We all have bad behaviours - little habits that we would rather be rid of, but that stick around and persist despite our best efforts. In the last post I wrote about my experiences of helping people to kick cigarettes and the techniques I saw working over and over again. Nietzsche himself outlined a number of approaches to eradicating undesirable drives in his book Daybreak. Let’s compare them to the approaches I used. He writes: ‘I find no more than six essentially different

Some years back, I worked for the National Health Service helping people quit smoking. Breaking free of nicotine addiction is incredibly difficult and rates of success for any individual attempt to quit are very, very low. However, over time I noticed that by far the most effective formula for success was the following: get a group of people who are strangers to attempt quitting together, all on the same day. They would have had a week to prepare themselves by getting rid of

If we are overweight, we may be embarrassed to be seen in a state of undress. If we are short in stature, we may be belligerent and combative. If we are prematurely bald, this may make us socially shy. If we are targets of prejudice based on our race, we may be defensive, angry or indignant in our dealings with the world. Our gender may open up opportunities to us or, conversely, close them down. If we are chronically ill, it may make us despondent, pessimistic and risk-avers

‘The body, gestures, diet, physiology, everything else follows from this.’ Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche’s unique concept of Great Health is expounded in The Gay Science and elsewhere. Though this Great Health may appear to be, primarily, a psychological state, an orientation to the world, it is firmly founded on the health and fitness of the physical body. Nietzsche argued that two thousand years of Christianity had taught us to despise the body and that this had been ‘the

'There exists above the "productive" man, a yet higher species.' From Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human. I am mildly afflicted with the Sunday night blues. The sand has slid through the hourglass too quickly, bringing yet another weekend, regrettably, to its close. And I haven't done nearly as much as I’d planned to. Is it really the case, as is often said, that we have less time now than ever before? Surely, at least some of this deficiency stems from the fact that we have mo

In the last post, I talked about Maslow's hierarchy of needs and Nietzsche's project of achieving greatness. What stops us being the best we can be? Is it just down to plain laziness? Of course, this is a problem for all of us, to one degree or another. For Nietzsche, our love of comfort and security is a legacy of the slave morality we have lived under as part of the dominant Christian cultural worldview that has held sway in the west for over 1,500 years. Christian virtues