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Your Mind & Brain Explained, Manchester (2026)

30/05/2026

Do we really avoid effort? Are we really lazy or undisciplined? Study shows that effort depends on whether the brain expects that effort to be worthwhile.

A recent study (link in first comment) caught my attention because it supports something I've been saying for quite some time and even wrote about it: humans may not be naturally averse to effort itself. Instead, we seem particularly sensitive to effort that feels unlikely to pay off, meaningless, or wasted.

This challenges the common idea that people simply lack discipline. People often talk about discipline as if motivation doesn't matter.

"Just do it."

"Just be disciplined."

"Keep going."

But human behaviour is rarely that simple. Most of us are not naturally opposed to effort. We are opposed to effort that feels wasted.

When we believe that our effort is likely to lead to something meaningful, we can work incredibly hard. We study for years, build businesses, raise children, learn new skills, and overcome enormous challenges.

The problem arises when the reward is uncertain, feels meaningless, or previous experience has taught us that our efforts are unlikely to pay off.

In those situations, reluctance is often interpreted as laziness when it may actually reflect a lack of confidence in the outcome, including fear of failure.

This is particularly relevant for people struggling with anxiety or depression. These conditions often bias our expectations toward failure, disappointment, or rejection. If you genuinely expect your efforts to lead nowhere, why would you invest your energy in them?

As a result, people may withdraw, avoid challenges, or stop trying altogether. Unfortunately, this reduces opportunities for success, reinforces negative expectations, and creates a self-perpetuating cycle.

The opposite is also true.

When effort leads to meaningful rewards, confidence grows. As confidence grows, people become more willing to invest effort because they increasingly trust that their actions can make a difference. Success reinforces effort, and effort creates more opportunities for success.

This reminds me of the famous marshmallow experiments. While they were initially interpreted as evidence of self-control and delayed gratification that led to better academic results, later work suggested that trust may play a much bigger role than originally thought. Children who trust that the promised reward will actually arrive are more willing to wait. Children who have learned that promises are unreliable may decide that the marshmallow in front of them is the safest bet.

Sometimes what looks like a lack of discipline is actually a lack of trust.

Before asking whether someone needs more discipline, it may be worth asking a different question:

Do they genuinely believe their effort will be worthwhile?

26/05/2026

Poor sleep and anxiety often reinforce each other in a self-perpetuating cycle, affecting not only how we feel emotionally, but also how we think, behave, and physically function.

What’s important is that the cycle does not always begin in the same place. For some people, it may start with stress, anxiety, or overthinking. For others, it may begin with physical illness, exhaustion, chronic stress, emotional distress, inflammation, or lifestyle changes. Once the cycle begins repeating, each part starts influencing the others.

But how does poor sleep induce anxiety? Poor or fragmented sleep leaves us more tired, it triggers inflammatory processes that take up a considerable amount of our resources. This in turn reduces our capacity for emotional regulation, concentration and rational thinking, lowers resilience, and makes the brain more sensitive to potential stressors. That's when we are more likely to become reactive, catastrophise, overthink, and interpret situations negatively. At night, instead of relaxing, the brain remains vigilant and alert, making it harder to fully switch off and sleep deeply, often resulting in rumination, more overthinking that keeps us awake and more alert.

At the same time, behavioural changes begin to appear too. Fatigue and low energy often lead to reduced physical movement, comfort eating, social withdrawal, and difficulty engaging in activities that would normally help regulate mood and stress. These patterns can further increase inflammation, exhaustion, and emotional vulnerability, strengthening the cycle even more.

Over time, repeated disruption can gradually develop into chronic sleep deprivation, where recovery itself becomes harder.

This is why anxiety and poor sleep fuel each other. The emotional, cognitive, behavioural, and biological components constantly interact with and reinforce one another.

Once we recognise the cycle, we can begin interrupting it, sometimes through surprisingly small changes like naps, consistent bed time and exposure to natural light repeated consistently over time.

23/05/2026

Can Exercise Fix PTSD?
Research shows that aerobic exercise alone, or coupled with standard treatment, can reduce PTSD symptoms. I've included a beautiful review in the first comment for those who want to read more.

So how can exercise improve PTSD?

🔹 1. Desensitisation - Exercise teaches the brain that arousal doesn't always mean danger

People with PTSD live with hyperarousal: fast heart rate, rapid breathing and muscle tension, as if something terrible is about to happen. Exercise naturally does the same thing physiologically, minus the sense of danger. Over time, the brain becomes more tolerant and relearns that a racing heart doesn't always mean disaster, it could just mean "I'm moving".

