The Mood Booster Podcast

How to Deal With Hate Comments (When You're Just Trying to Help) | The Mood Booster Podcast Ep. 74
The Home of Wellbeing and Joy
Welcome back to The Mood Booster Podcast. This week, Charlie and Dr. Marcus are recording live from the New Forest, fire pit roaring, stars overhead, and they are fired up for a reason. After a wave of hateful comments flooded in following last week's episode with Gaz Oakley, the guys decided to do what they always do: lean into the experience, unpack it honestly, and find something useful in it.
This is not a "woe is me" episode. It is an honest, grounded conversation about what it actually feels like to put something meaningful into the world and be met with cruelty, and more importantly, what you can do about it.
🎧 In this episode:
Dr. Marcus and Charlie open up about the specific hate comments they received following the Gaz Oakley episode. They explore why anonymous online environments lower the threshold for cruelty, what psychology tells us about why we hyper-focus on negative feedback over positive, and how negativity bias is a wired survival mechanism that we can consciously override. The conversation also covers how hate comments are always a reflection of the sender, not the recipient, and why no genuinely happy, fulfilled person directs that kind of energy at others.
🛠 Practical Advice:
The guys share grounded, honest tools for processing online hate, appraisals at work, and everyday rudeness alike. From anchoring yourself in the objective evidence around you, to the simple but powerful act of leaving a kind comment or saying good morning to a stranger, this episode is a reminder that what you put out shapes both your world and the world around you.
📍 𝐏𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐝: Community and Connection, Introspection and Inspiration, Wellbeing and Joy
🔔 Don’t forget to follow and review, it really helps us grow 
📲 Follow us for more: 👉 Instagram: @themoodboosterofficial 
👉 TikTok: @themoodboosterofficial 
🌍 Website: www.themoodbooster.co.uk 
🎥 Prefer video? Watch this episode on YouTube @TheMoodBoosterOfficial 

Reflecting on: Slow Living, Nature and Self Sufficiency with Gaz Oakley | The Mood Booster Podcast Ep. 73
The Home of Wellbeing and Joy 🌱
Welcome back to The Mood Booster Podcast. This week Charlie and Dr Marcus are joined by for one of our most reflective and grounding conversations yet.
From leaving London behind and reconnecting with nature, to growing food, rejecting labels, building community, fatherhood, sustainability, anxiety, and the pursuit of a slower life, this episode explores what it really means to live intentionally in a world that constantly pushes us towards speed, convenience, and consumption.
Gaz shares how reconnecting with the land completely changed his relationship with food, wellbeing, stress, identity, and purpose, and why modern life can leave so many of us feeling disconnected from what truly matters.
This is an honest, thoughtful, and wide ranging conversation about nature, self sufficiency, mental health, compassion, and finding joy in simpler ways of living.
🎧 In This Episode
Charlie, Dr Marcus and Gaz explore slow living as both a philosophy and a practical way of life. The conversation moves through growing your own food, reconnecting with nature, anxiety and nervous system regulation, community living, the pressures of modern culture, labels and identity, fatherhood, sustainability, consumerism, and the emotional impact of living more intentionally.
Gaz also opens up about why he no longer labels himself vegan, the complexities of modern food systems, and how trying to live compassionately often means embracing nuance rather than extremes.
🛠 Practical Advice
The key insight from this episode is that wellbeing is often found in reconnection rather than accumulation. Reconnecting with nature, community, craftsmanship, slower routines, meaningful work, and the simple act of growing or creating something with your hands can profoundly change the way we experience stress, purpose, and joy.
📍 𝐏𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐝: Community and Connection, Introspection and Inspiration, Wellbeing and Joy
🔔 Don’t forget to follow and review, it really helps us grow 
📲 Follow us for more: 👉 Instagram: @themoodboosterofficial 
👉 TikTok: @themoodboosterofficial 
🌍 Website: www.themoodbooster.co.uk 
🎥 Prefer video? Watch this episode on YouTube @TheMoodBoosterOfficial 

