Articles by The School of Life 

Browse themes

Self-Knowledge

Mechanisms of Defence

Developing an understanding of the way Mechanisms of Defence work won’t magically save us from reliance on them but it may give us an inkling of what we are up to, and increase our tolerance to insight.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

The Always Unfinished Business of Self-Knowledge

We have no alternative but to go to our deaths having understood only a fraction of who we have been. We are – each one of us – fated to be laid to rest in an at-least-partially unknown grave.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

How to Live More Consciously

We don’t need to be poets or artists to digest our experiences more thoroughly, but we can learn from these disciplines about how to study the world and preserve its most valuable moments.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

On Always Finding Fault with Others

The sad part is why the fault finder came to be this way: because someone else constantly and intolerably found fault with them.

Read Article

Calm

The Causes of Obsessive Thinking

Our minds may grow less consumed by obsessive thoughts the more we can interpret our preoccupations as symptoms of other concerns we are in flight from;

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

How Psychotherapy Might Truly Help Us

The beauty of psychotherapy is that we will without trying end up rehearsing around the therapist many of the same peculiarities as we manifest in the world outside.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

How History Can Explain Our Unhappiness

A proper understanding of our situation cannot be complete without considering the highly peculiar era in which we exist. We are troubled in part because we dwell in highly unbalanced times:

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

The Sinner Inside Us All

The more we understand of ourselves, the more we necessarily reach a humbling realisation: most of what we condemn in other people is present in ourselves.

Read Article

Calm

Why Things May Need to Get Worse Before They Can Get Better

Our lives are often less than they could be because we are – strangely – too good at making things just about bearable for ourselves.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

How Should We Define ‘Mental Illness’?

We might define mental illness as a failure in the capacity to be kind to oneself. This gives us a clue as to the likely cause of this form of suffering: a deficit of love.

Read Article

Calm

The Limits of the Conscious Mind

To know ourselves properly is to learn to separate out a problem that manifests in the mind from one that is caused by the mind.

Read Article

Relationships

The Logic of Our Fantasies

Our sexual fantasies may shed considerable light on themes in our lives; they may hold the clue to central, challenging aspects of our biographies.

Read Article

Calm

What Our Bodies are Trying to Tell Us

When our conscience has done everything it can to alert our minds, it has a tendency to set to work on our bodies. Lack of awareness returns to haunt us as physical ailments.

Read Article

Relationships

Three Questions to Help You Decide Whether to Stay in or Leave a Relationship

All love involves compromise, but this truism masks that not all compromises are equally legitimate or fair.

Read Article

Relationships

Our Secret Wish Never to Find Love

The process of locating a partner to love is so hard, it may for a long time disguise a more complicated reality: that whatever we claim, it would be a lot easier for us if we never found them.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

Do You Believe in Mind-Reading?

Few of us explicitly sign up to a belief in the occult art of mind reading. Nevertheless, we often behave exactly as though we do.

Read Article

Relationships

What We Really, Really Want in Love

We don’t want someone to worship us. We need someone to do something far more difficult: see us as we are and still keep faith.

Read Article

Relationships

Why Good Manners Matter in Relationships

Successful relationships may require us to be – far more often than we’d like – substantially affected, stilted and unnatural.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

How to Be Less Defensive

We will be past defensiveness when every nagging insecurity has been pulled squarely into the centre — and there examined and defused.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

Learning to Laugh at Ourselves

We don’t need people to be perfect; we need people to know they are imperfect and then not to blame us for our grief and irritation at finding them so.

Read Article

Relationships

How Love Can Teach Us Who We Are

One reason why relationships are valuable is that they enable us to know ourselves better; being part of a couple can help us to understand who we are.

Read Article

Relationships

When Parents Won’t Let Their Children Grow Up

There are certain parents who – in private – rely on their children to satisfy a range of emotional needs: the need to feel powerful, to have an audience, to play a role, to exist.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

Are You a Sadist or a Masochist?

Why do we seem to delight in inflicting suffering – or, even more strangely, to take satisfaction in enduring it?

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

The Hidden Logic of Illogical Behaviour

The most fruitless and counter productive behaviours of adulthood all reveal a logic, once we cease to search for this logic in the present.

Read Article

Relationships

The Fragile Parent

The fragile parent will turn against the child for reminding them of insufficiencies they are secretly in flight from in themselves.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

A Simple Question to Set You Free

Liberation awaits us if we have the courage to ask a deceptively simple yet pointed and mind-expanding question…

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

Our Secret Longing to Be Good

The route to satisfaction lies in vigorously pushing thoughts of ourselves aside for a while in the name of trying to make others less afflicted.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

How Lonely Are You? A Test

We might take an unusual test that seeks to probe at the more dignified and generous reasons one might have for being lonely.

