Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2025 i Psychologies

“Painful periods are treated like part and parcel of being a woman” We’ve all been there: sitting in the doctor’s surgery, patiently explaining your symptoms, explaining the impact whatever it is has had on you, explaining why this matters. And then being brushed off, with a quick prescription if you’re lucky, but most likely told, in one way or another, to get on with it. That is, we’ve all been there, assuming you’re one of the 97% of readers of this magazine who are female. But call me crazy, I hadn’t expected that to be the case for an actual medical doctor. Well, it seems it doesn’t matter what your job is, how many years you spent studying, how knowledgeable you are: if you’re female, and suffering from anything that…

Returning home from dance class one day with my daughter, we spotted a pre-teen girl and her mother loitering at the path to our front door. Embarrassed, the mother confessed that they just wanted to see their old home again. We chatted as they looked around our front garden, telling us tales of their happy time at number 72. I debated whether to let them in. But it was our home now, and it felt wrong to allow someone else’s past to intrude on our present. But why do we feel so nostalgic for people, places, and things from the past? Why is it so hard to let them go? And why are we so tempted to revisit the parts of us that we’ve left behind? I spoke to chartered…

As a child, I would rummage through the two large drawers of the dressing table in my parents’ bedroom. I was fascinated to find out more about who my mother was. Delicately handling handwritten letters and photos wrapped in embroidered handkerchiefs, desperate to glimpse the life she had lived before me. This childhood curiosity reflects something profound: so much of who we are today stems from those early days. Children are like sponges, absorbing through osmosis the language, behaviours, and unspoken narratives from their primary caregivers. It’s here we receive our most potent messages about love and intimacy through how affection is shown (or not shown), creating blueprints for our adult relationships. Understanding these early experiences provides an essential lens for understanding ourselves. This is why this month we turn…

If you had to list what Denmark is most famous for, you might struggle to differentiate it from its Scandi neighbours. Fjords? No, that’s Norway. Ikea? Nope, that’s Sweden. Ice caves and steaming geysers? That’s Iceland. So what does Denmark have to offer? Lego and Vikings, apparently. Which is all very well if you’re an eight-year-old boy, but what about the rest of us? Well, it’s also been one of the happiest countries in the world for the last half century. So why? Well, all that Lego and those vikings might actually have something to do with it, in a roundabout way: Denmark has happy children, who grow into happy adults. Certainly that’s the opinion of Jessica Joelle Alexander, a Danish parenting expert. ‘It must be the parenting,’ she says.…

The body and mind may seem like entirely separate entities, but they are more closely connected than you might think. Just as the body can hold on to physical stress and tension, so too can it lock in emotional stress and tension, which can lead to a number of physical responses. As an example, chronic stress is thought to cause inflammation within the body, which can increase blood pressure and, as a result, the risk of heart disease. Stress can also negatively impact our sleep routines, interrupt exercise motivation and lead to us making unhealthy food choices. Similarly, anxiety can lead to the release of the stress hormone cortisol, which can boost blood sugar, weaken the immune system and has been linked to digestive issues such as irritable bowel syndrome…

Our reality is that whatever is really going on, we can only deal with the triggers that we are comfortable to acknowledge, that’s why there are some that we happily let fly under the radar, since we would rather pretend they are not there. Often that’s because they elicit feelings we aren’t so comfortable to confront, such as shame, or envy. You know, like receiving your best friend’s wedding invitation weeks after your own relationship breakup; seeing a colleague’s pregnancy announcement on social media when you’ve had a difficult journey with fertility yourself; or perhaps seeing someone close to you experiencing real professional success whilst you feel like your own career is stagnant. Whilst the outward response expected by society is of course to congratulate others on their good news,…

I am trying to learn that conflict can be a good thing. Until recently, everything I knew about conflict convinced me that it was bad. A combination of nurture and nature had led me to a place where the most natural thing in the world, the easiest thing, the safest thing, seemed to be to keep the peace at all times. In friendships, in work and in love, I put a lot of effort in to avoid conflict. Looking back it was exhausting, but at the time I didn’t know there could be any other way. This is how I lived my life for forty years, holding everyone else’s emotions in an attempt to keep the peace, often neglecting my own. After I ended my marriage, I had some therapy,…

