What cereal manufacturers, longevity scientists and our anxious minds can teach us about making informed choices. A little colour, a good coffee, and no complicated breakfast rules, only your imagination and creativity. Apparently, even breakfast has become another opportunity to get life wrong. Eat it, and you might be ruining your fasting benefits. Skip it, and you might be damaging your metabolism. Choose the wrong cereal, and goodness knows what you've done to your blood

You make a small mistake at work. An ordinary mistake. Correctable. Unlikely to require an international investigation. Then comes the commentary: They’ll realise I’m incompetent. They’ll lose respect for me. Perhaps I was never good enough. The mistake took thirty seconds. Its unofficial biography may occupy the rest of the evening. Somewhere along the way, “I did something wrong” became “There is something wrong with me.” That is quite a promotion. Often, what frightens us

What does quantum physics really have to do with anxiety? Less than the internet might suggest — but psychology offers something far more useful: a way to test our predictions and help the brain learn from what actually happens.

Some of the most important things fear takes from us don't look like losses at all. And I am not talking about the more obvious — and sometimes wonderfully specific — fears: spiders, balloons, flying, or even clothing buttons. Yes, there really is a phobia of buttons. Human brains are endlessly inventive. These are specific phobias, and modern psychology has developed highly effective ways of working with many of them, particularly through behavioural and cognitive behavioura

Why can you know that you’re safe and still feel anxious? The answer lies in the way the brain learns, predicts and protects — and in what helps it learn something new.