Mindful Injury Recovery and learning to move without fear

This week’s blog is a little different, as I want to tell you about an interview I did recently with Maya Novak, an Injury Recovery Expert and Mindset Coach. The interview was part of her Mindful Injury Recovery World Summit, during which she interviewed 25 specialists in different fields from around the world, from doctors to physiotherapists to dietitians to… me!

Maya came to her field after a rock climbing accident in 2012. At first she hoped it was a bad sprain, but it turned out the ankle was broken, and doctors repeatedly told her that the injury would have debilitating and lasting effects.  

After nine months Maya was still in pain, and had become terrified that she would never fully recover. 

 However, this was not the case. In the end Maya completely recovered, and can now walk, run and move without pain. She was inspired by her experience to develop a Mindful Injury Recovery technique that she now uses to help other people recover from injury. 

During our eighty-minute interview, Maya and I covered many topics related to injury, recovery, and resolving chronic pain. The full interview is available to purchase either as a video or audio file here. 

 Below is an abridged excerpt from the interview, where Maya and I discuss pain medication. 

Maya: What do you say to someone who has had pain for, let’s say eight months, after a serious injury. Would you say that by then it’s essential to start looking into other things [such as Resolving Chronic Pain]? Or is it enough to wait for another few months and then maybe it will get better? 

Mags: One of the things about people coming to me is that sometimes they’ve gone to every person they can think of, but they have felt they’re not progressing, that they’re not healing.  I’m constantly taken aback by how people know themselves. It’s like a gut reaction: ‘This does not suit me. I’m not progressing here. I need to find a different route.’ So if someone had a serious injury, as you just stated, and they weren’t getting anywhere, doing this work on balancing the autonomic nervous system can do no harm. So they could do that alongside whatever else they were doing. 

Maya: Being in chronic pain, many people use medication. So when a person comes to you, and if they’re on pain medication, do you suggest they stop using it so that they can really start observing the body? Because pain medication is kind of numbing you, so you actually don’t know what is happening. What is your approach to this?

Mags:  I have a very open approach to pain medication. I feel I have to defend it on occasion because if someone is taking pain medication and it numbs the pain it allows them to move. 

One of the things I feel passionately about is that if I can restore someone’s confidence in moving, they will initiate a reduction in their pain medication when they are ready. But often health practitioners have suggested that movement should be restricted because of pain, and what that can do is perhaps make someone quite anxious and nervous about moving.  A lot of my experience of this is about low back pain with people explaining to me that their back is fragile, and I will reply ‘no, your spine is a robust bit of kit. It’s there to bend. If you look at the biomechanical structure of the spine, it’s designed to move, and it will support you.’ For someone to rediscover that that’s true, and then to be able to do gentle safe movement it can restore their faith in movement. If they manage to do that partly because of the pain medication, that’s actually fine because then they will find that they’ve got more confidence in their own body. That, to me is a great starting point.

Whose Life Are You Leading?

“Craig was a poster child for the post-Princeton urban-professional dream. He was getting an MBA and had a job as a vice president at Continental Bank, and he and [his partner] had bought a nice condo in Hyde Park. He wore tailored suits and had driven over for dinner in his red Porsche 944 Turbo.”

It sounds like a dream life, doesn’t it? A good job, a stable relationship, a nice place to live and money left over for expensive clothes and other luxuries. This is an extract from Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming, in which she describes her brother Craig in his early professional life.

But the next sentence reveals something else: “I didn’t know it then, but none of this made him happy.”

It might be surprising to some of you that this high-flying lifestyle wasn’t making Craig happy, but most likely you already knew that money doesn’t bring happiness. What surprised me about this sentence is actually the first part – Michelle had no idea that her brother was unhappy.

She was also unhappy at this time herself, as she describes: “I wasn’t happy with my job, or even with my chosen profession - that I was seriously unhappy, in fact […] I was desperate to make a major change but worried about not making enough money if I did.”

So why did neither brother or sister acknowledge their unhappiness and resolve to make changes?

“Knowing how thrilled our father was by what his kids had managed to accomplish, neither of us ever brought up our discontent over dinner.”

Both children were desperately unhappy with the versions of life they had pursued, but couldn’t bring themselves to say anything because of their father’s pride in those very versions of life.