🔹 2. Movement interrupts rumination and grounds you in the present.

Trauma pulls you inward — memories, overthinking, catastrophising. Movement pulls you outward. When you walk, dance, or move, your brain automatically senses rhythm, tracks the environment, notices sounds, adjusts balance, engages with the world. This is grounding without trying. It's the same logic behind grounding techniques, but done naturally through sensory engagement.

🔹 3. Neuroplasticity - exercise grows the parts of the brain that trauma weakened

PTSD typically causes an overactive amygdala (threat centre), reduces prefrontal cortex activity (the rational self-control brain region) and reduces hippocampal volume (memory + context). This is why PTSD people have higher reactivity, less ability to inhibit it and messed up memory. But exercise reverses this pattern. It increases BDNF (a brain growth factor) which stimulates the formation of new neurons and connections in the hippocampus and strengthens prefrontal networks. In other words, you become less reactive, more rational, self-controlled, in control and more detached.

🔹 4. The neurochemical cascade: adrenaline → dopamine → serotonin

Movement produces the most healing chemical sequence: adrenaline for focus and alertness, dopamine for motivation and reward, serotonin + endorphins for calmness, mood, and relief. You shift from threat to effort, to reward and calmness.

🔹 5. Exercise normalises the stress response (HPA axis)

People with PTSD have lower cortisol levels and higher inflammation. Moderate to high intensity exercise increases cortisol (in a healthy way) and reduces inflammation. This leads to better stress resilience and healthier cortisol rhythms. Essentially, exercise becomes a controlled, predictable stressor.

Important:
Exercise doesn't have to be hours at the gym. Even 10 minutes matter. Exercise must be something that feels enjoyable, whether it's dancing, walking outside, light jogging, lifting or yoga - anything that does not feel like self-punishment. When exercise is perceived as a chore, it has the opposite effects. It increases stress and guilt leading to giving up. But something that feels good propagates. Your body will want more.

Let's be real: No movement (or therapy) will erase traumatic memories

Movement can reverse the biology that trauma changed, will reduce sensitivity, increase tolerance, give you agency, help you reinterpret sensations, and shift perspective. Movement won’t erase the story, but it will give the brain the ability to process it, change the relationship with it, instead of reliving it.

20/05/2026

Taking too long to decide may lead to worse decisions. How looking at every variable breeds the fear of making the wrong choice.

Many times, we are told to think thoroughly when we are about to make complex decisions, but an interesting study (link in first comment) suggests that thinking too long instead of deciding fast can actually lead to worse choices. Here's how:

In a more naturalistic setting - in this case a professional chess tournament, researchers set out to analyse whether the time taken by the players to make a complex decision led to better or worse results. They found that making fast decisions led to better results compared to longer thinking.

Now the question comes: how do you explain that? Researchers described that when we take longer to decide, the brain perceives the task as being more difficult than it is, then overthinking takes over, leading to worse decisions.

Beyond the study, I'd say that everything makes sense. When we think longer, we add more variables to analyse, we see from different perspectives. This may give us a temporary sense of control, but the problem is that, after a certain point, the brain begins to anticipate possible errors. You think you're being thorough, but you're actually just building a trap of error-prediction. So instead of focusing on problem-solving, the brain shifts to threat-monitoring.

“What if this goes wrong?”
“What if I missed something?”
“What if there’s a better option?”

The result is often not clarity, but paralysis, or fear-based decision.

Part of this may come from the limits of the prefrontal cortex — the area involved in planning, weighing options, and decision-making. Holding too many competing variables at once is cognitively expensive. The brain becomes tired and overwhelmed, confidence drops, anxiety rises, and eventually even simple decisions begin to feel confusing. So sometimes an intuitive, fast response may be moving you forward more than spending a long time deciding.

What’s interesting is that intuition does not necessarily mean irrational. In many cases, it may reflect rapid unconscious pattern recognition based on previous experience. Sometimes the brain already knows enough before conscious over-analysis begins interfering.

So perhaps there’s a sweet spot:
Think enough to understand the situation… but not so much that you drown in variables and lose the ability to move at all. The cycle seems to be:

“Thinking Longer” → “More variables” → “Error prediction” → “Anxiety” + “Cognitive fatigue” → “Paralysis/Worse choices”

17/05/2026

Do you procrastinate until a sense of urgency/anxiety takes over?

