School of Life Monday:How We Lie to Ourselves

We are liars of genius when it comes to hiding uncomfortable facts from ourselves. But there’s real wisdom in understanding how we manage to deceive ourselves – and real utility in learning to be a little bit more honest with ourselves.

School of Life Monday: Why We Sometimes Don't Feel 'In The Moment'

One of the dangers of emotional life is that we find that we don't feel 'in the moment': we're at a funeral, but we don't feel sad. We're making love, but our minds are elsewhere. It's our birthday, but we're not jolly. Why is it sometimes so hard for our true inner feelings to keep pace with events in the outer world? An investigation into the psychology of feeling in the moment - or to the left or right of it.

School of Life Monday: The Appeal of Lonely Places

Some of us feel most at home not in obviously beautiful or homely places, but in desolate, melancholy ones, places that are vast, barren, bleak or isolated. These places speak to our souls and deserve to be celebrated as our true homes.

School of Life Monday: The Problem of Shame

Underlying so many of our emotional problems lies one phenomenon above any other; shame. Feeling misguidedly and disproportionately ashamed of who we are is at the root of an extraordinary amount of disturbance, rendering us harmful to ourselves and to the world.

School of Life Monday: The True and the False Self

A good life is one in which we can dare to show our True Self and do not mind too much occasionally having to wear the mask of a False Self. But for this to be possible, we need a certain sort of childhood - as the masterful British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott helped to explain in his theory of the true and the false self, outlined here.

“One of the most surprising but powerful explanations for why we may, as adults, be in trouble mentally is that we were, in our earliest years, denied the opportunity to be fully ourselves, that is, we were not allowed to be wilful and difficult, we could not be as demanding, aggressive, intolerant, and unrestrictedly selfish as we needed to be. Because our caregivers were preoccupied or fragile, we had to be preternaturally attuned to their demands, sensing that we had to comply in order to be loved and tolerated; we had to be false before we had the chance to feel properly alive. And as a result, many years later, without quite understanding the process, we risk feeling unanchored, inwardly dead and somehow not entirely present…”

School of Life Monday: Are Intelligent People More Lonely?

It sounds like a hugely arrogant and self-serving suggestion to imply that cleverness might lead you to loneliness. But if you define cleverness in a selective (and modest) way, there may truly be an aspect whereby it can lead to a certain isolation.

School of Life Monday: Philosophical Meditation

At the School of Life, we’ve pioneered a new form of Meditation we call Philosophical Meditation, designed to help with anxiety, sadness and a lack of direction.