This can happen to all of us. After all, if you love someone, a partner, a good friend, or a relative it is natural to consider their opinion. In particular parents can have tremendous influence, often far more than they intend, as in the above case of Michelle Obama. If they have given you a great or reasonable start in life to the best of their abilities, how could you not make sure that your life fits the image that will make them most proud?

Unfortunately, something is eventually bound to crack. As we are told by countless coming-of-age books and films, pursuing someone else’s dreams can only get you so far. Eventually there comes a point at which the unhappiness you buried in a bid to make someone proud bubbles up to the surface. This can be more injurious than disappointing a loved one ever could be.

Of course it’s tempting to try and make others proud: it’s a way of showing your love, gratitude or respect for them. And it may make them wonderfully happy in the short term. But in the long run, it has potential to cause more harm than good.

What we know deep down is that our lifestyle and chosen profession needs to align with our ambitions and principles. However, it's not easy. To follow your own path takes courage, and a leap of faith. Belief in yourself. Being true to your own aspirations, respecting what you feel, cultivating your own skills, and identifying values you want to adhere to. It means committing to your own moral compass. Perhaps those same people who love and care about you, whose opinion may have swayed you in the past, would be simply delighted to see you navigate your own route and thrive?  

What does exercise actually do for mental health?

A month ago in this blog I wrote about running a marathon, and the huge benefit I found that it had on my stress levels and overall well being. Thank you to all of you who have been in touch to share your own experiences of the effect of exercise on both physical well being and your mental health, and to those who have asked me more about the research surrounding this effect.

There have been a huge number of studies over the years, and I encourage you to do your own research and draw your own conclusions. That said, here are a few which I have found particularly striking in my own reading around the subject recently.

Exercise and Working Memory

A 2008 paper published in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology details an experiment run by Sian Beilock and Ben Sibley into the effect of exercise on working memory. About 50 undergraduate students were asked to take a series of tests which evaluated their working memory. In one task, called Operation Span Task, students were instructed to solve a maths problem which appeared on a screen followed by a word. The students were to read aloud and solve each maths problem, then to read aloud the word and remember it. The sum and the word then disappeared from the screen. After a series of between three and five problems, students were asked to recall the words in the order they appeared. This was to test working memory: how well students could hold information in their memory while doing something else. After this initial test of working memory was completed, students were told to run on a treadmill for half an hour, at 60 to 80 percent of their maximum effort. The organisers then asked subjects to take part in another round of the test, and measured the change in working memory. They discovered that those who had showed the least amount of working memory to begin with experienced the greatest increase after exercise.

Exercise and Depression

A revolutionary study in 1999 by researchers at Duke University found that exercise is better than the SSRI drug sertraline at treating depression. In the study, called Standard Medical Intervention and Long-term Exercise and nicknamed SMILE for short, 156 patients were divided into three groups. Over a period of sixteen weeks, one group was prescribed sertraline, one group exercise, and one group a combination of the two. The exercise group took part in supervised walking or jogging at 70-85% effort for 30 minutes three times a week. Results showed that all three groups showed a drop in depression, with about half of each group in complete remission after sixteen weeks. The leader of the study concluded that in the short term exercise was as effective as the drug at treating depression. However, six months after the study finished, the researchers returned to the subjects to see how they were doing, and concluded that in the longer term exercise could be labelled as even better than the drug at treating depression. Only 30% of the exercise group still had symptoms of depression, compared to about 50% of both the medication group and the combined group.

Other Benefits

There has also been some research to suggest that exercise might be able to slow down the development of dementia, although this is not yet conclusive. Exercise has been shown to improve sleep – both in terms of falling asleep faster and sleeping longer and better.

The evidence for exercise as a benefit to mental wellbeing is overwhelming. It should be noted though that the benefits of exercise are increased when the subject enjoys the activity, and that too much exercise at too high an intensity can cause both physical and psychological harm. As with anything else, its best undertaken in healthy moderation, and under the advice of a doctor where necessary.

We'll look in more detail at physical well being and feeling good about your body through exercise later. For the time being I'm happy to say I didn't disgrace myself in the Edinburgh 10k a couple of weeks ago… although there is plenty of room for improvement!

The letter you will never send

Have you ever written a letter you never intended to send? A love-letter to the person you couldn’t reveal your feelings to, or a heat-of-the-moment scrawl letting out all the anger you felt towards someone who caused you pain?

