Christmas Opening Hours 2016

Christmas Opening Hours 2016   Saturday 24th December 2016                9 am – 1 pm Christmas Day                                        Closed St Stephens Day                                …

Cognitive Distortions

Blog #16 – Cognitive distortions Sometimes, as it relates to individual well-being, we can be our own worst enemy. To be more specific, the patterns of thinking that we develop can be actively detrimental to our happiness. When these patterns move from rational to irrational thinking, we can fall prey to what psychologists refer to…

Self-efficacy

How many times have you found yourself thinking along the lines of “I would love to be able to do that” only to then tell yourself “but I’ll never be able to”? This kind of internal commentary can cross a wide spectrum of possibilities, from, for example, learning to play a musical instrument to starting…

Optimism 2

Blog #14 – Optimism 2 Last time, we focused on optimism; in particular, highlighting ideas such as that, whether we realise it or not, as a species we tend towards optimism more than pessimism, and that far from the former being somehow a sign of self-delusion, it appears to be a key marker of psychological…

Optimism

Whether you realise it or not, the odds are that you skew at least slightly more towards optimism than pessimism. One of the peculiarities of human beings is that we can be optimistic without even realising it, even those of us who identify as pessimists. That is not to deny that there are many among…

Measuring well-being

We began this series of blog posts in July by asking the question – what is well-being? It was one worth asking, particularly at the outset, as 10 random people on the street would most likely offer 10 different answers if the question was put to them. That wouldn’t necessarily cause any problems in general…

Gratitude & Well-Being 2

Two weeks ago, we focused on how the experience of gratitude can impact positively on individual well-being. More specifically, we looked at the ‘counting blessings’ approach, which has been demonstrated to be particularly effective by an ever-increasing body of research findings. However, it would be misleading to leave this topic at that, as psychology researchers…

Gratitude & well-being

In an earlier post in this series, we focused on the factors that tend to influence individual levels of happiness and well-being. This involved highlighting three lists of variables compiled from a number of pre-existing studies, ranking items as contributing to happiness to small, medium, and high degrees. While all of the items mentioned in…