Read Article

Sociability

Is It Okay to Outgrow Our Friends?

We might outgrow a friend precisely because they have fulfilled their brief perfectly.

Read Article

Sociability

Why Everyone We Meet is a Little Bit Lonely

We need to battle the fatefully modest part of our minds that reads our isolation as a selective punishment. What holds true for us must and will hold true for others

Read Article

Sociability

On ‘Complicated’ Friendships

We start to properly value our friendships when we grant that they are often every bit as tricky as our most meaningful love stories.

Read Article

Sociability

The Art of Good Listening

In a world where everyone seems to talk past one another, to genuinely listen is one of the most constructive and warm-hearted things we can ever offer another person.

Read Article

Sociability

Don’t Be Too Normal If You Want to Make Friends

Real friendship is not so much threatened by disclosures of vulnerabilities and compulsions as built out of them.

Read Article

Sociability

The Friend Who Can Tease Us

At its worst, teasing means mocking things another person can’t do anything about. But there’s a more artful, adult version, in which humour is recruited to sweeten the task of correction.

Read Article

Sociability

The Forgotten Art of Making Friends

We don’t need to stop talking to friends, but if we really want to grow close, we might also need to start doing something with them – preferably laundry.

Read Article

Sociability

The Friend Who Balances Us

We may seek in friendship to correct our imbalances of character; to locate in another the missing piece of ourselves.

Read Article

Sociability

The Purpose of Friendship

Friendship ends up delivering the intimacy and security of romantic relationships without the jealousy, control, exclusivity and foul temper.

Read Article

Sociability

Why the Best Kind of Friends Are Lonely

Those most suited for company will probably have spent a lot of time by themselves.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

Locating the Trouble

We should not be discouraged by the monstrous scale of our forgetting. There is much that we can do to infer crucial things from the past.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

You Might Be Mad

It’s a long and arduous game we play with others, pretending not to be mad. We would be so much wiser to give up the act and square up to the truth

Read Article

Relationships

Rethinking Gender

Outward life continues to demand forbidding levels of conformity. The life of the spirit, revealed in the imaginings of religions and mythologies, points us in more diverse directions.

Read Article
  • Relationships
  • Romanticism

The Buddhist View of Love

In the Eastern tradition, love is first and foremost an emotion we must cultivate in ourselves – and then bring to bear on anyone we meet.
Read Article

App exclusive

  • Self-Knowledge
  • Trauma & Childhood

Disassociation

The disassociated person stands out by all that they are not doing, saying and feeling; all that they can’t register or express in relation to the upheavals and joys of life.
Get the app
  • Calm
  • Perspective

What Sleeping Babies Can Teach Us

Sleeping babies remind us of the value of modest claims. We were like them once and will be so again towards the very end.
Read Article

Self-Knowledge

The Wisdom of Tears

We are in our essence and should always strive to remain cry-babies, that is, people who intimately remember their susceptibility to hurt and grief.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

Fears Are Not Facts

This small sentence, in which so much wisdom is compressed, can helpfully jolt our minds into greater ease. Nevertheless, we are left with a question: if a fear is not a fact, what is it?

Read Article

Calm

Why Life is Always Difficult

It isn’t necessarily difficulty that sinks us; it’s misconceived notions of what a task should legitimately demand.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

Who Knows More, the Young or the Old?

Time must at least theoretically offer us the potential for degrees of maturation and insight to which the young are inherently, through no fault of their own, denied.

Read Article

Sociability

How to Lose Friends

We hear so much about the loneliness we feel without others; but far too little about the loneliness we have to suffer with the wrong sorts of people.

Read Article

Relationships

Stop Repeating the Same Mistakes

What leads us to keep repeating a story isn’t that it’s challenging to begin with, but that we’re not managing to alter how it ends.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

Beyond Sanctimony

The opposite of goodness isn’t evil, it’s sanctimony: the belief that wickedness could, through sufficient shaming and hectoring, one day be magically be expunged from the species.

Read Article

Relationships

A Role for Lies

Many lies exist for a noble reason: people are continually trying to shield one another from pains that would devastate them if they saw things as they are.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

We Are Made of Moods

We are malleable creatures of mood who dare to mistake themselves for people of conviction.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

Taking Childhood Seriously

We’re among the first people who have been able to take our childhoods as seriously as they need to be taken – and to have had the intellectual strength to locate most of our adult ills in them.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

Why We Overreact

We never set out to be such inveterate exaggerators. It’s just that no one ever showed us that there might be another, more bearable way to be.