Unsent letters are a widely-used tool for helping people to process emotions. They are one variation of a treatment method called expressive writing, which has been the subject of more than 200 academic studies. One particular researcher has produced a huge body of work on the subject: James Pennebaker, a social psychologist who is currently the Regents Centennial Chair of Psychology at the University of Texas.

The beauty of writing unsent letters is that it allows you to vent all the frustration and anger you might feel towards a certain person or group, without causing any damage in cases where confronting the person in question would be unhelpful or harmful.

There are other forms of expressive writing: some involve writing down feelings about or memories of traumatic incidents, some just entail writing a paragraph about your day. ‘Journaling’, which has become increasingly popular of late, is also a form of expressive writing.

I often advise clients that they might find expressive writing exercises helpful. This can come in any form, but there are three key components which I advise. Firstly, the writing should be done by hand. This differentiates the activity from work, which many of us do on a laptop or computer. Not involving your phone will also help you to write with fewer interruptions, and have less of a negative impact on your sleep, if you choose to write before bed.

Secondly, you should destroy the piece of paper after writing on it. This doesn’t apply to all forms of expressive writing – journaling, for instance, relies on keeping the pages instead. But I find that writing and then destroying what you’ve written can be a wonderful aide to letting go of unhelpful thoughts, whether you scratch a line through the words on the page, crumple it into a ball, rip it up, throw it in the bin, or even burn it, if you have a safe method of doing so!

Finally, writing sessions should be regular. I don’t advise carrying a notebook around and jotting thoughts down as they occur to you throughout the day, rather the point of this exercise is that you set time aside regularly to do it. I find it best to dedicate a few minutes every day, which quickly forms a habit. It’s important to give yourself a time limit, of perhaps ten or twenty minutes – this encourages you to start writing immediately, and that way your thoughts are expressed without being filtered.

Good luck with your writing, and let us know how it goes in the comments!

What nobody told me about running a marathon

In 2014 I was involved with the back pain association BackCare UK. One day a colleague and I were in a meeting. “I need a volunteer” he said.

“A volunteer for what?” I asked, expecting to be pulled into some admin task or other.

“I need someone to run the London Marathon.” He replied.

It was January. The Marathon was in April. I had never run so much as a mile, let alone 26 of them. I kept myself fit – back then I was teaching Pilates in addition to my Resolving Chronic work, and I also loved swimming and going for long walks. But I had never tried running. Of course I couldn’t run the London Marathon.

“I’ll do it” I said.

What had I got myself into? The answer was, of course, a lot of running. I trained consistently for the three months until the marathon, exploring local trails and venturing further and further afield. I treated myself to some new running shoes, decided I preferred my old faithfuls, and soothed my aching muscles by taking baths sprinkled with Epsom salts.

April came around very quickly, and with it the London Marathon. To my great surprise (and that of my close friends and family), I managed to make it through the race. I no longer remember my time – it wasn’t something I was prepared to show off! I was never going win any awards for speed, but I finished the race after just a few months of training, and that was enough for me.

Training for a marathon in three months is a dramatic step, and if I hadn’t already had the fitness from my career as a Pilates teacher it would have been extremely foolish to put such pressure on my body. If you’re thinking about running a long distance make sure you consider what is right for you and your body, and don’t put yourself at risk!

In my case I was glad to have done the race. I noticed the effect it had on my body, and most of all, on my mind. My husband had recently changed jobs and was dealing with an increased workload and the stress of a new routine. We were also considering moving house, and my daughter was preparing for her school exams, the Leaving Certificate, with a lot of pressure on her to get the results needed for her university choice. It was a stressful time for those around me, and as I was doing my best to support them it was a stressful time for me too.

Running helped me cope with that stress. The rhythm of my feet pounding the trail, the hours in which my body was so concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other that my mind could wander elsewhere… or go blank.

That exercise is good for the body is by now a well-established fact. There are few who would dispute it and even though millions of people don’t get enough exercise, they are in the most part aware of this fact. But fewer people recognise that exercise is also fundamental for the health of the mind. Try it if you can, I promise it’ll be worth it!

Can the hand jive help you do mental maths?

