The Psychology of your 20s

Welcome to 2024! With each new year on the podcast, we set a new theme or intention for the next 12 months. This year our theme is RISK, embracing our fear of change or making a mistake and embracing risk in all its forms! We discuss how we can get a better idea of what we want for our future, discover our purpose, what type of risks will get us there, the difference between bounded and unbounded risk and why risks not always have to be impulsive or spontaneous...

Alcohol is a drug, highly addictive, has proven to do damage to our minds and our bodies and yet makes up a huge part of our 20s, especially how we socialise and connect with others...

Many of us find ourselves obsessively focused on the opinions and judgements of others, letting their opinion of us influence our sense of self worth and confidence. However, true power and success comes when we embrace the courage to be disliked and recognise that the negative words of others come from their own insecurity, rather than as a reflection of us...

In today's episode we are going to discuss the psychology behind our health anxiety, something we don't speak about enough in our 20s. Health anxiety leaves us feeling incredibly hypervigilant to symptoms or feelings in our body that could indicate a life threatening illness or impending death, even if they are just a projection or derived from stress. This comes from our need to feel in control of our bodies and a lot of primal, evolutionary origins...

We experience chronic guilt towards a lot of things: guilt for resting, guilt for not resting, guilt for prioritising ourselves, guilt for being a bad friend, a bad partner, a bad student, for not deserving your opportunities...

Being able to travel and explore the world in our 20s is such a unique privilege, but sometimes we can overdo a good thing and hit a point of complete emotional, mental and physical exhaustion, causing us to want to go home early, abandon our trip or enjoy our travels a lot less...

Two of the most noteworthy elements of our 20s are dating and our experiences with mental health. They also interact - our mental health will influence how we date, how we deal with rejection, how we meet new people, and subsequently, our dating experiences can have a profound impact on our mental health. In this episode we dissect everything about this interaction and how we can take care of our mental and emotional wellbeing, avoid codependency whilst also finding the love we deserve...

Anger is one of our most primal emotions and yet we have no idea how to manage it. We suppress it, allowing it to rule our lives; we hide from it, we let it explode onto people who don't deserve our rage. In this episode we break down the psychology of anger and why anger is often a secondary emotion, masking our true fear, anxiety and insecurity...

Sometimes we become more attached to the idea of someone and their potential, than the reality of who they actually are. We begin to project our wants and desires on to them and ignore the red flags, the disappointments, the truth. This is what we call fantasy bonding and it prevents us from seeing someone for who they truly are, causes us to be lead along and invest in the wrong people...

A considerable question for those of us in our 20s is how do we create a good life? What does it mean to design a life we love and how exactly do we do that? In today's episode we break down five ways we can do this, including: 

1. Deconstructing your old life for your new one + the Odyssey Plan
2. Prototyping your new life + the 15 minute rule 
3. Addition through subtraction 
4. Pursue daily joy 
5. Positive future planning + dopamine...