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And Aristotle thought that these ideas that Socrates and Plato had come up with were very helpful to enable people to live their lives in a better way. They were really psychotherapists, you know. They were talking with people, which is why Socrates, of course, had to die, because he was talking to the youth in Athens and he got them to have ideas about freedom and change and all that kind of thing. They were psychotherapists.

And Aristotle thought, well, to be a proper psychotherapist you have to have more knowledge, so he started this whole system of trying to describe human knowledge. But he also came up with this idea that what people should try to achieve is eudaimonia.

Now, eudaimonia means to be on good terms with your demons, to be open to your spirits, to be in good conscience, if you like, to have that process of reflection and understanding going on inside of yourself at all times. And at the same time, he thought you had to benefit the community at large rather than just yourself.

I won't go into it more. After that, we got the Epicureans, who started to look at how to treat human suffering — again, a psychotherapeutic system to try and make people happier. And what his solution was, was to eliminate all pain and disturbance, which is what he called ataraxia: reduce your life so that you can just control what is still there and all the disturbing elements are gone, and make the most of what you've got.

After that, you got the skeptics. They did even weirder things. They said if we can become skeptical and unknowing and uncaring about everything, then all our problems will be gone. Then nothing will upset us, we won't have emotions at all anymore, because we'll just say, "Who cares?" or "What's that?" or "Hmm, not important." And so we get a little way of life without emotions, where everything is hunky-dory.

So they weren't getting rid of false beliefs — they got rid of all beliefs. Well, I know a fair few people like that these days. Not a good way to live at all.

The Stoics got a bit more clever about it. They said the goal has got to be that a person becomes their own teacher in the end, and that we can improve a person's soul by making them exercise their soul every day. So they need to use logic and poetry and other arts to make themselves more open to the good things, and so that the flourishing life can affirm good meanings like wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance.

But at the end of the day, it also meant detaching yourself from caring or worrying about things, and they called that apathy. Many of my clients, when they start out, have a complaint about apathy. They have lost a sense of enjoyment or importance about their life, and what they prefer to do is stay in bed all day and not do anything, get away from everything they can. They're not happy at all, of course.

So let me skip all the way about 15 centuries forward now to the philosopher Spinoza. The reason I skip so fast — and I hope I'm not going to offend anybody — but what happened in between the Stoics and this time of Spinoza is that philosophy became entirely taken over by Christianity, and philosophy basically died as an open discipline. It was taken over by one way of looking at things.

But with Spinoza, things changed. And of course, Descartes is also a very important influence on that, much as he's maligned, because Spinoza understood that our emotions are actually extremely important — that these early guys, these Athenians, got it all wrong. They tried, each in their own way, to stop our emotions taking us over.

No, said Spinoza, what we need to do is understand our emotions — not to reduce them, but actually make sense of them. And he understood something extremely important, which is that essentially we have two sorts of emotions. We have emotions that make us feel we're going up towards something that matters to us, or we have emotions that take us down, away from something that matters to us.

Now, the funny thing is, when Kierkegaard talks about this, he says all our emotions of aspiration, of going up, make us anxious. That's what anxiety is. Anxiety is those up-swinging emotions that make us want something, that make us want to do something. Because what is anxiety? It's just a simple mechanistic thing: it's adrenaline. It's our body getting geared up for the thing we want to achieve, the thing we need to do.

The problem arises when we want to do it on the one hand, and on the other hand we suppress it. Then it spins out of control. It becomes like panic.

So imagine you're sitting there thinking, "Oh my God, what rubbish she's talking. I wish I had the courage to say something about it. Should I put my hand up? Shall I put my hand up? Shall I do it? Shall I not? Shall I do it?" And you get this adrenaline, this lovely flow of energy — but you suppress it. And you say to yourself, "No, they're all going to think I'm stupid," or "It won't make any sense," or "She seems so in the flow, I don't dare cut her off."

And so you suppress your energy, and then you become slightly unpleasantly out of touch with yourself. But if you use the energy and you go for it, and you go for that purpose that your passion directs you towards, you won't be anxious. You'll feel energized. You'll feel excited. I can guarantee you that it works that way.

I used to be an extremely oversensitive and very nervous child and teenager, and I put myself through lots of risky and difficult challenges and situations. And once I learned that this is how it works, I could reinterpret those feelings and I could say, "Yeah, here it goes. I'm on a roll. Here's my energy rising. Great. I know what I want to do with it." And from that moment on, it was no longer a problem.

So Spinoza took the view that the universe is lawful, which we pretty well think it is, and that therefore if we understand how ontology works, we can basically work with that. One of the things he found, and many others have found, is that everything has an opposite.

This is how kids learn to make sense of their existence. They say something is low or high, big or small, far or near, good or bad. When they read stories, it's about goodies and baddies, and they get really interested. It's black-and-white thinking. It's either this or it's that.

It's very important that we learn to do this, because we learn to discriminate between one thing and another. But it is entirely wrong to think that that discrimination is in one thing and another, because actually this is just a way for us to make meaning of things.

What is really the case is that everything is incredibly complex and must be looked at in the round to truly make sense of it. But at first, we start with the flow of energy between the extremes.

You know, there we are: the positive charge and the negative charge. That's what energy is — the flow between. That's what thunderstorms are like: a positive charge on a sunny day, with a negative charge at the bottom of the cloud, and kaboom — you've got your lightning and your thunder.

So is there enough differential in your lives, or are you running out of energy? How do you get the differential back into your life? Very often it is about having more diversity in your life, having more challenges in your life, having more difficulties in your life, having greater problems in your life.

We turn it upside down, because problems and difficulties are there to give you energy, to bring you to life, to make you think about solutions. You can find ways in which you can be creative around it. This is how life works.

And this is how we come to dialectics — you know, that thing that Hegel came up with, and then Marx turned into an economic theory. But actually, let's go back to Hegel for a bit and see how that works. One thing opposes another, we find the synthesis, and then that in itself becomes a new thesis with an opposition, and so on and so forth.

Well, as it happens, there is an ongoing process there. Yes — use your energy. Tell me all about it.

Well, I could suggest a few things, like going out of your way to help other people, or join political organizations, or try to solve poverty in the world, or try to work out what has really gone wrong with your relationships, and try to really speak to all the people in your life to try and get to the bottom of that. Just a few suggestions. My dad helped — no, seriously.

It is important we challenge ourselves and we do seek out problems and difficulties. So this is how it works in therapy. That was old Hegel there.

Somebody comes in with their view of their past, and in the dialogue together we are comparing that with the present situation we're in, and out of that is generated a picture for the future — a synthesis, a wider view, a new perspective, something they hadn't thought about.

So it always involves rediscovering the movement in your life, that forward feeling of going somewhere, of something good happening, of something changing for the better — and not just by chance, but because you have understood how it works and you're engaging with it.

And you start to feel that actually your little unit of humanity can function much, much better than you've ever functioned before. And the sky is really the limit.

This is my overview of some of the tensions we all have to work with at these four levels: physical, social, personal, and spiritual. And they go across. We have to work with the physical in nature, in relation to things, the body and the cosmos, different layers of that.

And at each level, we have these tensions, these contradictions, what I call paradoxes. And we can't opt for one. We can't have all pleasure and no pain. We can't have just health and never illness. We can't just have harmony and no chaos.

If we're going to open up to life, we've got to accept that. We've got to be prepared for both those sides.

We can't solve Brexit by leaving or remaining. We've got to look at the issues and look at all the sides of the equation, which is what we haven't done. We need to understand the connections between things, the multifold connections between things, because things are in patterns. And every person's life has many different points that are important, and they're all interconnected together.