At Resolving Chronic Pain we know that moving your body in any way is good for you, and that dancing is a particularly helpful activity. Studies have shown that dancing can increase certain cognitive skills including visual and spatial recognition, long-term memory and executive function. But could specific forms of dancing be applied to specific, real-world problems in order to achieve better results? Could doing the hand jive help you solve mental maths problems more quickly? Dance psychologist Dr Peter Lovatt believes it can.

Dr Lovatt has spent years researching the link between dancing and problem solving. A Reader in Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, Dr Lovatt set up a Dance Psychology Lab at the university in 2008. He had previously been a professional dancer, having trained at the Guildford School of Acting and Dancing and performing in musical theatre, ballet and tap. As a child he had experienced severe reading difficulties, and had found it easier to communicate through dance.

As well as showing that dancing can cause people to think and solve problems more quickly,  Dr Lovatt has done research into what specific kinds of dancing can best speed up different types of thinking.

Convergent problems are those with a correct answer - you might be trying to do mental maths, remember a specific date or solve a puzzle. According to Dr Lovatt’s research, performing structured, predictable dance moves can help you solve convergent problems more quickly. This could be a set dance routine, something like the Macarena, or even just a simple hand jive.

Conversely, divergent problems have more than one specific answer, and involve thinking about a range of ideas and solutions. This might be a brainstorm, or an answer to questions like ‘what should I do with my weekend’ or ‘how can I move my career forward.’ In order to solve these problems, Dr Lovatt recommends unpredictable dance. His research has shown that improvised, random dance moves can make someone solve divergent problems more quickly.

He told LSN global: “What we’ve found is that the way people move their body influences their ability to solve convergent thinking problems or divergent thinking problems. So very directly the way you move will influence how you think. And if you take that out of the lab, you can apply it in the real world [...] What we’ve shown is that when you get people to move their bodies, very easily, in different ways, it changes the way people think. And of course if you can get people to change the way they think, they can break away from their set patterns of thinking.”

Dr Lovatt has also done research into the power of dance to improve self esteem, and he told the Guardian that relaxed dancing without an emphasis on ‘doing it right’ is the best for improving self esteem. He suggests ceilidh dancing “where people smile, laugh and giggle, and they are adults and it’s absolutely fine. It’s wonderful.” He adds: “There have also been studies that have found that dancing in baggy “jazz” clothing is better than tight-fitting clothing for the dancer’s self-esteem.”

While I might not find myself doing the hand jive in the supermarket while adding up the bill anytime soon, it’s fascinating to think about how the way you move is deeply entwined with how you think and feel - sometimes in unexpected ways!

Sweating the small stuff

“Don’t sweat the small stuff” is a very common mantra for life, and it’s one we’re wholeheartedly in support of. It’s often dispensed along with advice not to worry about the myriad of minor problems thrown up by everyday life: the tiny mud flecks on your shoes that nobody will ever notice; the less-than-perfect email you send off to your boss at 5pm on a Friday rather than spending your weekend thinking about; or the dirty look you got from a stranger on the bus who was most likely thinking about something else.

But sometimes in life it is worth paying attention to the small stuff, as it can help us make hugely positive changes.

I remember a speech I watched a few years ago by a former US Navy SEAL who had written a book advising everyone to make their bed in the morning. “How simplistic!” I thought, not willing to believe that something as small as making your bed in the morning could have a meaningful effect on anybody’s life.

While I made my bed most days at that point, I can’t claim that it was every single day, and I didn’t always do it in the morning.

In his speech, to 8000 students graduating from the University of Texas, Admiral William McRaven said: “If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task, and another, and another.”

The notion of a ‘sense of pride’ is important here. In no way should you begin to feel a lack of pride, or worse still a sense of failure, if you find yourself unable to take control of small things in your life. Some habits are easily formed, some take huge effort but render incredible reward. Some might be out of reach for the moment, and if that is the case then it important to recognise that.

Another small way to bring control back into your life could be through tidying. I’m not going to suggest that the way to a calmer life is through a tidy house, as this seems both obvious and unnecessary: who keeps their house messy out of choice? Of course you may have a pristine home already, and if so that’s all to the good! But personally I find that everything seems to get messy again just as soon as I’ve tidied it up, and I just don’t have the time to run around after other people, pets and guests to clear up their constant chaos. If this sounds familiar, it can feel overwhelming and dispiriting. One small way of regaining control is to claim one corner of the house as tidy, and take a couple of minutes every day to make it so. This could be one particular windowsill, cupboard or drawer - for me it’s the area where I keep my toothbrush.

