The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - Your Brain Is Ancient: Why Modern Life Feels So Hard

Episode Date: December 27, 2025

In this episode of The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast, we explore why modern life feels so overwhelming through the lens of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. I’m joined by clinical psychologist Dr Matt Slavin, and together we discuss how our brains are still wired for survival in an ancient world, not the constant demands, uncertainty, and stimulation of modern society. We explore anxiety, negativity bias, rumination, avoidance, the impact of technology and news, lessons from the pandemic, parenting conversations about death, and how understanding our “ancient brain” can reduce shame and increase compassion. This episode is ideal for aspiring and qualified psychologists, therapists, and anyone interested in mental health, wellbeing, and why distress is a deeply human response rather than a personal failure.Timestamps00:00 – Why our brains are ancient and modern life feels so hard01:08 – We discuss why understanding our evolutionary wiring really matters02:10 – Ancient survival drives and why they clash with modern expectations03:05 – Avoiding discomfort, uncertainty, and why that blocks the life we want05:29 – Maslow, privilege, and how self-actualisation is a modern luxury06:52 – Why our neurobiology hasn’t caught up with modern society08:03 – Negativity bias and why our brains are wired to spot danger first09:56 – Rumination, worry, and the exhaustion of a threat-focused mind12:02 – Loss, mortality, and how ancient humans related differently to suffering13:36 – News, technology, and constant activation of our threat systems16:11 – The pandemic as a leveller between clinicians and the people we serve19:42 – Functional contextualism and why behaviour makes sense in context21:22 – Nature-based practice and meeting clients as humans, not hierarchies23:18 – Legacy, meaning, parenting, and what we want to leave behind27:03 – Shame, compassion, and understanding survival strategies in mental health29:51 – Self-awareness, skills, and what really helps people live wellLinks: 📲 Connect with Dr Matt Slavin: https://www.instagram.com/drmattslavin/ Check out Dr Matt's websites: http://www.drmattslavin.com/ https://getmentaladvantage.com/ 🫶 To support me by donating to help cover my costs for the free resources I provide click here:

I'm Jo and I work as an assistant practitioner in a CAM service in Lancashire. I bought and read Marianne's book The Clinical Psychologist Collective to accompany me while completing the clinical psychology training application. It proved to be really good company. I found it sparked ideas of how to build experience and skills, but more than that, it offered the chance to get lost in people's stories. It provided a timely reminder not to get so cold, up in an end goal and to value and enjoy each job we fulfil along the way because the work we do now is important and matters to those we sit alongside as well as ourselves. It also gave the reassurance that there are eclectic roots into clinical psychology which is important for me as someone who's had a meandering journey and not a typical route to the profession. I wholeheartedly

recommend the book for both personal and professional reasons. Be prepared to put evening tasks on hold for a while though because once you've started reading it's tough to put it down. We like to think we're modern humans but our brains didn't get that update. They're still wired for caves, threat and survival, not smartphones, deadlines and self-actualization. And that mismatch? Well that's why so many of us feel anxious, overwhelmed or like we're failing at modern life. In today's episode I'm chatting with fellow clinical psychologist Dr. Matt Slavin and we're discussing how and why your ancient brain behaves in the way it does and how understanding it might just change everything you know about your mental health. Hope you find it super useful

and if you do please like and subscribe for more. Welcome along to the aspiring psychologist podcast. I am joined today by Dr. Matt Slavin. Hi Matt, thanks for joining us. Hi, everyone. Thank you for being here. Can you tell us why it matters that we've got these kind of old brains? Can't we just go about and live our lives? Why does it matter that we know about all of this stuff?

Well, does it matter? I think it's one of the most important things to remember. We'd like to think that we're finally evolved creatures who turn up in shirts and jumpers. but that's not what our brains are convinced of. It's not what your nervous system is convinced of. It's definitely not what your well-being and your mental health and your frame of aspirations are made of.

We can't help but escape that we're driven by all these ancient drives and they still drive us. And this is the challenge we talked about to come on the podcast about is that we have an ancient brain designed for an ancient world and yet we're in a modern day world. And so a huge amount of difficulty, challenge, comes up when these two worlds come together. Yeah, absolutely they do.

Could you give us a few of the kind of urges that we might be having that might come from our ancient brain that maybe not marrying up so well in 2025 and beyond? One thing I often do when I do a training with a team is that I talk them through our ancient ancestry and how we've come to be here today. And I think it's important to remember that life, as we know it, has been around on this planet for around 4 billion years. So a pretty long time. And I walk this out, actually.

