Author: Dr Sallee McLaren

Learning mental control is going to take quite a few blogs – so that you fully understand it and how to achieve it. I cannot get everything written in one posting, so stick with it.

Just to humour me – I’d like you to do a little exercise:

Put both your hands flat on a table and then just lift up the index finger of your dominant hand while you keep all your other fingers flat on the table. Now, stop lifting up that finger and place it flat again. Then lift up that same finger one more time, and then stop lifting it and place it flat again. Read More

At the end of my last blog, I talked about how taking charge and taking control are at the very heart of recovery of almost all ‘clinical’ problems. The most essential way of taking charge and ensuring strong mental health throughout life is through exercising mental control.

To help you exert the level of mental control you need for recovery, it is important to understand how your brain works at a physiological level. Read More

One thing that I think needs to be noted is that it is not a coincidence that almost every person I see in my anxiety clinic has come from a ‘difficult’ background. A difficult background simply means that objectively a person has, on average, experienced more distressing events in her or his childhood than other people have experienced. These events could be all sorts of things, like parental separation or divorce, death of someone close, serious illness, school bullying, excessive parental criticism, physical or sexual assault, excessive moving from place to place, or over-protection from parents (which teaches children that the world is a frightening place that they need protection from, and, which also teaches children that they cannot trust themselves and depend upon their own resources and, therefore have to be rescued or over-protected). Read More