Read Article

Calm

Anxiety-as-Denial

We are worrying about everything, continually, in order to stop ourselves from understanding, and feeling sad about something specific in our pasts. Anxiety has grown into an alternative to self-knowledge.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

Why Everyone Needs to Feel ‘Lost’ for a While

To have any chance of one day reaching something substantial, we may need first to give up all hope that we will ever in fact do so.

Read Article

Relationships

Falling in Love with a Stranger

We know deep down that crushes are a demented illusion, but it is not always entirely realistic or mature to try to live as though we should never daydream.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

You Don’t Always Need to Be Funny

It can sound odd to suggest that some of us should try to become a little less funny about ourselves, and aim for more frequent moments of solemnity and grief. We shouldn’t – for our own sakes – be quite as comedic as we are.

Read Article

Calm

Our Anxious Ancestry

We carry fear in our bones. We are – to all intents – in the ancestral mind, somewhere 17,000 years ago in an underground shelter, while outside sabre-tooth tigers howl.

Read

Sociability

Abandoning Hope

Our dips in confidence can have an unlikely-sounding source: hope. We become hopeful that things can turn out well – but then, when life turns out to be trickier than we’d budgeted for, fall prey to grave panic, despair and anger.

Read Article

Relationships

The Secret Lives of Other Couples

Despite all our recording devices, and all the ways we have of sharing information about ourselves, one of the things that remains as hard as ever is to know what it is like, really like, for other people in relationships.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

Why It’s Good to Be a Narcissist

Narcissism is one of the more misunderstood terms of our time. We’re so aware of the bad narcissist that we are at risk of missing the central role that narcissism should play in the development of any healthy human.

Read Article

Sociability

How to Leave a Party

People need a lot of self-love before they can find their own needs acceptable – and by extension, dare to try to transmit these to others.

Read Article

Sociability

On Becoming a Hermit

Hermits fascinate us because they are who we might be if only we learnt to be braver. They have unearthed the courage to be unusual.

Read Article

Calm

Why We May Need a Convalescence

The business of living is a sickness enough; it can take half a lifetime to realise it isn’t weak or indulgent to take very gentle care of ourselves.

Read Article

Calm

Auditing Our Worries

We should use the reams of data about the unreliability of fears gone by as a guide to the future. If we got it so wrong in the past, it’s highly likely we’re getting it rather wrong now too.

Read Article

Sociability

How to Have a Renaissance

One of the great cities of the world arose off the back of an inspired mood. It wasn’t coal, guns or wealth that did it: it was a movement of the mind.

Read Article

Work

Giving Up on Being Special

It can take a lot of pain before we make our peace with so-called ‘ordinariness’ and accept it for the wonder it is.

Read Article

Relationships

Why You Will Never Quite Get it Right in Love

Whatever intelligence, foresight, dedication and effort we bring to the task, perfection is almost certainly going to elude us. There is simply so very much that can go wrong.

Read Article

Calm

What is a Transcendental Experience?

In the grip of a transcendental experience, we willingly let go of the compromised ‘I’ in order to become, for a privileged while, a part of the timeless, beatific whole.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

Am I a Bad Person?

No one is ever straightforwardly nice. The route to true benevolence flows through the door of a candid acknowledgement of ill temper and vanity.

Read Article

Calm

The Perils of Making Predictions

The only prediction we can rely on is that life will – with ceaseless ingenuity – outrun our finest predictions.

Read Article

Relationships

Understanding Attachment Theory

An unusual realisation that lovers may eventually make is that it is hard to envisage successfully navigating any relationship without some understanding – and mutual discussion of – Attachment Theory.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

Why Some of Us Are So Thin-Skinned

Why do some of us end up unable ever to forget mean things people say and do while others sail on unmolested? The central explanation is: the degree and sort of love we received in childhood.

Read Article

Sociability

Think Like an Aristocrat

We limit the concept of aristocracy unhelpfully when we identify it simply with a restricted franchise and country houses. We may be able to become something far more relevant and more flexible than an aristocrat of the blood: an aristocrat of the spirit.

Read Article

Calm

Building the Cathedral

When despair stalks us, we should – like that mason – step back and imagine ourselves as part of a larger whole that can redeem us through its scale, logic and beauty.

Read Article

Self-Knowledge

How Music Can Heal Us

Intuitively, we know that music can heal but rarely is it asked to do so as directly and explicitly as it has been here. These extraordinary musical pieces carry the listener on a representative journey from psychological distress to understanding recovery and liberation.

Listen to Album

Articles

Select themes

Mechanisms of Defence

Self-Knowledge

Mechanisms of Defence

Getting to know ourselves better sounds, on the surface, like a project we might all buy into. But this is…
View