnezzar, Malvolio, Basil Fawlty — why the same story gets retold every century, and the brain science behind why the fall feels so good.
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Why Some People Try to Become Someone Else
The pull toward admiring someone so much you start to absorb them — where that comes from and what it tells you about your own sense of self.
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When Grief Moves — and When It Doesn’t
What grief actually is, what it does to the self, and why some loss gets stuck rather than moving through.
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Who We Argue With as Children Shapes Who We Become as Adults
The formative influence of early intellectual conflict on identity — and what the people you pushed against left behind.
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Getting Older Doesn't Make You Wiser or More Stubborn — Not by Itself
Why age alone doesn't decide which way a person goes, and what actually does — the disposition that was already there long before it had the chance to show.
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