I get like a 10 metre piece of land. I often do it out in nature. And I walk a meter. And every meter I tell a different part of that story. And it's only in the 10 meters. It's only in that last blade of grass, the very end, that humans came to be on this planet around 250,000 years ago. And then in that, we have to divide the blade of grass into micropoints to get to where we had the Industrial Revolution,

and then we had smartphones, and then we have this modern tech that we live in. So ancient drives. Really important to remember that for the majority of our history, we have been around for survival, not for success. And so our brains and our bodies and our nervous system do three wonderful things all the time. They're trying to avoid danger. They're trying to find resources and they're trying to pass on our genetic code. Everything else we would say is just extra. Nice stuff. So one of the great impulses we have is to stay alive. And we're not built so well for the battle of success and purpose and meaning, things we actually think that's what our life should be about. And actually what we're built for is to avoid danger and to, well,

here's the thing. This is what it comes into mental health is we try and avoid discomfort. Because our brains are so unbelievably clever. But the one thing they're not very clever at is distinguishing truth from imagined truth. So we can get into a whole bunch of tricky tricky grounds our tricky brain as a friend might call it is that we get into to the realms of trying to avoid emotional discomfort trying to run away from negative feelings we put that word negative before any emotions unpleasant feelings but the very thing of doing that often means that we don't get to where we want to go in life so one of the great impulses is to avoid the very thing we want which is the pursuit of ambitions aims successes because the path is

always inevitably going to be filled with unpleasant feelings, stress, doubt, uncertainty. They are part of the course and yet they're the things we try to avoid because they are very uncomfortable. Yes, indeed they are. There's a really lovely book by Dr Chris Irons as well about kind of compassion-focused therapy and difficult feelings. It's a really nice one. But I'm guessing, kind of as I hear you talk, if Maslow and his hierarchy had been around earlier, that would have looked quite different because it sounds like the self-actualization phase, which goes at the top of Maslow's hierarchy, is actually a very much more modern bolt on and really would have just been looking at those bottom layers, right? We're so privileged. Now, I have to frame this in context. We're so privileged in particular parts of the world, in particular socioeconomic demographics, that there are, I'm very lucky to say that I'm not worried most days about surviving. Most days I've got a shelter over my head. I'm probably thinking what food choices I'm going to have as opposed to whether I'm going to eat or not. And so many of us, not all of us, but many of us are no longer having the battle for survival. We've almost beat the battle for survival.

If anything, we're trying to prolong survival. Let's stay really around for a very long period of life. But as you say, it's really recent. You only have to go back, if we even go back 50 years in the UK before the NHS, it's a bit longer than 50 years, 1950, 40, something. when the NHS were founded, that we didn't have all access to medicine, to medicine, to shelter, to survival, that actually it's only been 70 years, really we've got access to healthcare as we know it, go 100 years back, mortality rates are much, much higher, 200 years back, it's a very different world we live in. And yet nothing has changed in our neurocircuitary.

Nothing's changed in our biology, our neurobiology, exactly the same as we were. Yeah, absolutely. I think our posture is getting poorer over time, and I don't know whether there will be evidence that our brains might, well, they shrink over time if we're not using certain elements. That's the whole chat GPT stuff, isn't it? We're making ourselves more stupid. But yeah, really, really interesting food for thought. And making me think that yesterday I watched half of a Bannattenborough program that's kind of a new series at the moment about different cat tribes locally and their fight. for survival and it really does just show like how different their lives are compared to ours

but that's what ours would have been like right as well like having to find food keeping your young safe stopping tigers or lions from coming and killing our our babies like it really does put things into perspective and you know we have our lovely front drawers that we can lock and try and keep our kids safe and we've got seatbelts and and all of the this stuff, but yeah, it's a very different set of circumstances, isn't it, than where our ancestors would have been in caves, for example. Exactly. And I think it's a very compassionate view to see ourselves in this way, because it gives permission for us to say, that is how we all are, is to, for instance, to have a negativity bias, to see the worst in it. It's an evolutionary

