Lovebrain

Why are we so hard on ourselves?

Many of us grew up in environments where correction outweighed encouragement.

Now, as adults, that inner voice mirrors what we once heard-quick to critique, slow to recognise progress.

A study of 2,500+ students found that classrooms with more praise saw up to 30% greater focus.🔬

Imagine if something as simple as how you speak to yourself could increase your focus and efficiency by 30%.

What if the key to better mental health isn’t in a pill… but in the world around you? 🌿

A £6M project tested the effects of prescribing nature - and the results speak for themselves. Just 120 minutes a week led to measurable improvements in well-being, reducing anxiety and boosting mental health.

Yet, despite this, we spend 80-90% of our time indoors.

If nature can make this kind of difference for those struggling… imagine what it could do for you.

Maybe the best medicine isn’t found in a bottle—but just outside your door. 💊

Your brain cleans itself while you sleep, flushing out toxins to stay sharp.

But research suggests that common sleep aids like zolpidem may disrupt this process, potentially raising the risk of neurodegeneration.

With millions of prescriptions filled yearly, could this be a hidden risk?

Make informed choices about your sleep. 💤

Your body knows before your mind does.

We often think of emotions as purely mental, but research proves otherwise.

A study mapping over 50,000 data points found that emotions create distinct physiological responses-ones that appear before we even process them consciously.

Stress tightening your chest.
Anxiety sitting in your stomach.
Confidence energising your entire body.

The key to better decision-making, emotional intelligence, and resilience isn’t just in thinking better-it’s in learning to read your body’s signals.

So, here’s the real question: Are you truly listening?

Did you know your birth month could impact your likelihood of being diagnosed with ADHD?

Children born just before the school cutoff are the youngest in their year group. Research shows they are significantly more likely to receive an ADHD diagnosis, sometimes incorrectly. Instead of recognising normal developmental differences, many are labelled and even prescribed medication.

Misdiagnosis can alter a child’s self-perception, lead to unnecessary treatments, and mask the real challenges they may be facing. It’s time to rethink how we identify and support neurodiversity. Every child deserves to be understood- not just labelled.

Swipe through to learn more about this critical issue. Let’s start an important conversation.

Tag a parent or teacher who needs to see this. 👇

Maybe you’re a sole not having the to charge a fair rate for your work?

Maybe you’re just not allowing yourself to shine in or interviews?

Maybe you’re often putting yourself down?

Maybe you don’t truly take in and just deflect them?

Maybe it’s got so bad that you feel to others at or .

Listen, - your needs to feel good about itself to function optimally.

Holding back will lower your intrinsic value - neurologically wiring yourself to feel less important than others.

The result is worse than than you can imagine. Of course you’ll earn less, get ahead less at work, be less of a leader amongst family and friends but also;

With a lowered intrinsic value you accept less than what you but more importantly you things that aren’t good for you more than you should.

What are you tolerating right now?

Toxic relationships, terrible employers, bad financial situations, poor physical health, or worst of all a negative which leads to poor health and premature brain ageing.

It starts with your internal worth.

Maybe you were, maybe you weren’t told enough that you are special and worthy of living - not just existing.

It can start now. You are more than worthy. You are special. You are unique. You know this. You deserve to live a life of happiness if you aren’t already.

You beautiful soul - no more excuses. Enough is enough ❤️

With the utmost love, respect and gratitude ❤️

Please feel free to share if you think this will help someone 🙏

Your memory is divided up into three types: working memory, episodic memory and semantic memory.

Your working memory is deemed as your short term memory, whilst your episodic and semantic memory are your mid-long term memory.

Even though all the memories you can remember from years ago and the skills you’ve learned are stored in your long term memory stores (episodic and semantic), also being where you would want to store information for exams and presentations; your short term working memory is the key to this.

Your working memory can only hold up between 5-9 pieces of information for up to 30 seconds, so it is very short term and can easily be overwhelmed.

So why is this component of memory so important?

Working memory is the foundation of your memory, with it being the first place information stops at before going anywhere else.

Working memory acts as a checkpoint for information, where your brain decides if it’s important enough to go through to your long-term memory stores or if it can be removed.

Unfortunately for most, your brain doesn’t work as simply as you may like, where you can just tell it ‘this information is important, so please store it’. Instead your brain has certain aspects it looks out for when storing information long term. Two of these aspects are emotion and novelty.

Emotion and novelty attached to information is what makes them memorable, which is why your working memory drops the mundane numbers you used for a maths calculation, and moves your wedding day to your episodic memory.

Alone, your working memory can’t do much, only being able to retain limited information for up to a short amount of time. This is why many may see their memory as ‘bad’, using their short term working memory to try and store information like people’s names they want to remember. Your working memory simply isn’t designed for that.

In relation to the whole memory system however, your working memory is one of the most amazing and fundamental parts to getting information into your long-term memory stores.

You’re finally sat down to get a task done, read that chapter, go through that report, study for an exam, prepare for an interview or meeting - but just moments in and your brain starts to fire random thoughts, ideas, and stuff from your pending to-do list!

Damn! You’re now struggling to focus!

Your focus is primarily linked to your survival mechanism. This means that your focus is designed to break when you feel unsafe.