If you're like me, you have a task or a chore, you procrastinate and it takes you a while until you take the first step but then eventually a sense of anxiety and urgency makes you suddenly move, and once you do, you're unstoppable. If that resonates with you, here's what's actually happening: 😅

In chemistry and psychology, Activation Energy is the minimum amount of energy required to start a process.The "Start" is the hardest part: Your brain, specifically the basal ganglia, is hardwired to resist effort and change because that requires high metabolic energy. That "anxiety and urgency" you feel is actually your body’s way of "revving the engine" to overcome that initial resistance.

Then comes the "Momentum" Phase: once you start moving, your brain begins to release Dopamine. This doesn't just make you feel good; it actually improves cognitive flexibility and creativity. That’s why you feel more confident and creative after you start, not before.

For me, the way I get past that resistance is by creating micro-emergencies. Set a 5-minute timer, race the kettle, anything that jump-starts the brain. Because once you begin, the chemistry shifts and the momentum takes over. So, what are you going to race today?

14/05/2026

What if the fear of rejection doesn’t just affect your relationships… but also shapes the entire way you interpret people, closeness, and even yourself?

For many people, sensitivity to rejection becomes a self-reinforcing cycle driven by hypervigilance, fear, and past emotional wounds.

When someone has been emotionally deprived for a long time, attachment can become very intense very quickly. The brain moves toward overinvolvement: idealising, seeking reassurance, investing emotionally fast, and attaching strongly because connection feels relieving, almost addictive.

But then comes the paradox. The more attached the person becomes, the more emotionally exposed they feel. Vulnerability increases. Suddenly, the relationship no longer feels just exciting, it also feels dangerous. Fear and attraction become intertwined.

This creates a push-pull dynamic where the person craves closeness while simultaneously fearing it. Vulnerability also increases hypervigilance. The brain begins scanning constantly for signs of rejection, distance, disinterest, or abandonment. Ambiguous situations stop feeling neutral.

A delayed message, a shorter reply, a different tone or needing space become uncertainty cues and uncertainty is interpreted as threat.

This is where cognitive distortions begin to reinforce the cycle. Instead of thinking "Maybe they're tired", the brain jumps to conclusions, mind-reading, catastrophising and assuming the worst:

"They’re losing interest.” “I’m too much, not good enough”, “I’m going to be abandoned.”

The emotional consequences are very real: fear of rejection, shame, inadequacy, self-criticism, emotional pain.

Withdrawal is the step to protect themselves either by shutting down, ghosting or even "slamming the door".

But withdrawal creates another problem: loneliness returns.

And loneliness reactivates the original emotional starvation, creating longing, craving for intimacy, and attempts to reconnect again for relief and reassurance and the cycle restarts. Particularly if the longing and need to reconnect remains unresolved.

The good news is that this pattern isn't fixed. Once you realise that not every ambiguous cue is rejection, not every feeling is evidence, and not every fear needs to become a prediction, you can move towards healthier and more emotionally nourishing relationships.

09/05/2026

Some time ago, I made a video about what misophonia is - when certain sounds trigger a very visceral reaction in us like loud chewing or snoring. I covered the fact that misophonia is a sensory processing problem in the brain. I also covered that the brain of a misophonic person is less flexible. Once the trigger is there, it's impossible to shift attention from that sound to anything else, any other stimulus, which is why you cannot talk yourself out of it, and if someone tells you to just ignore it, it's biologically impossible to do so.

So what can you do? You can learn about your triggers and try to avoid them. You can create environments that work for you, and you can certainly educate others about misophonia, so they can understand you and support you better.

What about therapy? There is no cure for misophonia. Talking therapy does not fix it because this condition is not caused by trauma, unresolved emotions or even cognitive distortions. It's purely related to how the brain processes certain sounds.

However, therapy can be indirectly useful. By addressing stress or other mental health issues, you can slightly increase your tolerability to the triggering sounds.

Finally, if you've done all of the above, all that's left to do is to try to live a life that respects the way your brain responds to sounds.

05/05/2026

A significant number of adults worldwide live with chronic pain. Research has consistently shown that chronic pain and depression often go hand-in-hand, but why is it that not everyone who lives with chronic pain develops depression? A new large study (link in first comment) explored this question.

The key was the hippocampus - the memory centre of our brain. When comparing people with chronic pain, with or without depression, researchers found that those without depression had a larger and more active hippocampus.

This was reflected in their performance. When tested, individuals without depression showed better outcomes in memory and learning tasks. In contrast, those with depression were observed to have progressive structural changes over time that disrupted hippocampal activity, researchers suggesting that the hippocampus may act as an emotional regulator as well, not just as a memory centre.