You know the drill — after hopping into bed nice and early with a plan to curl up and get a good night’s snooze, you just nip onto your phone to check what that notification was… and reappear three hours later, after doomscrolling your lovely, restorative evening away. It’s a common picture. Distraction is now one of the leading obstacles to reading for pleasure, according to a new report from The Reading Agency, and only 53% of UK adults now say they read regularly, compared to 58% in 2015. But reading aside, is this late-night screen time affecting our sleep? And could swapping it for a book make a difference? We asked the experts to find out… ‘Use of any screen late at night means your body continues to be…

Love at first whiff Women can sniff out whether a new acquaintance is going to make a good friend, just by their scent. Scientists from Cornell University discovered it takes a mere four minutes for heterosexual females to assess the smell of another, with the sense guiding our judgement as much as any other. They took t-shirts that captured the ‘diplomatic’ odour of women, shaped by their daily choices, instead of their ‘natural’ one, and asked others to judge friend potential based on this. Participants later met in person for a four-minute ‘speed friending’ chat, revealing that smell-only evaluations paralleled in-person ones. ‘Everybody showed they had a consistent signature of what they liked,’ says study co-author Professor Vivian Zayas. ‘And the consistency was not that, in the group, one person…

Phobias are often dismissed as irrational, but their impact can be profound. For those who experience them, fear isn’t a matter of choice — it’s an automatic, visceral response, often bypassing logic entirely. As a clinical hypnotherapist, I have seen first-hand how phobias can dictate behaviour, shaping everything from holiday choices to daily routines. But before I could help others, I had to face my own fear… During my hypnotherapy training, our tutor posed a simple question: ‘Does anyone have a phobia?’ I hesitated before raising my hand. My fear? Spiders. Or, more accurately, my belief that the world wasn’t nearly afraid enough of them. I was so frightened of spiders I didn’t like to tell people because it made me feel vulnerable and paranoid. Spiders were too horrible and…

To be ‘triggered’ is a term that has slipped into our everyday speech, where it is more often than not used as a hyperbole to describe anything from a mild annoyance to something that causes significant irritation or frustration, but has no lasting consequences. From a psychological perspective, a ‘trigger’ causes a person to have a strong, negative emotional response, but the reality is that triggers can range in terms of their severity. At one end of the spectrum are people who live with forms of PTSD, for whom triggers are capable of eliciting a trauma response and are themselves connected in some way to the trauma that was experienced in the first place. Seen this way, it is easy to assume that triggers must be loud, violent things, with…

Swap soggy sandwiches for Rainbow rice bowl This is a very substantial dish, packed with a host of health-boosting ingredients. It’s also super-adaptable, so feel free to add or swap in some of the optional additions listed below to adapt it to your tastes and add some variety to your weekly lunches. SERVES: 2PREP TIME: 15 minutesCOOK: 15 minutes NUTRITIONAL INFO PER PORTION:Fibre 12gProtein 14gPlant Points 10.25 ● 100g long-grain brown rice● 1 large carrot, peeled and julienned or grated● 2 medium cooked vac-packed beetroots, sliced● ⅓ cucumber, sliced into half moons● 1 avocado, peeled, de-stoned, and sliced● 8 radishes, sliced● 4tbsp kimchi or sauerkraut● 3tsp toasted white or black sesame seeds● 2 spring onions, finely sliced For the dressing ● Juice of 1 lime● 1tsp brown sugar or maple…

I went into the room with my best suit, a well-rehearsed pitch, a biomedical degree, and 10 years of experience on my back. Yet, every time I introduced myself to any potential client, I got the same question: ‘Are you a student?’ And it wasn’t just new people who seemed to undervalue me. Over time, I noticed that I had to deliver something extraordinary to receive the same respect my male peers received just by showing up. Have you ever been in this position? Have you ever felt you had to change your essence and become more masculine to get a promotion, or a salary raise? How can we overcome other people’s cognitive bias, and use who we are to our advantage? Build confidence Before asking yourself how others perceive…