The Home of Wellbeing and Joy 🌱
Welcome to Episode 72 of The Mood Booster Podcast.
In this Friday Focus episode, Dr Marcus and Charlie takes Monday's conversation on nostalgia and distils it into the essential psychology, the origins, the science, and the tools that help you understand what your brain is actually doing when it pulls you back to the past.
We begin at the very beginning. The word nostalgia itself is built from two ancient Greek words: nostos, meaning homecoming, and algos, meaning pain. It was coined in 1688 by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer to describe a condition he observed in Swiss mercenaries who became so consumed by longing for home that they developed physical symptoms including anxiety, fever, and in some cases death. What began as a medical diagnosis eventually became one of the most universal human experiences we know.
From there, Dr Marcus unpacks the psychology of why we feel nostalgia at all, the competing theories around it, and crucially why we seem to feel it more intensely right now. In times of hardship, austerity, and uncertainty, the brain reaches for the familiar comfort of the past. It is a mood regulation mechanism, and once you understand it that way, it starts to make a lot more sense. We also look at how this psychological vulnerability is being actively exploited, from political parties building entire campaigns around restoration and return, to brands like Claude using nostalgia in advertising to create emotional connection and drive behaviour.
The episode closes with a set of practical tools designed to help you notice when nostalgia is pulling at you, understand what it is telling you about what might be missing in your present, and use that awareness to make meaningful changes rather than simply retreating into the past.
📍 𝐏𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐝: Community and Connection, Introspection and Inspiration, Wellbeing and Joy
🔔 Don’t forget to follow and review, it really helps us grow 
📲 Follow us for more: 👉 Instagram: @themoodboosterofficial 
👉 TikTok: @themoodboosterofficial 
🌍 Website: www.themoodbooster.co.uk 
🎥 Prefer video? Watch this episode on YouTube @TheMoodBoosterOfficial 

Reflecting on: Nostalgia | Why Your Brain Lives in the Past and What It Says About the Present | The Mood Booster Podcast Ep. 71
The Home of Wellbeing and Joy 🌱
Welcome back to The Mood Booster Podcast. This week Charlie and Dr Marcus are reflecting on nostalgia. Why we crave the past, why it feels so comforting, and why right now, more than ever, the world seems to be looking backwards.
From the rise of Reform UK and Make America Great Again to the fact that more songs in the Billboard top 100 are over a decade old than ever before, nostalgia is not just a personal feeling. It is a cultural force. And understanding why it pulls at us so powerfully, what it is doing in our brains and what it is actually telling us about how we are feeling in the present, might be one of the most useful things you can do for your own wellbeing right now.
This is a wide ranging, honest, and genuinely fascinating conversation that moves from politics to pop culture to personal memory, and lands somewhere that feels both grounding and hopeful.
🎧 In This Episode Charlie and Dr Marcus explore nostalgia as a psychological and cultural phenomenon, from positivity bias and how memory distorts the past, to why low mood triggers nostalgic thinking, what nostalgia is actually doing for us emotionally, how it is being used in politics and media, the tension between present moment living and the pull of the past, and how to find joy in the now without abandoning the warmth of looking back.
🛠 Practical Advice The key insight from this episode is that nostalgia is not weakness or delusion. It is your brain's way of regulating mood and reminding you of what matters to you. The question is not how to stop looking back but how to use those memories as a compass for the present rather than an escape from it.
📍 𝐏𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐝: Community and Connection, Introspection and Inspiration, Wellbeing and Joy
🔔 Don’t forget to follow and review, it really helps us grow 
📲 Follow us for more: 👉 Instagram: @themoodboosterofficial 
👉 TikTok: @themoodboosterofficial 
🌍 Website: www.themoodbooster.co.uk 
🎥 Prefer video? Watch this episode on YouTube @TheMoodBoosterOfficial 

🌱 The Mood Booster Podcast | A New Chapter for the Mood Booster
Something is changing. And we wanted to tell you about it ourselves.
Episode 70 felt like the right moment to pause, check in, and be honest. Charlie and Dr Marcus have been frustrated. Not with each other, not with the podcast, but with the feeling that something important has been missing. That something is you.
In this episode, recorded outdoors with the portable mics, they open up about where the Mood Booster is heading next and why the community has always been the whole point.
🎧 𝐈𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞: ✨ Why Charlie and Dr Marcus went back to the drawing board ✨ What has been missing from the Mood Booster ✨ The new format and what it means for you ✨ Why everyday people inspire us more than experts ✨ A conversation that changed everything
🛠 Practical Takeaways:
The biggest takeaway from this episode is a question. What is your story? The Mood Booster has always believed that joy is found in the everyday, not just in the lives of experts and high achievers. From episode 70 onwards, that belief becomes the format. If you have something to share, a struggle, a small win, a lived experience, they want to hear from you. Get in touch via Instagram at @themoodboosterofficial.
📍 𝐏𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐝: Community and Connection, Introspection and Inspiration, Wellbeing and Joy
🔔 Don’t forget to follow and review, it really helps us grow 
📲 Follow us for more: 👉 Instagram: @themoodboosterofficial 
👉 TikTok: @themoodboosterofficial 
🌍 Website: www.themoodbooster.co.uk 
🎥 Prefer video? Watch this episode on YouTube @TheMoodBoosterOfficial 

