Forests and trees

Almost 2 years since my last post? Unbelievable. Unimaginable. Unamerican? Inspired by a number of consistently excellent bloggers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) providing peeks into their lives, I'm back on the wagon. I've been thinking about the format that might best suit going forward. In the past, blogging has been an opportunity reflect on my life and where I want it to go. That perspective-taking is incredibly helpful to avoid me getting consumed by the day-to-day. Going forward, I plan to continue with a bit of personal reflection and stock-taking, to help define where I, and we, go next. With under four months to go until I get married, it seems opportune to start thinking about where Leigh and I go next in our life together. I would warmly receive any comments on such reflections.

I also want to introduce a new component to my blog - something that I feel there is not necessarily enough of: a digest of what my research field does and can offer as insight into everyday life. Our society invests a lot into higher education and in return provides education and training, and conducts research which makes our world a better place. But what do we actually do? I work as behavioural scientist and academic at a great university in the field of health psychology. What is health psychology? It's an applied branch of psychology that deals with promoting health and reducing illness by using psychology as a basis for understanding and changing the behaviours that people do which affect their health. The key questions we focus on are: why do people do what they do and how can we help them to change what they do to promote their health? What motivates people? How do people's attitude, confidence, habits, beliefs, knowledge affect what they do? How do the people around socially influence them? How does the environment and resources affect what they do? Psychology is the science of behaviour, and health psychology is the science of behaviour applied to health. The work we do can and does make a difference to people's lives - and some of those findings might have implications for what you personally do in your life to better your health and well-being. I plan to use this new section to provide quick snippets of recent work in my field and how it might have implications for you and your health. The aim is not to be preachy and certainly not boring - my aim will be to be at least informative and hopefully potentially inspire you. And for anyone reading the blog thinking about a career in this field, I hope this will provide a bit of insight into what you can contribute if you choose to follow a similar path.

I'm fascinated by people, what they do, what they think, and why they do what they do, and I am committed to finding effective ways of helping people do what they want to do. I hope to use this as a vehicle to take you along for the ride and maybe offer a few tips along the way. We have 80-odd years on this planet if we're lucky and what we do plays an important role in our capacity to make the most of those years.

So that's the new format I propose. What do you think? Please leave me notes in the comments about what you like or don't like and if the new format works for you. ∆