I spent the first fifty-odd years of my life stressed about things that either never happened or didn't matter. I worried about what people thought of me. I tossed and turned at 3am over conversations I'd had three days earlier. I catastrophised minor problems into major disasters before breakfast. I checked the news constantly, as if being informed about every terrible thing happening everywhere was somehow my personal responsibility. I said yes to things I didn't want to do, then resented the people who'd asked, then felt guilty for resenting them. It was exhausting. And — here's the kicker — none of it made anything better. The worrying didn't prevent the bad things. The catastrophising didn't soften the blow when problems actually arrived. The people-pleasing didn't make people like me more. All it did was make me tired, anxious, and slightly unpleasant to be around.
At 66, I'm not going to pretend I've cracked the code. I still get stressed. I still have nights where my brain decides 3am is the perfect time to replay every mistake I've ever made in high definition. But I've learned a few things — practical, unglamorous, non-mystical things — that genuinely help. Things that make the inside of my head a nicer place to live. Things that stopped me treating every minor problem like a five-alarm fire. This is not a post about meditation (I've tried it, I spent twenty minutes thinking about lunch). It's not about gratitude journals (if they work for you, brilliant — they don't for me). It's not about 'just thinking positive' (the most useless two words ever strung together). It's about the small, boring, surprisingly effective habits that keep my mind reasonably calm in a world that seems determined to make it anything but.
For educational purposes only. This is what works for me. It is not medical advice. If you're struggling with persistent anxiety or depression, please speak to your GP. There's no shame in asking for help — I've done it and it's one of the best decisions I ever made.
── Your Brain Wasn't Designed for This ──
Let's start with something that changed how I think about stress entirely. Your brain — the one sitting inside your skull right now, reading these words — evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to handle a very specific set of problems. Sabre-toothed tiger. Is that berry poisonous? Is my tribe still here? Where's the next meal coming from? These are immediate, physical, survival-level threats. Your brain is magnificently engineered for these. Spot the danger, react fast, survive, relax.
Your brain was not designed for: a 24-hour news cycle delivering every tragedy from every corner of the planet directly to a device in your pocket. Social media algorithms optimised to make you angry because anger drives engagement. Email notifications at 9pm on a Saturday. Doomscrolling through comment sections. Comparing your ordinary Tuesday to someone else's curated highlight reel. Worrying about mortgage rates, pension shortfalls, climate change, geopolitical instability, and whether you remembered to reply to that email — all before your first cup of tea.
The stress response that evolved to save you from predators doesn't have an off-switch for modern life. Your amygdala — the brain's alarm system — can't tell the difference between a genuine physical threat and an alarming headline. It fires either way. Cortisol floods your system either way. Your heart rate goes up either way. And when this happens dozens of times a day, every day, for years, the result is chronic background anxiety that feels normal because you've never known anything else.
Understanding this was revolutionary for me. I wasn't broken. My brain wasn't defective. It was doing exactly what evolution designed it to do — reacting to perceived threats. The problem wasn't the brain. The problem was the environment I'd put it in. And while I couldn't change the entire modern world, I could change my exposure to it. That distinction — between 'something is wrong with me' and 'something is wrong with the input I'm feeding myself' — is possibly the most important mental health insight I've ever had.
── The Worry Window: Stop Anxiety Leaking Into Your Whole Day ──
Here's a technique that sounds too simple to work, which is usually the sign of something that actually works. Give your worrying a specific time slot. That's it. Instead of letting anxiety leak into every hour of the day — while you're eating breakfast, driving to work, sitting in a meeting, watching telly, trying to sleep — you confine it to a window. 15 minutes. 4pm to 4:15pm. The Worry Window.
When a worry pops up outside the window — and it will, constantly — you don't fight it. You don't try to suppress it (that doesn't work, and the research backs this up). You acknowledge it, jot it down somewhere (phone note, scrap of paper, back of an envelope), and say to yourself: 'I'll worry about this at 4pm.' Then you get on with whatever you were doing. The worry doesn't disappear, but it's been acknowledged. It knows it'll get its time. It can wait.
At 4pm, you sit down for your 15 minutes and you worry. Properly. Run through the list. Some of the worries will have evaporated by then — they were just passing thoughts that felt urgent in the moment. The ones that remain, you actually think about. Is there something you can do about this? If yes, what's the next action? Write it down. If no — if it's completely outside your control — ask yourself: is worrying about this helping? (The answer is almost always no.) Then consciously put it aside. The window closes at 4:15pm. Worrying time is over. Tomorrow at 4pm, you can worry again.
This technique works for two reasons. First, it contains the anxiety. It stops it from being a 24-hour background hum and turns it into a specific, time-limited activity. Second, it trains your brain that worries don't need to be dealt with immediately. The brain learns that a worrisome thought at 10am is not an emergency — it's an agenda item for 4pm. Over time, the intensity of the worries diminishes, because they're no longer being reinforced by constant attention. I've been using this for years and it's the single most effective anxiety-management tool I've found. 15 minutes a day, all the worry gets, and the other 23 hours and 45 minutes are mine.
