Peace in a Pod

One of my New Year's Resolutions this year was to complete the Duolingo French course (I’m anything if not ambitious, clearly). It was while I was sitting on the couch a few days ago testing myself on my reflexive verbs, the weak Spring sunshine gleaming through the window, that I was suddenly filled with this feeling of just pure exoticism? (Read again, that’s EXOTICISM, not EROTICISM. I know French is a sexy language, but please, take your tête out of the gutter.) It felt like I was in holiday mode, basking in the sun (albeit indoors) and uttering phrases in smooth-sounding French. And of course, me being me, it made me think about additional-language-learning and how it impacts on us emotionally and psychologically. I have always loved languages and, in my time as as a psychology student, the field of psycholinguistics, which is the science of language acquisition. I was raised more or less bilingually, English being my native tongue followed closely by Irish, passed down to m...

This week we welcome a new month (perfectly rectangular, in case you hadn’t seen the memes) and a new season too, one usually linked with birth and beginning, and a shaking off of the winter cobwebs. If I could convince you to start any new habit this Spring, it is that of meditation. I have spoken about it on this platform before, from what it actually entails to some of the many benefits it reaps. My own mindfulness practice really came to fruition when I decided to download Headspace 14 months ago. I don’t exactly remember how I had come to hear about it - maybe I saw ads for it on social media - but I am so glad I took the plunge and got it because I truly feel that having a structured meditation practice via the Headspace app has helped me weather the stress of everything over the last year. So stick with me for the next few minutes for a little review of the app (which has a 2-week free trial btw - you’ve been told from the outset). Headspace was founded back in 2010 by two guy...

The 21st century human is, by nature, a lazy article. We have access to all the information that has ever existed at the touch of a button. We can order food, products and services straight to our door without ever leaving the house. It seems all we have to do these days is turn up, no effort needed. In an age where technology assists us so much in our day-to-day lives, it can be very easy and very tempting to take the foot off the pedal, to procrastinate, to become demotivated, to think ‘everything’s fine the way it is, and even if it’s not fine… meh’. Our parents and grandparents had none of that, no smartphones or computers, no central vacuum systems, no fancy kitchen appliances for spiralising or what have you; they just got shit done. And they didn’t complain about it either. Watching ‘Reeling in the Years’ and ‘The Way We Were’ with my parents these last few weeks has truly hammered it home for me how easy we have it nowadays in certain aspects of life and work. So why are we so ...

I think one of the most simultaneously hilarious and stupid things we have done as a society is create a taboo around mental health. We do this bizarre thing where we all struggle in private and pretend to everyone else, who is also struggling in private to further or lesser degrees, that we are managing perfectly fine. We have the audacity to think that our problems are unique and that it is utterly pointless to talk to anyone about them, and that is assuming we even realise we are having problems at all. The prevalence of social media platforms like Instagram that only show the highlight reel have definitely ramped this up too. ‘I am the only person who is stressed, who feels sad, who feels lonely, who feels less than.’ Before I became turned on to the idea of self-help at the end of last year, it seems crazy to think that I just ambled through life completely unaware of the fact that I have thoughts and feelings and values and anxieties that can all be actively reflected upon and qu...

Meditation sounds like a fluffy word. It sounds like it doesn’t mean anything. It seems too simple to have any real power. The idea that listening to your breath, and training the mind to focus on just that, is meant to be beneficial to us in a number of ways sounds crazy. It’s just too vague, too hippy-dippy, too… straightforward? Okay, so maybe you aren’t totally allergic to the idea of meditation. You’re open to it, but finding the time to do it is just proving difficult. My hope is that, having read through this blog post and my having shared with you both my personal experience with meditation as well as what the science says, you will be willing to invest the time in yourself and in your quality of life. The first major thing I noticed in my life when I started to meditate was how much it reduced my stress , which is a known benefit of mindfulness (Goyal et al., 2014). Speaking as someone whose thoughts can spiral to towering infernos, this benefit alone is life-changing. I parti...