adaptation, aiding survival to be, should we let's say shorthand, to be a pest. or to see the worst in things. That's useful, right? It was far more useful in caveman days to be able to see the snake in the grass or to read the impending storm or to read in the eyes of another perhaps a sense of danger foreboding. Now all of that was far more useful than be able to find honey on the trees or to celebrate success. And so our brains have been wired to really look for the worst in situations and we're pretty good at that. I'm pretty good at that nowadays. And I would say this is a learned skill that we all have to gain in life and that we're not taught in schools, that hopefully you do learn through parents. Maybe you learn through your psychology training or

you learn through going to therapy. You learn through the wonderful world of the internet is the skills it takes to be able to catch your thinking, to know that your brain is wired to see the worst in things wired to ruminate, to have worry, to human beings. We hate uncertainty for the very reasons of our evolution, that uncertainty was unpredictability, and unpredictability meant greater chances or threat to life. So knowing all this, and now it comes from, I think, firstly, is the great compassionate view. And then there's a skill to be able to manage thought management or emotional literacy and emotional management to manage these things which are driving us to feel scared most of the time. Yeah, it's that whole negative attribution bias, isn't it?

Like actually we might go into a shop and have, you know, nine brilliant experiences, but it's the it's the 10th one where we feel like they've been a bit rude or something outlandish has happened. That's the one we're going to tell our friends about because when we understand the brain kind of the way that our brains have been put together, it's because that negative thing could be the thing that is a risk to ourselves, our family, our tribe. So it makes sense that that's going to be sticking up more for us to pay attention to. It can be exhausting though, can't it? To be around Eeyore types. So as it said that we're all, we're all a part of a character from Winnie the Pooh. There's a Tigger, there's E. Or there's Winnie the Pooh himself. Like being around

people that seem to be overly negative can be exhausting. Would we all have been like that in it originally, do you think? I don't know the answer to that. I love and I love the analogy. I think our sensory profiles and our attachment profiles very much fit into the different character tropes from Winnie the Pooh. And I grew up from the Winnie the Pooh. So I always feel a great sense of comfort reading it. And would we all be like that? Now, it's hard to know exactly what would be like. Many curious minds have thought what exactly are we like?

What would we be like back then? Perhaps, but perhaps we could also go the other way. Perhaps we wouldn't worry as much. Perhaps part of, if we go into more acceptance and commitment therapy language, perhaps we'd be more willing to, or willing or have more acceptance of the life, this life as it is, that is very precious. sometimes understanding how fragile life is. I know personally when I've been through some of my darkest periods of my life

and most close to the raw elements of life, loss and hardship, that actually life somehow feels less stressful in those moments for me where you can appreciate things far more. And I think we would have been much more in contact with loss and death and suffering in a way that perhaps we wouldn't have the time to worry about it so much, either through acceptance or also, because we're not, maybe now, because many people are not fighting the fight for survival,

in the purest sense of the word, that we're left with a lot of time to think, and a lot of time to think about what we want from this life. And this life can be cruel and unfair, and it can mean that we can't always have all the things that we want in this life, in which case, then there's a lot of suffering, thinking about what we don't, what we wish for, where we're not yet, about the relationship, they didn't quite work out in ways that maybe these kind of worries wouldn't have been so

present in our mind in a more survival-driven world. Yeah, and our lives would have been so much smaller, right, because it would have just been ourselves, our families, our immediate tribes, whereas at the moment, I certainly feel as a clinical psychologist and a mother that we'll be, sometimes I'll be, sometimes I'll be really worried about people on the other side of the world that I've never met and never will meet. And that can feel like a lot. That can feel like a lot of concern for people and what it is to be human and, you know, to go through earthquakes, to go through war, to go through all of these horrendous things. And we were never, we were never designed to be able to have that

level of being bothered by other people were we no and it and it never stops is that we're in our household we've got very careful rules about exposure to the news we have very periodized times where we'll check in um because the news i'd say television um these things the companies the news agencies they know the one that's important to listen to what's going on in the world absolutely But they also, they will know how our brains are wired. They know the psychology of fear, and they're very good at making us hook into it. And once we see something that brings our attention to it, we'd say alerts our attention to it. And once it's alerted, then we're very concerned if something's going to be, you know, a worrying news story.

