Wellness culture is all about healing – healing from stress, dissatisfaction, trauma, toxic relationships, and poor physical health. However, wellness culture can also encourage an obsession with healing that ends up being counterproductive. When you’re constantly focused on healing – getting better, working on yourself, going from one healing modality to another – your mental…
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One of the applications of medical cannabis is for the improvement of mental health. In the UK (where I’m from), you can be prescribed medical cannabis to counteract the symptoms of a range of mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Private cannabis clinics are seeing a rise in the number of patients who…
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Why do some people get really into New Age practices and beliefs? Explanations can range from charitable and optimistic ones (e.g. people finding pathways to truth and wellness) to less charitable and cynical ones (e.g. some people are not scientifically literate, or they’re prone to cling to wellness trends to feel more ‘spiritual’). In answering…
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The ‘deathbed meditation’ is a mental exercise that I thought was an original idea I came up with. But others have stumbled upon this idea before – centuries ago, in fact. It involves visualising yourself on your deathbed, looking back on your life. By doing so, you put your current self into the perspective of…
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I’ve previously written about the Stoic perspective on travel (see here and here), which includes the idea that our strong impulse to travel often comes from a desire to escape the self (which is doomed to fail). Our discontent about who we are can be refashioned, unconsciously, as discontent about where we are. We avoid…
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