2024 · 11. January 2024
A negative thinking style can hurt your mood and well-being. My latest Southern Star column offers some CBT tips on how to develop a more helpful, balanced thinking style in 2024.
2021 · 26. August 2021
Perfectionism can have seriously damaging emotional consequences and is linked with a whole host of mental health problems. How can you change a perfectionist thinking style?
2019 · 10. October 2019
People often cope with life’s challenges by saying everything happens for a reason. However, that's bad thinking and bad advice, I argued in last week's Southern Star.
2019 · 20. June 2019
Kinsale CBT therapist Linda Hamilton explores what Worry Trick author Dave Carbonell has to say about laughing at your worries.
2018 · 19. April 2018
In last week's Southern Star, I talked about the healing power of laughter. The column is reproduced below. There’s a certain truth to the old cliché about laughter being the best medicine. The late cognitive psychologist Dr Albert Ellis certainly believed in the power of laughter. Like most cognitive therapists, Ellis believed anxiety and depression were underpinned by distorted and unhelpful thinking patterns. Unlike his fellow cognitive therapists, however, Ellis used some pretty...
2017 · 12. October 2017
Some self-help books offer potentially harmful advice on positive thinking, as I noted in in last week's Your Mental Health column in The Southern Star. The column is reproduced below. It’s better to view the glass as half-full rather than half-empty, but be warned: an excessive focus on positive thinking is not good for your mental health. In particular, I’m thinking of some of the advice doled out in popular self-help books that preach the gospel of positive thinking – books like Norman...
2017 · 24. August 2017
‘There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy.’ Cognitive psychologist Albert Ellis believed people make life unnecessarily difficult by holding all kinds of unhelpful beliefs about themselves and others. My column on Ellis's ideas can be found in this week's Southern Star.