First Psychology blog

In the press yesterday was news that Gwyneth Paltrow and her husband Chris Martin are to 'consciously uncouple'. By this they mean they will continue to remain friends and co-parent but hope to reduce all the emotions that commonly come with a separation – anger, sadness, and bitterness. Relationship difficulties and separations can be an extremely stressful and upsetting time for couples and families. Relationships are often complex things, particularly when there are children involved. Both partners have a shared love of the children and want to make things as pleasant as possible for them. Despite this, anger and bitterness can often lead to significant conflict during relationship difficulties and the children can get caught in the middle. But whether you have children or not, there are some common relationship issues that may lead you to feel unhappy in your relationship. Common relationship issues Arguing - couples can get 'trapped' in a cycle of arguin...

In our last blog we talked about anger and how the practice of mindfulness can be used to aid relaxation and bring about an increased feeling of calm and wellbeing, but what is mindfulness? Mindfulness is currently very popular and sometimes it seems you can't go far without reading about its benefits somewhere. However, mindfulness has actually been around a long time – indeed it has its roots in ancient eastern meditation practices. Mindfulness was introduced to modern healthcare by Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn. So what can mindfulness do for you? It is a natural process of the human mind to wander and make up stories or 'chatter'. However, what we often don't recognise is that these thoughts strongly affect our emotions. Despite being processes of our mind, we can get caught up with them and find ourselves feeling angry, upset, sad or jealous. Mindfulness practices work to inhibit negative thinking patterns and the over active limbic system that can occur when people are...

Anger gets a bad press, but we thought it worth explaining why we get angry and why anger isn't really so bad. Anger is a natural emotion and something we should all expect to feel from time to time. However, anger is often seen as a very negative emotion and one we should aim to quash.  Anger may be bad for us - but on the other hand it has its uses (The Guardian, 04/04/14) What is the purpose of anger? Anger is an emotion that kicks in when we feel violated in some way - it allows us to stick up for ourselves and in that respect it is a positive thing. Well then it's good to be angry isn't it? Despite its bad press, anger isn't a terrible thing, it has a very useful purpose. It fires us up and allows us to take action. Anger is our emotive response to something. However, our behavioural response to feeling angry, aggression, can be extremely damaging to relationships at home and work. Therefore in instances where aggressive behaviour in response to anger has b...