This is a subject I sit with often, and something I think deserves far more of our collective attention. Long before we can explain what a "good person" means, we are already learning how to become one. Manners, morals, and the quiet discipline we later call character are not taught to us as ideas, they are modelled and absorbed, moment by moment, from the people who raised us. Some of what we absorb concerns manners: how we speak, show respect, and navigate social situations

Not all your relationships are supposed to last. Some are built to be temporary, and that's not a failure of the friendship, it is actually the design. I first came up with this idea on our long walks in Norwich, UK, during my PhD, talking with a fellow PhD friend, Jennie Robinson. I call it the Onion Theory. It is a working theory, not a finished one. I am sharing it half-formed because I think it is worth developing further. Picture your social world as an onion. Every laye

What Makes Us Open to Others, or Keep Our Distance? As human beings, we are wired for connection. When two people meet, something more than a simple interaction can happen. There is the possibility of change. As Carl Jung wrote: “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed". You meet someone. You talk. You spend time together. Maybe you become friends, partners, colleagues, something meaningf

We like to imagine we are rational creatures: clear-headed, practical, above all that “messy feelings” stuff. Emotions get treated like background noise. Efficiency is treated like virtue. So we learn to speak in plans and facts, even when what we are actually craving is comfort. Except… humans do not bond to efficiency. We bond to felt safety. And one of the most uncomfortable lessons in psychology, both influential and ethically controversial, came from baby monkeys who mad

The turn of the year is a cultural ritual, a collective pause where we reflect, reset, and, most importantly, hope. Some people embrace this ritual with colour-coded planners and vision boards. Others roll their eyes and mutter something accurate but incomplete like, “Nothing really changes on January 1st”. Psychological research suggests that hope is not about believing things will change, but about how the mind prepares for change. Hope is often dismissed as naive optimism,

The Need for Belonging and Social Inclusion I watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) for the first time, long after it had settled into popular culture as a familiar seasonal story. At its surface, it is a seasonal fable about generosity and redemption. Psychologically, however, it is a story about belonging under threat, and about what happens to a person when inclusion feels permanently out of reach. The Grinch is not simply “anti-Christmas”; he is an outlier navigat

The Christmas holiday is already here, and festive seasons always remind me of something important: gratitude tends to surface when life slows down just enough for us to notice what we usually rush past. Gratitude is often described as an attentional and cognitive orientation: the ability to notice what is supportive, meaningful, or sustaining in our lives, even in the presence of stress and uncertainty. But it is not about ignoring difficulty or forcing positivity. In fact,