It's very hard to detach from, to de-anchor from. So, yeah, in our own tribes, we probably have access to what's going on in our immediate family. family and our immediate world, but nowadays if you let yourself, or even if you don't let yourself, even if you are exposed in this modern day world, we're almost always bombarded with things that are going to alert our, definitely alert our involuntary attentional response. We've got two voluntary, we've got our voluntary and our involuntary attentional responses, voluntary what we choose to look at, the part of our brain that can focus and select and ignore information. It's the part of our attentional capacity that is susceptible

for fatigue, which we're getting worse at because we're not stretching it nowadays. But the involuntary attentional pathway in our brains is always on because that's the intentional pathway that allowed us to survive. So I think about it like in our brains, we've got our mere cat brain. So we've got our mere cats constantly watching on guard and we're always scanning because if any moment, I don't know if my alarm went off downstairs, I couldn't help but hear it. My whole being would be alerted and oriented to it. And then I want to do something about responding to it.

Now, I might have trained myself well enough to be able to, once I know it's not a signal of absolute fear and danger, I could then train myself to not listen to it. But the danger in our modern day world is all the pings we get from digital devices, all the way the emails pop up, all the ways that our WhatsApp notifications play, all the news stories, they're designed to hook our involuntary attention in a way that's very hard just through willpower alone to not get swept away and to be and to feel it and to be affected by it, for sure. Yeah, absolutely it is. And even though my phone's on silent,

it's connected to my watch. So my watch will regularly alert me to things that I actually am not interested in. Like, I should probably change those alerts. I think I'm interested in your opinion on this, but the pandemic was a great level up for clinicians and people with mental health problems and the general population. So I remember very clearly being in a clinic session with a client who, this was early 2020, so this was probably January. And the client had shared with me that they were anxious about something that was going on in in China and I with hindsight was I don't know but I guess using a CBTish lens which I don't usually use but shut that down a bit really and was like oh this is not something we're going to need

to be worried about and we're going to need to just notice that as a thought and then think about how that obviously will trigger our responses but you know it's all going to be okay and actually, and I gave the client some data, you know, to add to their knowledge and said, did you know that not all people who get diagnosed with COVID die? And the client said, well, no, actually, I didn't know that. And that does make this feel less scary. But then ultimately, what unfolded in the next couple of months did really make me think about eating my words. You know, it was me who, as Boris Johnson was telling us all, that the country was going under lockdown and that the schools were being closed, I was sitting on the floor in my living

room, on the rug, crying and really worried that my children were going to die. And that was, you know, that was a really difficult period because, of course, I was working in the NHS, so I was having to still go into work. Like, it's hard to walk into the face of day, and when actually that's not necessarily the job I signed up to. I didn't sign up to be a firefighter or to be in the walk to be an army, you know, personnel. But like, for me, that really began to break down that barrier between professionals, mental health professionals and the people we serve. And it definitely humanised the process. I think this is relevant. to what we're talking about. It feels kind of relevant. What do you think to all of that, Matt?

Lots of thoughts. Okay, I'll respond to the last point and then I'll come back to where my brain went first of all, is that I remember doing my training and having a wonderful clinical psychologist who talked to me, we talked a lot about the philosophy of science. I found that very interesting, personally. And we talked about functional contextualism, which in essence says there's that every behaviour in this world makes sense. if you understand the right context. So all of the clients that we see, anything we bring, fear, anxiety, depression, psychosis, all of this makes sense when we think about the context it came from

and where it's being applied. And quite commonly, I bring this in the idea of evolution as well because I think it's very helpful to remember everything where it came from. The challenge is when the function and the context don't quite fit. And I would say actually there's times where even the most inverted commas, dysfunctional, maladaptive behaviours are incredibly functional in the right context. So I don't want my surgeon to feel emotional about cutting me open. So I want them to functionally dissociate. I don't want my firefighter to go, oh, that's scary and hot. I don't want to go in there. No, I want

them to be cold and emotionless going into the fire. Same we want for our soldiers. I think properly, I would say, my thought was probably the same for clinical psychologist that actually there's a level of emotional responsiveness you need to have and switch online. You can't be cold in a session. I don't think being a straight data-driven psychologist is the right way to do it. I once had a CAM supervisor who would say the human doesn't matter, it's all about the technique.

I don't agree with that. I think it's all about the relationship. But there's a part of that what we need to, sometimes we need to think about the context. How do we need to respond to that person? It's very, very subjective and it matters. That's why a good formulation matters for that person. what you need to be for that person.