── Walk Without Your Phone (The Most Underrated Mental Health Tool on Earth) ──
I've written about walking for physical health. But walking without your phone is a different thing entirely — it's a mental health intervention disguised as a mild inconvenience. When you walk without your phone, several things happen that can't happen when you're plugged in. Your mind wanders. Genuinely wanders — not 'scrolls Twitter while physically moving.' Thoughts drift. Connections get made. Problems you've been grinding on for hours suddenly unlock because the back of your brain was working on them while the front of your brain was occupied with looking at trees. Your default mode network — the brain circuitry associated with creativity, reflection, and making sense of your experiences — activates when you're not focused on a task. It can't activate when you're reading notifications.
I try to do one phone-free walk every day. 20 to 30 minutes. No podcasts, no music, no checking messages. Just me, my legs, and whatever's going on between my ears. Sometimes it's boring. Sometimes my brain replays an argument from 2017 for no apparent reason. Sometimes I have genuinely useful thoughts that I jot down (on actual paper, with an actual pen) when I get home. And sometimes — increasingly often — I don't think about anything in particular. I just notice things. The way the light hits the buildings. The sound of birds. The fact that it's not raining for once. Nothing profound. Just... being present. Being unplugged. The mental equivalent of taking your bra off at the end of a long day. Relief, in its purest form.
── Learn to Say No Without Feeling Guilty ──
I spent decades as a people-pleaser. If someone asked me to do something, I said yes. Didn't matter if I was already overloaded. Didn't matter if I didn't want to do it. Didn't matter if saying yes meant sacrificing something I actually cared about. The word 'no' felt aggressive, selfish, unkind. So I said yes and quietly resented it. The resentment accumulated. The stress accumulated. And the people I was trying to please? They had no idea. They'd asked, I'd said yes, they'd moved on. The only person suffering was me.
Learning to say no — properly, without guilt, without over-explaining, without a three-paragraph justification — was one of the hardest and most liberating things I've ever done. Here's what I learned: 'no' is not an insult. It's not a rejection of the person asking. It's a boundary. A fence around your time, energy, and mental space. And most people — decent people — respect boundaries when they're set clearly and kindly. The ones who don't? That's useful information about who they are, and you're allowed to factor it in.
You don't need an excuse. 'I can't take that on right now' is a complete sentence. 'That doesn't work for me' is a complete sentence. 'No, thank you' is a complete sentence. You don't owe anyone a detailed justification of why you're protecting your own time. And here's the counterintuitive bit: saying no to things you don't want to do creates space to say an enthusiastic, wholehearted yes to the things you genuinely care about. Every unnecessary commitment you decline is a deposit in the bank account of your own wellbeing. The balance adds up faster than you'd think.
── Do One Thing at a Time (The Radical Art of Not Multitasking) ──
Multitasking is a lie we tell ourselves to feel productive. The research is unambiguous: humans cannot actually do two cognitively demanding things at once. What we call multitasking is just task-switching — rapidly shifting attention between activities, paying a cognitive penalty each time. The brain takes time to re-engage with whatever it was doing before the interruption. Studies estimate that task-switching can reduce productivity by up to 40%. You're not doing two things at once. You're doing one thing badly, then another thing badly, then back to the first thing badly, accumulating mental fatigue with every switch.
But the productivity cost isn't even the main problem. The main problem is what multitasking does to your mental state. It creates a constant low-grade feeling of being scattered — of never quite being fully present for anything because part of your attention is always elsewhere. You're having a conversation while thinking about an email. You're eating lunch while scrolling. You're watching telly while also checking your phone. You're never 100% anywhere. And over time, that fragmentation is exhausting. It leaves you feeling busy but empty, occupied but unfulfilled.
Single-tasking is the antidote. Doing one thing. Fully. With your whole attention. Eating dinner without a screen. Reading a book without checking your phone every three pages. Having a conversation where you actually listen instead of preparing your response while the other person is still talking. Working on one task until it's done (or until a natural stopping point) before moving to the next. It feels weird at first — almost uncomfortably slow. But the quality of your attention improves. The quality of your work improves. And — most importantly — you finish the day feeling calmer, because your brain hasn't spent eight hours being yanked between a dozen different things.
── Stop Comparing Your Behind-the-Scenes to Everyone Else's Highlight Reel ──
I've touched on this in other posts — about money, about health — but it bears repeating specifically for mental health. Comparison is the fastest route to misery. Social media shows you the curated, filtered, carefully-lit version of other people's lives. The holiday photos without the arguments. The family pictures without the toddler meltdown five seconds earlier. The promotion announcement without the years of grind and the luck and the privilege that made it possible. The perfect kitchen without the takeaway boxes hidden just out of frame.
You, meanwhile, are living your unfiltered reality. You know about the argument you had this morning. You know about the bill you're worried about. You know about the thing you said three years ago that still makes you cringe. You're comparing your raw footage — complete with outtakes, deleted scenes, and behind-the-scenes chaos — to everyone else's trailer. Of course you feel inadequate. Anyone would. The comparison is rigged.