An interesting study showed that prisoners who were given a plant which they were solely responsible for ended up feeling happier and more optimistic. The reason for this was the feeling of being in control of this one small aspect of their lives, as their actions (ie whether or not they watered the plant) had a tangible effect, causing the plant to either die or continue to thrive.

Life is full of things which are outside our control, some of them exciting and wonderful, some not so. While it’s easy to wish we could be in control of every area of life, this isn’t possible, and we need to find ways to manage and cope with that fact. If we can take control of a few small areas of life, it can make us feel more able to deal with the other things we are faced with.

The Road Not Taken

English teachers and poetry lovers often bemoan the misinterpretation of Robert Frost’s poem ‘The Road Not Taken.’ The ending contains some of the most famous lines of poetry ever: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

The point made by English teachers is that many people take the last two lines as the most important, and interpret the poem as advice to take ‘the road less travelled,’ and to try and be a bit different from everyone else.

But what about the title? The title of the poem is ‘The Road Not Taken,’ so actually it seems Frost intended to highlight the path more travelled, the one he didn’t take. Instead of being about making different and unusual choices, the poem could be about regretting the options you didn’t choose. The narrator is ‘sorry’ he can’t travel both routes, and knows he will regret the choice for a long time: “I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence.”

Regretting paths not taken is a fundamental part of our culture. “You only regret the things you didn’t do,” the saying goes. But as we noted in our last blog, there are always things you didn’t do. No matter who you are, or what your situation in life, you will invariably make choices that involve not doing something.

In 2008 Hillary Clinton lost the battle to be the Democrat candidate for US President, to Barack Obama. In a speech, she thanked her supporters for endorsing her and told them not to regret her defeat: “When you hear people saying or think to yourself, ‘if only’ or ‘what if’, I say, please, don’t go there. Every moment wasted looking back keeps us from moving forward. Life is too short, time is too precious, and the stakes are too high to dwell on what might have been. We have to work together for what still can be.”

We all know the old saying, “don’t look back, you’re not going that way!” We all know that dwelling on regret is not healthy. But it’s worth consciously reminding ourselves from time to time. It’s worth thinking about Clinton’s plea to ‘work for what still can be’ - in her case it was for democrat candidate Barack Obama to win the 2008 election. He did win, but even if he hadn’t done there would have been no point regretting the choice of him over Clinton, no point wondering what would have happened if she had run instead.

Choices, once made, cannot be undone. They can only be built upon. It’s important to recognise that regret is natural, and it’s a part of life for everyone whether they show it or not. It isn’t unique to the choice you made and you may have felt a twinge of regret whatever the outcome. It takes time and work to come to terms with some choices, but each one is now part of a past you can’t change, instead leading the way to a future you can.

The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Choices, choices choices

I was recently shopping for jam. Standing in a huge supermarket aisle, looking at all the options available to me, I wondered did I want strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, blackcurrant, plum, damson, gooseberry or rhubarb? What about lemon curd or honey? What about marmalade? Thick cut or thin? And once I had made a choice about what flavour of sweet spread I desired, did I want the supermarket own brand, or did I want to pay a little more for a standard branded version? Or did I want to splash out and buy the most expensive, homemade-healthy-and-wholesome brand?

In the end I bought butter, and left it at that.

Too often in our lives we feel paralysed by choice. The wealth of options available to us in every area of our existence is utterly overwhelming, and it’s no surprise that in self-defence we sometimes shut down and refuse to make any decision at all. It reminds me of the stress response, fight, flight or freeze. We freeze. This paralysis induced by choice is an increasingly common phenomenon in developed countries, as our lives have become much easier and more affluent than they were a hundred or so years ago. We are lucky that most people have the luxury of choosing between many different options when deciding what to eat, what to wear, what to listen to or what book to read. But the flipside is that so much choice may not be healthy, and it can actually make us more unhappy than we would have been otherwise.