A pattern became apparent: increased sensitivity to pain, followed by anxiety behaviours and ultimately depressive symptoms.

Another area of interest was the dentate gyrus. This is where new neurons continue to form in adult life. During the initial phases of chronic pain, the neurons produced by this region become highly active, suggesting a compensatory response. The brain is trying to adapt to persistent pain. However, over time, the immune cells in the brain (microglia) also become abnormally active leading to increased inflammation. This, in turn, disrupts the communication between neurons, increasing vulnerability. That's when depressive-like symptoms begin to emerge.

What's interesting is that when researchers suppressed the activity of the immune cells, depressive symptoms improved. Taken together, these findings suggest that inflammation in the hippocampus may be what drives depression.

While these findings are interesting, particularly the role of the dentate gyrus, I would interpret the mechanism differently. In my view, based on my research experience, this is less about a localised hippocampal effect and more about a broader process: a persistent stressor (chronic pain) leads to sustained immune activation, which over time shifts into a pro-inflammatory state. This ongoing inflammation drives neuronal damage, including in the hippocampus. Meanwhile, regions such as the dentate gyrus initially attempt to compensate. When compensatory capacity is overwhelmed, vulnerability increases, leading to sickness behaviour and, eventually, depression. In this sense, the hippocampal changes are part of a downstream effect rather than the primary driver.

Fortunately, because these changes happen progressively, it gives a window of opportunity to potentially avoid the development of depression. Targeting inflammation, particularly early on in the course of chronic pain, could restore the brain's ability to remain resilient.

02/05/2026

This isn't the usual way I talk about mental health, but last night a friend said something very profound, which I think might help some people put things into perspective.

You see, society tends to reward us for beig independent, not needing anyone and being strong on our own. But as my friend elegantly put it: you might be the queen, but if you're the only piece on the board, you can't play.

This is a powerful insightful: being capable doesn't mean being effective alone. Even the strongest people cannot thrive in isolation. They need the right structure and to function within a system, with others around them, in order to move forward. Our brains are wired for connection.

Progress often happens through interaction, not isolation. It's the interdependence and strategic positioning that's beneficial not only for our productivity, but also for our sense of wellbeing.

From a neurological perspective, the sense of loneliness is one of the strongest predictors of cognitive decline, depression, chronic stress and anxiety, as well as sleep issues and low self-esteem. Isolation creates a "feedback loop" that reinforces social withdrawal. Remember: even the most powerful piece on the board still needs a team to win.

What do you think?

30/04/2026

For a very long time, therapeutic approaches for depression and anxiety focused almost entirely on reducing the negative affect, such as sadness and anxious feelings. However, new research is showing that targeting positive emotions may be a very strong approach.

In one study, researchers worked with 98 participants experiencing severe anhedonia, depression and anxiety. Across 15 sessions, therapy deliberately ignored working on negative emotions and instead focused on retraining the brain's capacity for joy, pleasure, motivation and reward using Positive Affect Treatment (PAT). The results showed that this approach was more effective than traditional therapies.

So what's the rationale? One of the core symptoms of depression is anhedonia - the reduced ability to feel pleasure. For many people, depression isn't just about sadness, but about the feeling of hopelessness. For example, you might achieve something meaningful, but not be able to feel pride and joy. Instead, you feel anxious. Or... when you finally have time for yourself, what you might experience it is guilt. And with the inability to feel pleasure comes low motivation and, in more severe cases, suicidal ideation and chronic illness.

But why does that happen? Our brain constantly evaluates effort versus reward to guide behaviour. If the reward system is impaired, effort feels pointless. So the goal isn't only to explore sadness or reduce negative emotions, it's to find ways to rebuild the person's capacity to feel and accept pleasure, satisfaction, calm and pride. This could be achieved through repeated, small experiences like sensory exploration, gratitude, compassion and rewarding activities that foster meaning, a sense of achievement and connection. Over time, these begin to retrain and strengthen neural pathways involved in reward, anticipation and motivation. Think of it like working on muscles you've forgotten about. You first activate them, then strengthen them through repetition.

This approach doesn't mean ignoring negative affect or promoting "just focus on the good, think positively". It's about acknowledging that negative and positive emotions are driven by different brain systems and are not merely at the opposite poles. Working on both may actually help people achieve what they truly want: the ability to feel happy again.

In other words, it's not enough to just work on the bad, you have to build the good.

Your Mind & Brain Explained

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