Psychoeducation

The benefits of understanding how the mind has evolved.

Sunrise just outside Cork City

Hello All

I’m sharing a short video this week from Dr. Russ Harris on how our minds evolved to protect us and how this can explain some of the difficulties we experience in the world we find ourselves in today.

I generally try to focus this newsletter on “doing mindfulness” - practicing meditation and mindfulness exercises - but there is also a lot of benefit to having even a very brief understanding of psychology, evolution, and the way the human mind tends to work.

In most mindfulness programmes we dedicate some time to this and call it “psychoeducation”.

It is easy to get caught up in trying to understand different concepts in psychology but the way I recommend approaching things like this is to just get the overall gist of a concept and then keep an eye out for it in your own life.

The benefit of this is often just in knowing that even when we notice difficult thoughts, emotions or patterns of behaviour in our lives nothing has gone wrong with us as individuals.

The human brain evolved to be a certain way, usually in an effort to protect us, and many of the things we may see as personal to us are actually experienced by most, if not all people at some stage in their lives.

When we see our thoughts, emotions and behaviours as natural products of how our brains evolved we can cut ourselves some slack and not be so harsh on ourselves. This allows us to see ourselves more clearly and make better decisions for how we want to behave.

I’m a big fan of Russ Harris and highly recommend picking up one of his books such as “The Happiness Trap”.

If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment below or DM me.

Or for a deeper dive you can book in for a free 30 minute 1:1 session here.

If you’d like to try a guided meditation check out the article below: