『The Gentle Rebel Podcast』のカバーアート

The Gentle Rebel Podcast

The Gentle Rebel Podcast

著者： Andy Mort
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 The Gentle Rebel Podcast with Andy Mort explores the intersection of high sensitivity, creativity, and contemporary culture. Through conversations, creative prompts, and reflections, we examine how highly sensitive people (HSPs) navigate and reshape the world within, around, and between us in sustainable ways. I invite you to poke and prod the assumptions, pressures, and expectations we’ve accepted—to rewrite the stories of who we are, and to explore what’s possible when we embrace high sensitivity as both a personal trait and an essential thread in our collective survival (and potential).Andy Mort アート 個人的成功 社会科学 自己啓発
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  • As a Man Thinketh (A History of Self-Help)

    As a Man Thinketh (A History of Self-Help)
    2025/09/06
    I had not heard of James Allen before I started exploring this history of self-help. I saw references to his book, “As a Man Thinketh”, which was frequently cited as an influential text around the power of thought on manifesting circumstances. With our “It’s the thought that counts” theme in The Haven this month, my curiosity took me into a James Allen rabbit hole. I read three of his books: From Poverty to Power (his first), The Divine Companion (his last), and As a Man Thinketh (his most famous). I wanted to try getting a sense of where he was coming from in his philosophical worldview. He published around twenty books, all written within an eleven-year period, before he died in 1912 at just 47 years old. I do wonder how his ideas would have evolved if he had lived longer. In this episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, I share my response to As a Man Thinketh. I reflect on Allen’s ideas and their implications for the way we think about ourselves, one another, and the nature of reality. https://youtu.be/tVtG-Ahrkgw Why Am I Doing This Project? You may be wondering why I'm exploring self-help...Good question. I'm not completely sure. But I think it's because I’ve felt an intuitive nudge to explore this world and its function in culture. I don't know where it will take me (I have no overriding purpose or vision with it - sorry James!), or what I will find, but I have a sense that there are interesting things to discover by examining, not just the content that is common in the self-help genre, but the role the field plays in how we understand and judge ourselves, others, and the horizons of possibility for the world. As I find in this book, there are some interesting insights and invitations to explore. But it also carries the potential to be understood, embodied, and applied in dangerous and harmful ways, especially when Allen’s metaphors are mistaken for literal truths. This is where his philosophy, which initially sounds positive and empowering, becomes reductive and destructive when we examine its logical implications. It demonstrates rhetorical tricks that are echoed in modern-day personal development literature, such as metaphorical literalism. This is where poetic imagery and aphorisms are employed to support and prove otherwise baseless philosophies. How James Allen Described As a Man Thinketh As a Man Thinketh is intentionally short. Allen described it as a pocket book with teaching that all can easily grasp and follow. He said it shows how, in their own thought-world, each human holds the key to every condition, good or bad, that enters into our life. By working patiently and intelligently upon our thoughts, we may remake our life and transform our circumstances. The question I keep coming back to throughout this exploration is, does he mean this as a description or a prescription? And what difference does this make to our reading, interpretation, and application of these ideas? As a Man Thinketh - Notes Thought and Character “A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts." A person is the product of thought alone. The mantra “change your thoughts, change your life” is still repeated as if it were a scientific law rather than a metaphor. The Effect of Thought on Circumstances “Every man is where he is by the law of his being. The thoughts which he has built into his character have brought him there, and in the arrangement of his life there is no element of chance.” Prosperity and poverty, joy and suffering, always mirror the state of an individual’s mind. The Effect of Thought on Health and Body "The body is the servant of the mind. It obeys the operations of the mind, whether they be deliberately chosen or automatically expressed." Thought is the source of health and sickness. Thought and Purpose “He who has conquered doubt and fear has conquered failure.” To avoid suffering,
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    1 時間 4 分
  • Overstimulation and High Sensitivity (The HSP Owner’s Guide)

    Overstimulation and High Sensitivity (The HSP Owner’s Guide)
    2025/08/22
    This post elaborates on the ‘overstimulation’ section of The HSP Owner’s Guide. In this week's episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, we look at the relationship between sensory processing sensitivity and overstimulation. Overstimulation is a term we often hear when people talk about high sensitivity. It's the second word in the DOES acronym after Deep Processing and before Emotional Responsiveness or Empathy, and Sensing Subtleties as a description of core characteristics of the trait. But what do we actually mean by overstimulated? What does it look like? And is there anything we can do about it other than avoiding stimulating environments and situations? At the get-go, I want to answer that question with a resounding yes. We don’t have to write ourselves out of the situations, environments, and experiences that really matter to us. We have the capacity to build sustainable approaches to this stuff. https://youtu.be/qy8XxQe7_iU Responsiveness and Stimulation Because highly sensitive people are all different, it’s important to remember that sensitivity isn’t who we are. It’s more like the rails our nervous system runs on. It is often described as a spectrum of sensory responsiveness. Those on the high end take in a huge amount of sensory data and process it deeply. Those on the low end take in less, and most people are somewhere in the middle. As a species, we have evolved and benefit from individuals existing along this continuum. Environmental Sensitivity researchers describe this variation through the concept of differential susceptibility. Some individuals are more profoundly influenced by their environment, for better or worse. It’s not about weakness or fragility. It’s about responsiveness and depth of processing. Studies show that highly sensitive individuals flourish in supportive settings but face greater challenges in chaotic ones. I like to visualise this difference using microphones. A sensitive condenser mic is uniquely effective in quiet, controlled spaces. It picks up every subtle detail. But in a loud environment, it can get overwhelmed by noise. A dynamic mic has a narrower field of responsiveness and can work in almost any environment because it picks up less background noise. Both are useful, but for different purposes. This helps us remember that high sensitivity isn’t a flaw or superpower, it’s just a variation in human temperament, useful in some contexts and less so in others. What Overstimulation Looks Like Overstimulation can look different from individual to individual. It is caused by an overload of the nervous system with environmental, emotional, social, or cognitive information. It's not always evident to others when a highly sensitive person is overstimulated. Despite appearing calm or composed, HSPs may be grappling with intense physical discomfort or emotional distress due to nervous system overload. Rising levels of stress hormones such as adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol exacerbate this heightened sensitivity, leading to strong reactions to excitement, tension, temperature changes, or sensory stimuli in the environment. What looks like calmness in a person might be a kind of shutting down. This happens to me when I've had too much stimulation - I can look really chilled out, but in actual fact I'm unable to function properly. You might experience: Physical symptoms of overstimulation Lightheadedness or dizziness Internal tremors (feeling shaky inside without visible shaking) Heart palpitations or irregular heartbeat sensations Nausea or digestive discomfort Temperature sensitivity Cognitive effects of overstimulation Difficulty concentrating or focusing on tasks Short-term memory lapses Mental fog or feeling disconnected from surroundings Racing thoughts Emotional responses Irritability disproportionate to the situation Sudden emotional surges, such as tears or outbursts of frustration
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    42 分
  • Exploring the History of Self-Help and the Rise of a Global Industry

    Exploring the History of Self-Help and the Rise of a Global Industry
    2025/08/15
    I’m starting a project exploring the history of self-help; where the ideas came from, how they’ve changed over time, and what they mean for us today. This episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast is my chance to set some intentions, explain why I feel drawn to do this, and share how you can get involved if you want to join me for the ride. I’m not starting this project with the end in mind. Sorry, Stephen Covey, but I’m rebelling against the second habit of highly effective people. I honestly don’t know how this will look or where it will take me. I’m just intrigued to dig into the backstory of personal development and positive thinking, and explore how it became an industry worth an estimated around $40 billion in 2024, projected to more than double by 2033. Self-help shapes how millions of us think about ourselves, our relationships, our struggles, and our potential. I want to look at where it came from, how it works, and what it’s doing to us now. https://youtu.be/GMowyoc4TeA This isn’t about belittling self-help I want to approach this with a curious and critical open mind, not a cynical one. I’ve personally gained insight, tools, and practices from authors in the personal development space. So, I have experienced the value of resources and authors under the broad self-help umbrella. But I do have some questions. One in particular that has long been on my mind...with the ideas in self-help are as widely adopted as they are, why haven’t they “worked” in the big-picture sense? Why now feels like a good moment to examine the rise of self-help We’re living in a strange mix of economic precarity, post-pandemic disorientation, the maturing of influencer culture, and now AI churning out self-help style advice at industrial speed. If self-help reflects and responds to the anxieties of its time, then this moment feels like a perfect point to ask whether it might be contributing to those same anxieties it claims to ease. The quote that caught my attention About 12 years ago, I read The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman. One idea in it has stuck with me ever since: “Perhaps you don’t need telling that self-help books… rarely much help. This is why some self-help publishers refer to the ‘eighteen-month rule’, which states that the person most likely to purchase any given self-help book is someone who, within the previous eighteen months, purchased a self-help book—one that evidently didn’t solve all their problems.” I was a big reader of personal development books at the time, especially those that spoke to building online businesses around creativity. They gave me a sense of forward momentum and excitement about future possibilities, but I could also feel myself on a treadmill. Old dissatisfaction was replaced with new. That quote made me wonder if the self-help industry insists on not solving our problems. Which makes sense when you think about it...why would a market secure its own demise? It needs to keep inventing new problems to solve. Otherwise it collapses. The 18-month rule and endless repackaging Some people enjoy the sense of growth that comes from reading a new book, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But from my experience, a lot of them say the same thing in different clothing. Different anecdotes. Different metaphors. Same structure. So why do we keep reading? And why does the market keep producing more? The Mel Robbins example Earlier this year, I looked into whether Mel Robbins had plagiarised a poem by Cassie Phillips and made up the story that inspired her book The Let Them Theory. I bought and read the book as part of my research. It’s not my usual reading choice, and I hadn’t read a new personal development book in years. Two things struck me: The writing felt more like marketing copy than the work of a writer. The ideas weren’t new; just repackaged versions of stoicism,
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    20 分
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