The fix isn't to 'stop comparing' — that's like saying 'stop breathing.' Comparison is a deeply human instinct. The fix is to be more deliberate about what you compare. Compare yourself to yourself a year ago, not to a stranger on Instagram. Are you calmer than you were? More self-aware? Better at setting boundaries? More present with the people you love? Those are the comparisons that matter. Not whether someone else's life looks more photogenic than yours. It probably does. They probably paid someone to make it look that way. And they're probably just as stressed and confused and human as you are — you just can't see it because they're not posting that bit.
── Sleep, Laugh, Write It Down ──
Three things that cost nothing and do more for mental health than most people realise. Sleep: I've banged on about this before but it's worth repeating because it's so important. Sleep deprivation makes everything harder. Your emotional resilience drops. Your irritability rises. Small problems feel like big problems. Big problems feel like catastrophes. Seven to eight hours of decent sleep is not a luxury — it's maintenance. Maintenance you can't skip without consequences.
Laughing: genuine, proper, can't-breathe laughter is a stress-reset button. It lowers cortisol, releases endorphins, and — not to get too philosophical — reminds you that life is fundamentally absurd and most of the things you're taking very seriously right now won't matter in five years. Spend time with people who make you laugh. Watch things that make you laugh. Seek out the ridiculous. The world supplies plenty of material if you're paying attention.
Writing things down: this is the simplest and possibly the most powerful mental health tool I've ever used. When thoughts are circling in your head — worries, to-do items, things you're afraid you'll forget, things you're angry about, things you're sad about — they feel bigger and more chaotic than they actually are. Writing them down externalises them. Gets them out of the echo chamber of your own skull. On paper, many worries look smaller. Many problems look solvable. Many conflicts look like they could be resolved with one honest conversation. I keep a notebook — nothing fancy, a £2 spiral-bound thing from the supermarket — and when my head gets noisy, I write. Stream of consciousness, no editing, no one's ever going to read it. Just getting it out. It's the mental equivalent of opening the windows in a stuffy room. Everything breathes easier afterwards.
── Most Things You Worry About Will Never Happen ──
I've been alive for 66 years. That's roughly 24,000 days. In that time, I have worried about thousands of things. A rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate: the vast majority of them — well over 90% — never happened. Not 'happened and I coped.' Simply never materialised. The job I didn't lose. The illness I didn't have. The argument that never happened. The market crash that turned out to be a minor dip. The thing I said that I was sure someone would be offended by — and they either didn't notice or didn't care.
Of the things that did happen — the actual problems, the real crises, the genuine setbacks — I handled them. Not always gracefully. Not always well. But I got through them. Learned from some. Eventually laughed about others. The track record is not 100% — nothing is — but it's overwhelmingly positive. Things I worried about: mostly didn't happen. Things that did happen: I dealt with them. The ratio is absurdly in my favour. Yours probably is too, if you stop and look at it honestly.
This doesn't mean 'don't worry about anything' — that's not how brains work. But it does mean that the next time you feel anxiety rising about something in the future, you can ask yourself: what are the actual odds of this happening? And if it does happen, based on your track record of handling difficult things, why would this be the one you can't handle? The evidence — your evidence, from your actual life — says you'll probably be fine. The worry is real. The thing you're worrying about probably isn't.
── Your Mind Is the Only One You've Got ──
I've written about looking after your body — the only one you've got — and the same principle applies to your mind. You can't trade it in. You can't upgrade to a newer model. You can't outsource the maintenance. The mind you have right now is the mind you'll have for the rest of your life. Might as well make it a nice place to live.
That means different things for different people. For me, it means limiting the noise — less news, less social media, less pointless comparison. It means walking without my phone and letting my thoughts untangle themselves. It means saying no to things that drain me so I can say yes to things that fill me up. It means going to bed at a reasonable hour, laughing until I can't breathe at least once a week, and writing things down when my head gets too loud. It means catching myself when I start catastrophising and saying — sometimes out loud, which makes my wife look at me oddly — 'this probably isn't going to happen.' Because it probably isn't.
None of this is rocket science. None of it requires an app, a subscription, or a qualification. It's just small, deliberate choices — made today, then again tomorrow, then again the day after — to protect the space between your ears. To keep it calm. To keep it free. To make it a place you don't mind being alone in. The world will keep being loud. The news will keep being alarming. Your phone will keep buzzing. But you don't have to let it all in. You get to decide what deserves your attention, your energy, and your peace of mind. Choose carefully. It's the most valuable real estate you own.
As always, nothing on this site is medical or therapeutic advice. I'm a 66-year-old UK investor sharing what I've learned about managing stress, anxiety, and keeping life in perspective. If you're struggling with your mental health, please speak to your GP or contact Mind, the Samaritans, or another mental health charity. Asking for help is not weakness. It's what sensible people do when they need support.