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very teenager knows that sometimes life can be challenging. Bad feelings happen - loneliness, worry, sadness, anger, shame. Bad things happen – parents fighting or divorcing, friends or family getting ill or dying, bullying, abuse, trauma, break-ups, pandemics, rejections or betrayal. Language can’t always do justice to how bad things can feel. And to add to all the bad feelings and the bad events, we have our minds telling us all sorts of other bad stuff. I hate myself… I’ll never live that down…No-one else feels like this…I’m fat…Noone cares…Our minds are like massive thought-factories with huge production lines, churning out thought-after-thought-afterthought. Some of these thoughts are painful and self-critical, and these tend to be the ones we get hooked on. It can feel like if we could just cut these thoughts out of our brains, we’d be OK. It’s partly that other people set us up to fail. When we feel sad, they say ‘Cheer up’. When we feel worried, they tell us ‘Don’t worry about it’. When we feel angry, they say ‘Calm down’. It’s like having any emotions other than happiness is seen as a bad thing. Our brains, which are so good at keeping us alive, haven’t actually moved on much since the Stone Age. At the smallest hint of danger, the guard dog in our brain is snapping away and telling us we need to fight or run! But really, the main ‘danger’ of the 21st Century is being alone. Research shows that the biggest threat to our physical and mental health is isolation – it’s why lockdown was so hard for so many people. We want to be part of the tribe. So when our brains
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