Welcome to Episode 69 of The Mood Booster Podcast. This week, Charlie and Dr Marcus take things somewhere different. Recorded in Madeira, surrounded by mountains and good food, this episode is a proper debate. The motion: social media is inherently bad for our mental wellbeing. Charlie argues for it. Dr Marcus argues against. And genuinely disagree. 
From comparison culture and body image ideals to the power of community and the very existence of The Mood Booster itself, this is an honest, unscripted back and forth between two people who see the same platform very differently. The question that sits underneath all of it: if social media does more harm than good, does using it make you a hypocrite? 
🎧 𝐈𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞:  
The debate: is social media inherently bad for our wellbeing?  
Comparison culture and the mental health cost of scrolling  
Body image ideals and who is responsible for what we see  
Whether regulation sits with the consumer or the platforms  
The power of online community and connection  
Can you criticise social media and still use it without being a hypocrite?  
🛠 𝐏𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐀𝐝𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐞:  
This one is less about tools and more about honest reflection. The debate format forces both sides to sit with the tension rather than reach for easy answers. If you use social media, which most of us do, this episode will give you a clearer sense of why it affects you the way it does and what, if anything, you 
📍 Pillars Explored Introspection and Reflection, Wellbeing and Joy, Presence and Gratitude 
🔔 Don’t forget to follow and review, it really helps us grow 
📲 Follow us for more: 👉 Instagram: @themoodboosterofficial 
👉 TikTok: @themoodboosterofficial 
🌍 Website: www.themoodbooster.co.uk 
🎥 Prefer video? Watch this episode on YouTube @TheMoodBoosterOfficial 

🌱 The Mood Booster Podcast | Self-Expression Through Fashion with Paul Webb 
What if the clothes you wear every morning are quietly shaping how you feel all day? From charity shop gold dust to sustainable shopping habits, this episode is about far more than fashion. 
In this episode, Charlie and Dr Marcus sit down with Paul Webb, a rising voice on TikTok talking about self-expression, sustainable shopping, and building a wardrobe that feels like you. The three of them even spent an afternoon charity shopping together in Chiswick beforehand, and yes, Charlie ended up in a polo shirt he never would have chosen himself. 
🎧 𝐈𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞:  
✨ Why what you wear affects how you feel  
✨ The spectrum of conformity vs authentic self-expression  
✨ How to start finding your own style from scratch  
✨ Paul's 3 realistic tips for shopping sustainably  
✨ Hot or not: celebrity fashion icons rated  
🛠 Practical Takeaways: 
Paul's advice is simple but genuinely actionable. Start with Pinterest to find what pulls your attention, then ask yourself why. That why question is where your real style begins to emerge. When it comes to sustainable shopping, his three tips are: secondhand first, check the label for single fabric only, and avoid brands dropping new lines every other week. And if you have never set foot in a charity shop, go with no expectations and enjoy the dig. 
📍 Pillars Explored Introspection and Reflection, Wellbeing and Joy, Presence and Gratitude 
🔔 Don’t forget to follow and review, it really helps us grow 
📲 Follow us for more: 👉 Instagram: @themoodboosterofficial 
👉 TikTok: @themoodboosterofficial 
🌍 Website: www.themoodbooster.co.uk 
🎥 Prefer video? Watch this episode on YouTube @TheMoodBoosterOfficial 