Barry Schwartz, American psychologist and celebrated author of The Paradox of Choice, believes that this abundance of choice makes us unhappy for a number of reasons. Firstly, according to him, as soon as we make a choice, we regret it, as undoubtedly the option we chose isn't perfect. If I chose raspberry jam, I might have felt, when spreading it on my toast at home, that really it wasn’t as nice as blackcurrant. Secondly, we feel as though we’re missing out on the options we didn’t choose - to think, I passed up the opportunity to eat blackcurrant jam! Thirdly, with so many options available to us, we develop higher expectations. With so many types of jam on offer, one of them must be perfect, right? And finally, we end up blaming ourselves for making a bad choice, when we are inevitably disappointed with the result. I had so many options, why can’t I even make good choices about jam?

The example of jam is of course a simplified one, but it’s true that we face an unnecessary amount of choice in almost every area of life. The above effects could apply to anything, from choosing food to choosing clothes, to more serious things like choosing a phone contract, a car, a house, a job, or even a partner.

To illustrate his point Schwartz uses the example of buying jeans. In the past, there was only one type of jeans available, and they didn’t quite fit anyone, but you put up with them because there was no alternative. Nowadays, there are more different types of jeans than it’s possible to count, as Schwartz found out when he went shopping for a new pair. He explains the concept of self-blame inspired by choice:

“One consequence of buying a bad-fitting pair of jeans when there is only one kind to buy is that when you are dissatisfied and you ask why? Who’s responsible? the answer is clear: the world is responsible. What could you do? But when there are hundreds of different styles of jeans available and you buy one that is disappointing, and you ask why? Who’s responsible? it is equally clear that the answer to the question is you. You could have done better. With a hundred different pairs of jeans on display, there is no excuse for failure. And so when people make decisions, and even when the results of the decisions are good, they feel disappointed about them, they blame themselves.”

You can watch this TED talk to find out more about Schwartz’ ideas. It’s several years old, so some of what he says is a bit outdated, but his key ideas haven’t changed. Even if you are already familiar with Schwartz’ work, it’s worth thinking about how the paradox of choice appears in your life. Could it be that there are decisions you are putting off making, for fear of making the wrong one? It is often the case that whatever decision you make, you feel some twinge of regret. Even if there’s no doubt you chose the right path, you may wonder what would have happened if you had chosen a different one. And if you are disappointed by your choice (which is not unlikely, as no choice is ever absolutely perfect), it is easy to imagine that you would not have been disappointed if you had only made a different one.

Schwartz highlights that some choice is usually better than no choice, but that too much choice can be a bad thing. The best scenario tends to be a limited amount of choice, defined within certain boundaries. That means using our beliefs, intuition, and value system to define boundaries, and making choices within those boundaries. In the end, I went home and made my own jam. I chose plum, as that was the only fruit we had!

Spring and new beginnings

This week’s blog is slightly different from previous instalments, as we have something very important remind you of.

You are enough. You, reading this blog post, wherever you are. You are enough.

We spend so much of our lives trying to reinvent ourselves - to be better, healthier, stronger, to have more skills or get that dream job or promotion. But the thing is, a goal like this is never the end goal. There’s always the temptation of another one behind it. Just as soon as you can run 5km you start aiming for 10km, just as soon as you get one promotion you set your sights on another.

You may have dreams and goals and plans, and we hope you do, as there’s nothing wrong with being ambitious with your aspirations. But each goal has to be a building block, a milestone to be reached, rather than a stepping stone to reinvention. You are enough just as you are.

As Matt Haig writes in his book Notes on a Nervous Planet: “You were incredible from the day you were born. You were everything from the day you were born. No one looks at a newborn baby and thinks, oh dear, look at all that absence of stuff. They look at a baby and they feel like they are looking at perfection, untainted by the complexities and baggage of life yet to come. We come complete.”

As Haig points out, no ambition or goal will ever be the end ambition, or the end goal: “There is no future. Planning for the future is just planning for another present in which you will be planning for the future.”

In response to this somewhat strident statement, Haig offers some advice: “Try to want less. A want is a hole. A want is a lack. That is part of the definition. When the poet Byron wrote ‘I want a hero’ he meant that he didn’t have one. The act of wanting things we don’t need makes us feel a lack we didn’t have. Everything you need is here. A human being is complete just being human. We are our own destination.”

It’s always a good idea to use Spring as an incentive for new beginnings, inspired by the freshness in the air and the sprouting of daffodils. But Spring should be about renewal, not reinvention, as there is no need to reinvent what is already enough.