The 2-minute mindfulness recipe

This is the easiest recipe you'll ever follow - and makes a real difference if practised daily:


Take your cup of tea or coffee, whichever you like - at work, at home, it doesn't matter.

Sit down with it.

Feel the heat of the mug.

Smell your brew.

Look at the colour of the mug, of your table, of your drink.

Notice the sounds around you, but don't listen to them.

Now drink it, feel the heat in your mouth, taste the aroma unfolding. Repeat.


What you've just done, in under 2 minutes, is coming fully into the present moment, using your five senses. Doing this, even for such a short time, physically signals your body that you are not in any danger, causing it to slow down and reverse any stress that may be present.

For all those who, like me, can't empty their minds enough to meditate, this is a wonderful little exercise to get all the benefits of mindfulness, without the tediousness/stress of "getting meditation right" or "thinking of nothing".

Do it every time you have tea or coffee during the day - though it works with fizzy drinks too, with the added bonus of listening to the bubbles - and hop, you've done some 10-15 minutes of mindfulness.


No need to thank me :) just forward it on to whoever you think needs it!

Learned helplessness - the dark sister of under-functioning

When I talk about under-functioning, I mean the "normal" doing less of something because the other does more of it, which, to a degree, is perfectly normal in any couple ("couple" meaning any two people functioning together, i.e. at home or in the workplace etc).

Learned helplessness is pushing the concept of under-functioning to its terrifying extreme: when one becomes helpless in certain areas, to the point of disability.

Let me start off with a couple of examples:

A friend found out the hard way that leaving all the financials for her husband to manage meant financial ruin when she discovered that he had gambled away both their fortunes.

Another one: my mother-in-law never learned to drive, as her husband was always driving (and for most of her girlfriends that was the norm too, a generational thing I guess). Then she saw what happened when one of their husbands died: the widow suddenly was more or less stuck at home, depending on her friends and children to go anywhere. But my mother-in-law being the opposite of a helpless lady, she decided at age 50 to learn how to drive, and has been successfully driving for the last 25 years. Yet most of her girlfriends are still trapped, because they chose the "safe" path - sticking to what they knew.

Now, before you think only women suffer from learned helplessness, spare a thought for all those husbands who leave their whole social life to their wives to organise, to the point where they don't have any friends of their own. In case of divorce, they end up terrifyingly alone.

But there is more to learned helplessness than just a lack of independence: it is about creating a belief that you are incapable to do something, when really you would be quite able if you made the effort (like my mother-in-law).

Now why would anyone want to become or stay helpless?
Because there often is an emotional side to the equation: both the over-functioning and the helpless bind themselves closer unto the other, making it a co-dependant relationship, where both can only exist with and through the other.

What can you do to change this dynamic?
Start with becoming aware on the areas in which you may have developed helplessness or taken over in your relationship.
Accept that there might be fear - fear of failure in the new endeavour, or fear of being abandoned if you stopped being either so "necessary" or so helpless.
Talk about it with your partner, in order to separate the emotional undercurrent from the practical issue at hand (by the way, for the practical side of things, outsource them, don't try and teach your partner yourself).

Untangling a co-dependant relationship will take time and effort, and courage.
But the reward is great: a relationship of two strong, independent people who choose to be together rather than stay together because they fear being alone.

Why do people do what they do?

Frequently in my practice the question arises on what other people's motivations are, and my clients often ponder way too much on what "made" their partner, parent, boss, colleague, act the way they did.

That pondering usually involves a vigorous work-out of their peanut.

Yet the answer to the question "why does a person do what they do" in most cases involves that other person's emotional world, and not something you said or did to them.

So the endless questioning of "but why do they do that?" will very often not have an answer that pertains to your behaviour.

An example:
You have a string of great dates with a man, over several weeks/months, and suddenly, out of the blue, he stops returning your calls. Unless you have smacked him in the face, literally or metaphorically, during your last date, it is unlikely that his "ghosting" you has anything to do with you, but rather comes from his getting cold feet, or having met someone else, or whatever his reasons are - "his" in that they pertain to him, and not to you.