But if I link it back to what you said before, my practice has massively shifted over the years of having to be this, I don't know, this clinical psychologist to be a, to be Matt. And I'm far more human with my clients now. The big change for me was when I started working outdoors and I developed my outdoor nature-based practice. It's always been part of my work,

but I did, I've done more and more of that under model, under clinical models. of eco-sensory therapy, types of ways we could really work clinically in the outdoors. And their hierarchy drops away because you're not in my clinic, you're in the woods, you're out in nature. And then you're meeting two human beings

where we get to have conversations like you did, but the conversation changes to whether it's the right or wrong way of thinking about something, to how do you manage themes of, let's go back to the theme, the uncertainty. I don't know, And you can say, we don't know if we're going to be okay. That was the collective experience during lockdown.

We don't know. So how did we manage that? How do you manage not knowing what's important to you? What do you want to prioritize? How do you manage the fear? Those themes that came up during COVID, there's still themes we're wrestling with. We'll wrestle for the rest of their lives. Who do we want to connect with and how do we connect to ourselves?

How do we manage fear and suffering uncertainty? And ultimately, what do we want to do in this life and hold no regret over? Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, like I often think about my own death. I don't know that's overly morbid, but because I lost my dad in 2017. I had his kind of experience of deathbed conversations. And it's made me think about what my lasting legacy will be, both as a parent, as a clinician, as a, you know, as a mental health spokesperson as well.

And I would just, yeah, I would want to think there weren't any regrets and that I'd lived authentically and to serve myself but also others. And, yeah, like, again, like you said, that that is a very modern gift, isn't it, that we begin to think about, we get to think about our own mortality and to strive for what we want to have achieved rather than just, you know, eating, hunting, reproducing. Well, maybe one of the big differences nowadays is that those three core needs,

one of the third one, passing on our genetic material, passing on our mind or something about ourselves, a legacy that is in our children. I love my children, having my children some of the best things I've ever done in this world, probably the best thing I've ever done. I remember when my first born came into this world, and I thought, I've tried very hard to be clever in this life and give value and do good things. And nature just made the best thing I've ever done.

Like I didn't have to, my wife did do most of the work. And this wonderful thing came into this world. But maybe what we get legacy-wise is like your podcast, Marian, and putting out things into this world that that's going to live on beyond your years. And we do get to wrestle with this thing. in life which is how do we want to live our life and how do we want it to be what impact do we want to have in this world and i think being a psychologist gives great opportunity in very quiet ways probably ways that most people won't know in ways that we don't want to talk about out loud those many stories that most people have in their in their clinical experience of moments that mattered

those things just get to be passed on good lives and giving value which makes the profession wonderful but it means that is the legacy you get to have as well as your own family yeah my nine year old randomly started crying the other day i wouldn't say he's overly anxious as person but um we're talking about something or watching something and he he said oh oh god i just i just thought that one day you're probably you're probably not going to be you're probably going to die mummy and um i'm just so upset because i how will i ever cope without you um and i and i'm don't say to him, don't be silly, mommy's not going to die. So I don't do what I did to my client in 2020. Instead, I'll say something like, oh, I know, like, oh, I'd be so sad if I did

have to leave you, I'm going to do my best to look both ways before I cross the road. You know, I've got my flu jab booked in, you know, next week and, you know, I'm going to try and take good care. I go to the gym. I, you know, I eat good food. This is why I eat my broccoli, you know, stuff like that. And then he's like, yes, yes, I know. You're all going to take good care. But what about everyone else? What if they want to hurt you? And I'm like, oh my goodness. Yeah. It's really hard, isn't it? The great pain of love is loss. If we let ourselves love, and I'd like my child to learn to love and to let herself love my boy but it's incredibly painful there's no there's no pain like

losing someone you love it's not it's not like anything else what can we do as parents as loved ones that be compassionate be loving I think I think as you say I tried to do the same and with my daughter we talk about loss but she lost my stepdad my granddad early this year we had a remembrance ceremony yesterday so it's very much in our heads and we do talk about it a lot in this in a similar way there's no promises we want to make that we can't keep either and i'll say what i said before i think when i talk about work i think particularly talking to men and i think i talk about it in this way that um there is life is so much more full of light when we can go to the darkness and we can appreciate the joys of life when we really are

in contact with it suffering i think actually they bring out the best in each other Yeah, I think so too. And I'm all right at looking at the dark stuff because I think that's part of our role as clinical psychologists, both of us are, is that we need to be able to hold a safe space for people to look at things that other people might shut them down about. Because it happens so much, doesn't it? Like, no, no, don't worry about that. And it's actually, oh, I'm sorry to you are worried about that. Like, what do you think that's linked to or what would be your fear? You know, I have this thing that I do with clients that we keep digging and then what and then what and then what and then what and then what and then what and then it'll be like well I'll be dead on the floor and my children will have to you know work out what to do or whatever and there's like like you said there's always a reason that is fueling our behaviour and I really love the idea of the kind of functional functional contextualism you said about I haven't heard of that before but I love that I think you should write a book on that Matt yeah like fascinating