Imagine eating a delicious meal and you are so hyper focused that you don’t hear or see the sabre tooth tiger approach - and then you’re in serious trouble.

Our focus is designed to break when there is something important related to the past, present or future that you’re not supposed to forget.

The problem is that when you sit down to do a task - your brain is firing things your way because it’s saying - “do you know you have all these things to think, worry, plan etc - is what you’re doing now the right thing?”

People generally try to block those thoughts out - so your brain is now in a more heightened state of stress - it fires those thoughts back at you even more strongly to remind you.

Additionally, our brain can typically hold 5-9 pieces of information in our short term (working) memory. It’s like juggling balls. When there are too many we drop them all. This is overwhelm.

Trying to hold onto or even blocking thoughts is the same thing for your brain - it juggles these - impeding how much capacity you’re left with to process your actual task.

As we’re now having to focus harder, the task takes more energy, hence we get tired and often stop the task.

So what’s the solution?

Neurological hack: use a distraction sheet.

Keep a piece of paper near you. Every time you have an idea that needs to be addressed simply write it down and continue with your work.

Writing it down reassures your brain that it’s on paper - your brain feels safer that you can come to that list later so that it can maintain a longer state of flow during the task at hand.

This simple but powerful hack is a real game changer. Try it and let me know how it suits you in the comments!

With love and gratitude ❤️

You will notice a slice of cake on a table, an attractive person walking into a room or someone that looks scary walking past you, regardless of whether you’re going to do anything about it or not.

Your brain immediately notices these things: food, attraction and fear.

The reason this is, is because of your “old brain” - the brain early humans had, before evolving into what our brains are like today.

Your brain is the most powerful safety tool you have, with everything it does, either consciously or subconsciously, stemming from trying to keep you safe. Whether that’s entering your body into fight or flight, blocking out scary or harmful memories from the past, or simply noticing someone intimidating.

It’s simply because of this hardwired safety mechanism that makes you notice these three things. Without food you’d starve, without s*x your species would die out and any threats would mean imminent death. To your ‘old brain’ these three things are some of the most important things to watch for in order to keep you alive and safe.

However as human society has modernised, you can skip a meal, live without a partner and know that not everyone that ‘looks scary’ is actually threatening. These three are not as big a priority as they used to be. But because of how important they were in the past, your brain still hasn’t evolved out of noticing them.

Do you often notice one of these three things?

Many people feel their memory either isn’t great or has been deteriorating.

But what would you say is the actual purpose of memory?

And is your ability to memorise new information actually the problem?

An effective memory allows you to learn; useful information, skills, habits and most importantly new ways of thinking.

Using your memory in this way allows you to become more productive which improves your abilities to gain qualifications, excel in your career or business, pursue hobbies and interests and even improve the quality and quantity of your relationships.

But memory primarily has two functions:

1. Guide your future

2. Keep you safe

Developing yourself is nearly always the conscious mode of learning. But it’s the learning for safety that’s the matter of concern for many.

Your brain is ultimately wired as a survival tool, which means your memory’s primary function is to keep you alive not necessarily enable you to thrive.

Which memories have you stored that are primarily there to keep you safe, but actually serve to hold you back?

The majority of events that occur in our lives that are perceived as painful, especially emotionally, such as feeling embarrassed, scared, belittled, let down, betrayed, abandoned, rejected, unfairly treated - are all packed as what I refer to as “survival memories” and are stored in the amygdala in the brain.

These packaged memories are semantically stored which override most of our “rational” thinking in the prefrontal cortex, because they are driven by strong emotions - we are biological creatures not rational.

These memories will potentially inhibit your ability to trust yourself, or other people or life generally thereby causing you to lack confidence, be small for others, be a people pleaser, or the opposite- inflate your ego to cover up what’s truly inside.

These types of memories ultimately prevent us from truly being our core self, and we therefore master the art of existing rather than living.

Healthily letting go of unhelpful memories allows us to free our minds to be more focused on the present and make better decisions for our future self.

With love and gratitude ❤️

Experiencing something that goes against your beliefs is hard to swallow for your brain. For example, someone who thinks they're unattractive being told they’re beautiful - they would struggle to take this compliment seriously as it goes against their own understanding of themselves. The brain would much rather have it’s beliefs proven right, than proven wrong. This is called cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance applies to the beliefs you have about yourself, people around you, and the world - with these beliefs generally having a positive or negative effect on your perception of reality.

Since the brain hates being wrong, when there is something that may prove a belief wrong, the brain will try to downplay it or seek another way to understand the experience so it proves its original belief to be correct.

An example of this may be you believing you’re bad at maths. Your brain will highlight all the moments where your maths has been wrong or let you down, reaffirming your belief and making your brain correct. However, if you got a positive result in a maths test, your brain would be shocked and try to downplay it, giving weight to thoughts like “I don’t know how I got that”, “That test was easy” or “I got lucky”.

The example above is a typical case of cognitive dissonance. This applies to beliefs on your looks, ability to connect with others, to learn, to work and generally your results in each area of your life will be a reflection of your beliefs.

Working on building more empowering beliefs can be challenging but is 100% trainable, and this is possibly one of the most rewarding skills you can learn and master.

When did you find yourself experiencing cognitive dissonance and how would you like to transform that experience?