Lucy Maddox

“We might have left school, but we haven’t left the chance to learn behind. Life has a clever way of presenting us again and again with similar challenges in different situations and allowing us to try different ways of managing them. Looking back and feeling like we’ve learnt, and grown and changed, at least a little, can only be a good thing, however painful that learning might sometimes be at the time.”
― Lucy Maddox, A Year to Change Your Mind: Ideas from the Therapy Room to Help You Live Better

“A neat experiment from the early 2000s by a researcher called Brad Bushman compared people’s reactions after either thinking about the person they were angry with as they punched a punchbag, or thinking about getting fit as they punched a punchbag.6 The research team also had a control group of people who didn’t do anything: no punching and no thinking about anything specific. They found that distraction, by thinking about getting fit while punching the bag, worked better at reducing anger than ruminating over what they were angry about while punching the punchbag, but doing nothing at all was the best thing for reducing anger.”
― Lucy Maddox, A Year to Change Your Mind: Ideas from the Therapy Room to Help You Live Better