Another, more straight-forward one:
Your husband beats you up (physically or emotionally). You keep questioning yourself what you have done wrong, to deserve such a treatment. The answer is nothing. Nothing you can do makes you deserving of domestic abuse.

By all means, do look into your conscience to see if you have done anything wrong; but if you can't find anything, try the explanation that it is their stuff, their baggage, and has not much to do with you. And once you can see what is their stuff, you can let it go, and work on your own.

Now why would I discourage anyone from spending too much questioning another's motives?

Because in a way, as long as you keep wondering, possibly looking for explanations/excuses for the other's behaviour, it prevents you from asking yourself the real question (and to draw conclusions from the answer): "is that behaviour acceptable?" and its corollary "why do I put up with it?".

It may just be more useful to spend time understanding what is said rather than thinking about why it is said.

Anxiety, allergies, asthma - modern world diseases with something in common...

Anxiety is everywhere - children, teenagers, adults, older people, it spares no-one.
At the same time, there is a huge recrudescence of allergies and asthma - who had heard about anaphylaxis in the 60s? And the "kid with asthma" used to be a one-off.

What happened to our world? Are we just more "wimpy" than before?
I don't think so. There really seems to have been an extreme change over the last 100 years.

Here's my theory:

For a very long time we were faced with real physiological threats.
We were confronted with parasites, dirt, bacteria.
Our immune systems were honed over tens of thousands of years to respond to these threats in order to keep us alive.

Over the last 100 years, the standards of hygiene in our societies have been lifted to lofty levels.
First we eliminated dirt, which in turn reduced the parasites we were exposed to (think intestinal worms etc). Then we went "anti-bacterial".

Now our immune system freaks out over anything out of the ordinary - "oh my god, a cat hair!" "yikes, the fungus on a peanut!" - because its role is to keep us safe from the unknown, and not being exposed to any crap early on means pretty much everything is unknown to our bodies.

Countless studies have shown that children are more likely to develop asthma in households where the cleaning standards are extremely high, and where there are no pets, which are just lovely furry collectors of dirt, bacteria and parasites (I'm glad to report that my kids have never been exposed to such a pristine environment lol).

Anxiety follows a similar pattern.

For millennia we were exposed to danger, violence and untimely deaths, starting with the sabre tooth tiger and finishing with human wars...

Our generation (Gen X in my case) has been lucky.
We benefit from a reasonable rule of law, our cities are safe and we haven't known war on our soil.
We are very rarely faced with real threats to our life and limbs.

And hence our psychological threat baseline has become very low. Anxiety, an emotion the purpose of which is to keep us safe from recurrent danger, no longer gets exercised to keep us safe from the risk of getting eaten by animals or killed by humans, but instead gets triggered when we're afraid of not getting the promotion at our job, don't write straight A's at school or when we get an attack of FOMO - the fear of missing out (on fun stuff).

Now, I'm not suggesting we should give up progress, bathe our kids in dirt and have some more wars - that would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

But there is nothing wrong with questioning the way we do things.
Antibacterial soap certainly has its place in hospitals etc. where some people have compromised immune systems; but most probably doesn't have its place in normal households.

Extreme cleaning - hard to define, but I reckon if you disinfect your whole house every day you may fall into that category - is not only a waste of time (IMHO), but also likely to lead to immune systems which won't be triggered enough in early childhood and hence be more likely to overreact later on.

Regarding anxiety, the solution may be to put things back into perspective.
Is there real harm we're facing?
Or are we more worried about a loss of face or a possible diminution of our (in historical terms extremely high) quality of life?

Next time you feel anxious, ask yourself: "what am I risking here?" or "what is the threat?".
This simple act of rationalisation will help you defuse most anxious feelings.


Post scriptum: if your anxieties stem from actual trauma, if you suffer from PTSD, please consider asking for help, having therapy, to help you deal with it.