stuff. And yeah, like we're going to talk about, in another episode that we're going to record shortly, we're going to talk about raising boys to not kind of fall into the whole kind of misogynistic narratives and to try to try to kind of, I don't know, raise good citizens. That's something that I think about as a mother of boys. So if anyone has really enjoyed our conversation, they might well really love the conversation that's coming next to. Matt, is there anything that you wanted to leave us with that we haven't covered? We will come to where your socials are and where people should follow you, but is there anything we haven't covered that you think that our audience should be mindful of?

Maybe I'll leave with this, is that when you're, if you're in a mental health profession, If you're interested in this and you're thinking about yourself or others, that this frame of helping people understand without shame, shame is never good for any of our experiences, more compassion about where this comes from. We can also have more tools to deal with our ancient, I will call these our ancient survival strategies that show up a modern day world under diagnosis, where it's fight, flight, freeze, flop, fawn, feign, any of these things that turn up. and how we live our lives, we can, my two great pieces of wisdom on this, what I've learned from others, is that self-awareness and the skills to deal with what comes up in those difficult moments, those two pieces are the great keys to helping people live the lives they want. That's what I try and do in my work, maybe what you can try and do too. Thank you so much, Matt. Where can people find out more about you and your work?

They can go to my website, Dr Matt Slavin.com, or find me on socials. I'm on LinkedIn under Dr. Matt Slavin or Instagram. You can Google my name or my handle mental.advantage. Lovely. And for anyone that's listening rather than watching, I will just spell Slavin. It's S-L-A-V-I-N. Thank you so much for your time. Everything that we've mentioned that is linkable will be linked.

in the description or the show notes. Thanks for your time, Matt, and I'll look forward to our next episode coming very soon. Thank you so much. Thank you once again to our incredible guest, Dr. Matt Slavin. And there will be another episode coming with Matt next week, and I can promise you that's also a brilliant one too. Yeah, so maybe click Notify if you're watching on YouTube

and then you will be told when that episode lands and then you will never miss another episode either. Please do consider joining his mailing list. I am absolutely going to be doing that in a moment too. If you love this conversation and you would like to think about how you can kind of introduce some of the tricky brain theory into your work with clients, well, I've thought of that. We've got the tricky brain psycho education kit, which you can use for people who are experiencing depression, grief and trauma. It comes with an online course as well where you can learn how to deliver it in kind of Marianne's style. And you can grab an exclusive £10 off that kit by going to my website www. Aspiring hyphen psychologist.co.com.uk.

Click, I think it's learn with me along the top and then the Our Tricky Brain Kit. And then the code in capital letters is YouTube 10. then you can grab your £10 off and that will be delivered to you wherever you happen to be. So, yeah, thank you again for being part of my world. If you would like to check out the brand new project, which I've unveiled on YouTube and Spotify and Apple, it's a way of helping me to know that you really value the content I create. And it's kind of a bit like a Patreon, but it's you subscribing to be a paid subscriber where you're then get some exclusive behind the scenes episodes.

So at the moment there's one behind the scenes episode per episode of the podcast. As it evolves, there might well become more subscriber content, but I pledge to you, the main podcast itself, will always remain free to you guys. But this is just to help support my costs and just for me to know that you really value and rate the content that I provide. please do check out the details in the show notes or if you've got any questions about it drop me a memo on social media which you can do where I am Dr. Marianne Trent everywhere with Dr. Mary and Trent. Hi, my name is Emily. I am a master's student studying clinical psychology at Southampton.

I bought the book of the Clinical Psychologist Collective to help myself prepare for my first round of doctorate applications, and I'm so glad I did. seeing how others have reflected on their journeys has been so insightful and it's given me a lot to reflect about with my own journey and skills. It's also helped to put things into perspective and reminded me that if I don't get onto the doctorate this year, that's okay. I think the most unexpected pleasure of this book, however, was just how inspirational each and every person's journey was. And using these stories as my morning motivation each day has been such a pleasure. I'm almost reluctant to come to the end.