The Christmas Effect: why you feel weird during the festive season 🎅

👆👆Oh look, it's The Brink podcast! Listen to this week's newsletter here! 👆👆 It’s Christmas. That means the bin bag of Christmas decorations you hastily shoved somewhere so you didn’t have to think about them is now empty, and your home is littered with tinsel

Why do people pay to suffer? 😭

I read something odd the other day.  Over in China, the Department of Culture and Tourism announced they had created a unique holiday package. Called the "Exile to Ningguta", paying customers would get the chance to experience what it was like to be exiled during the Qing dynasty.

The Psychopaths of TikTok 🤳

When you think of psychopaths, where does your mind take you? For me,  I’m transported back to my late teens, and watching Patrick Bateman, the eponymous main character from American Psycho: a suave lunatic who can be an expert in the inner workings of Phil Collins, but also an

How to flourish when the world is going to sh*t 💩

Oh it’s gloomy out there guys. Regardless of your political views, open your favourite news app and you’re inundated with all the bad things in the world. Whether it’s climate change, poo in the rivers, wars in the Middle East, the refugee crisis, the rise and rise

Why do we give power to bad men? 💪

This week Donald Trump returned to the White House. For the political left it was a gut punch. For the political right it was a vindication of sticking with a man who had been tried, convicted, impeached and bankrupted on multiple occasions.  But for the rest of us who don’

Anxiety: the World's Most Misunderstood Emotion 🤔

Anxiety is everywhere. According to pretty much every statistic measuring it, there has been a steady increase in people feeling a sense of dread or fear about their lives. And it’s global. It’s believed around 4% of the global population currently experiences an anxiety disorder - more than

Robotic Love: How Machines Won Over Our Hearts and Heads 💗

Artificial intelligence is everywhere: it watches the skies for asteroids, it manages our transport, and it develops our medicines. Even the typing of this sentence had two bits of AI working to ensure I didn’t put a foot wrong. From the predictive text engine Google uses to guess what

Do you feel lucky? How luck shapes how we think the world works 🤞

When was the last time you felt lucky, or unlucky? Chances are it’s an idea that drifts in and out of your head with some regularity. But have you ever wondered where it comes from and why it forms part of our beliefs about how the world works?  People

The Rise of the Main Character: how we all became the Star of our own show 🦸

Are you the main character in your story? That’s not a term I thought I’d be talking about in this newsletter. But then again, we’re an endlessly innovative bunch aren’t we?  Take a tour of your social feeds and you’ll find someone declaring they are

A brief history of toxic masculinity 😷

Toxic masculinity: that’s a phrase I’m sure you’ve all heard on your travels across the internet. It’s one of those ideas that seems to drift freely through our social feeds, finding its way into the nooks and crannies of everyday life.  It’s found its way

Anger: The emotion no one knows what to do with 🤬

The world is an angry place right now. As I wrote about last week, the UK witnessed dozens of violent acts by groups claiming to be protesting an event that was distorted and twisted by known and unknown actors.  But zoom out a tad, and there has been anger on

The psychology behind far-right radicalization 🧠

Earlier this month in the UK, something terrible happened.  In Southport, Merseyside, three children were killed and 10 others were injured as the result of the acts of a single individual.  Thanks to a whole bunch of false reporting, and amplification of that false reporting by prominent individuals, a series

The psychology behind the Trump Assassination attempt 🧠

Over the weekend, someone tried to kill Donald Trump. Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old man from Pennsylvania, sourced an automatic rifle, climbed onto a roof during one of Trump’s rallies, crawled to the edge and opened fire.  He hit Trump in the ear but killed a man and critically

Is Mental Illness Contagious? 🧐

Here’s a puzzler for you.  We know that when you take the train in the morning, or go to an office, or a gym, or a library, whatever yanks yer daily chain, there is a chance you might ‘pick up’ something from another person. That could be anything from

What’s going on with young people’s mental health? 🤔

What’s up with young people? Over in the world of newspapers (remember those?) a survey has kicked up a bit of a storm.  People in their early 20s are more likely to be not working due to ill health than those in their early 40s. Cue row over young

A Brief History of Narcissism 📚

I was on the Tube the other day. As the train pulled into the station, normally those waiting to get on let passengers get off first. Except this time, that didn’t happen.  Instead of the usual huffing and tutting that makes travelling on UK transport a uniquely British affair,

Conspirituality: How mindfulness, spirituality, and mistrust took over the web 💆

Dip into social media and you might find your favourite fitness/wellness/spirituality guru diverting from their usual soul-soothing content in favour of something a little left field.  It might be something around vaccines, or 5G, or the things found in food, or alternatively, an ‘herbal’ remedy that can cure

How One Book Changed Who We Think We Are 📚

Are you experiencing ADHD symptoms? Do you feel like you might have BPD? Or perhaps you had Aspergers but now you’re not so sure?  The language around mental health is everywhere. In particular, the language around diagnosis. With the rise of the internet came lots of things: memes, flame

News

The rise of wellbeing washing 🫶

It’s Mental Health Awareness Week! Which means your news feeds will be absolutely choked full of posts regarding mental health. And rightly so.  Millions of people experience emotional and psychological challenges at any time. Raising awareness is a good thing, right? RIGHT? Well, yes and no. Talking about mental

Mental Health has an influencer problem 🤑

May is Mental Health Month. The initiative, first started in 1949 by the National Association for Mental Health in the US was designed to help raise awareness of all things the mind.  While historically it has been governments that have been the key advocates of better emotional and psychological awareness,

The psychology behind the Netflix show, Baby Reindeer 🧠

What’s that, two newsletters in a week? What can I say, I struggle to maintain healthy boundaries. But I just had to step into my writing shoes and explore some of the ideas behind the absolutely brilliant Baby Reindeer on Netflix.  If you’re not familiar with the show,

Scarcity: how the things we lack dominate the way we are

What do you crave? Beyond the usual: food, a drink, a break, a holiday, not to work anymore, and spend your days posting pictures on Instagram from exotic locations with the caption “today’s office 🤷”.  What I mean by that is, what is the thing you always seem to think

Why we need to all stop manifesting 🙏

Have you manifested lately? Even if you haven’t, you probably know someone who has, or at least, professed to the benefits of bending the universe to their whim.   Indeed, since the COVID days, Google searches for “manifesting” went up 600%. Over on social media, it has become one of

Why are we so terrible at looking after ourselves? 🤷

Self-care, wellness, focusing on you, being selfish. These have become synonymous with our times. The global wellness industry, which captures everything from traditional medicine, mental wellness, wellness tourism, personal care, healthy eating, spas, all the things designed to help us care for ourselves, is worth $5.6 trillion. Yes, I

Grief: The emotion no one wants to talk about 🫢

While the world has gotten better at talking about its feelings, there is still at least one emotion where things remain a little tricky: Grief.  It’s that emotion that we never seemed prepared for. The one we see on TV and film, and say to ourselves, “oh yeah, I