Reflecting on: The Psychology of Optimisation | How to Find the Balance Between Efficiency and Wellbeing | The Mood Booster Podcast Friday Focus Ep. 67
The Home of Wellbeing and Joy 🌱
Welcome to Episode 67 of The Mood Booster Podcast.
In this Friday Focus episode, Dr Marcus takes the conversation from Monday and layers in the psychological theory behind why our obsession with optimisation is quietly eroding our wellbeing, and what we can actually do about it.
Because the problem is not efficiency itself. The problem is what we lose when we remove every moment of friction, waiting, and idleness from our lives. And most of us do not notice it is happening until we feel restless, disconnected, and unable to switch off, and we cannot quite explain why.
This episode unpacks four key psychological mechanisms that explain exactly what is going on. When we optimise away idle time, we cut off access to the brain's Default Mode Network, the state responsible for emotional processing, self reflection, and building a coherent sense of who we are. When we outsource our thinking to GPS, reminders, and instant answers, a process known as cognitive offloading, we gradually reduce our capacity for memory, problem solving, and mental effort. When effort is removed from the things we care about, research shows we find them less meaningful. And when every gap is filled and every silence is replaced with stimulation, our nervous system never fully gets the chance to recover.
The good news is that the answer is not to reject technology or move to rural Italy, tempting as that sounds. It is to reintroduce intentional friction into the specific areas of your life where effort creates meaning. To stop treating slowness as inefficiency and start recognising it as investment. And to resist the automatic urge to reach for your phone every time there is a queue, a wait, or a moment of stillness.
As the episode closes with: optimisation has made life easier. But easier is not always better. Sometimes the moments we are trying to remove are the ones that were quietly holding us together.
📍 Pillars Explored Introspection and Reflection, Wellbeing and Joy, Presence and Gratitude 
🔔 Don’t forget to follow and leave a review, it really helps us grow 
📲 Follow us for more 👉 Instagram: @themoodboosterofficial 
👉 TikTok: @themoodboosterofficial 
🌍 Website: www.themoodbooster.co.uk 
🎥 Prefer video? Watch this episode on YouTube @TheMoodBoosterOfficial 

Reflecting on: Efficiency | Is Our Obsession With Optimisation Ruining Our Wellbeing? | The Mood Booster Podcast Ep. 66 
The Home of Wellbeing and Joy 🌱 
Welcome back to The Mood Booster Podcast. This week Charlie and Dr Marcus are asking a question that sounds almost too simple to take seriously: what if all the efficiency we have added to our lives is making us feel worse? 
From the boiling tap that removed the ritual of making a cup of tea, to AI tools that eliminate the friction of thinking, to self-service checkouts replacing the brief human interaction that used to punctuate a supermarket trip, optimisation has quietly stripped away many of the small, slow, human moments that actually contribute to our wellbeing. We do not always notice when they disappear. But we feel it. 
This episode is not anti-technology or anti-progress. It is an honest, grounded, and at times very funny conversation about what we lose when everything becomes frictionless, why boredom and idleness are not weaknesses, and how we can be more intentional about what we choose to optimise and what we choose to protect. 
🎧 In This Episode
Charlie and Dr Marcus explore the boiling tap as a symbol of modern efficiency culture, the evolutionary psychology behind our drive to always do more, how optimisation removes ritual, human connection, and the space to think, whether AI is making us cognitively lazier, the difference between helpful efficiency and wellbeing-eroding efficiency, and practical ways to protect the slow, intentional parts of daily life that actually bring joy. 
🛠 Practical Advice
The key takeaway from this episode is not to reject technology but to become intentional about it. Ask yourself which parts of your daily routine have been optimised in ways that have quietly removed something valuable, whether that is connection, ritual, presence, or the satisfying friction of learning something the hard way. Protecting even one unoptimised space in your day could make a meaningful difference to how you feel. 
📍 Pillars Explored Introspection and Reflection, Wellbeing and Joy, Presence and Gratitude 
🔔 Don’t forget to follow and leave a review, it really helps us grow 
📲 Follow us for more 👉 Instagram: @themoodboosterofficial 
👉 TikTok: @themoodboosterofficial 
🌍 Website: www.themoodbooster.co.uk 
🎥 Prefer video? Watch this episode on YouTube @TheMoodBoosterOfficial 

The Home of Wellbeing and Joy 🌱
Welcome to Episode 65 of The Mood Booster Podcast.
In this Friday Focus episode, Dr Marcus breaks down the psychology and neuroscience behind failure, building on Monday's honest conversation about what it really feels like to hear no, and why we are so wired to avoid it.
This episode explores the deeper mechanisms at play. We look at why rejection activates the same regions of the brain as physical pain, rooted in our evolutionary need for social belonging. Research in social psychology shows that rejection was once genuinely dangerous, which is why our brains still treat it as a threat even when the stakes are much lower. We then unpack why failure so often feels personal.
When our sense of identity becomes too attached to our outcomes, a single rejection can feel like an exposure of who we are rather than feedback on what we did. This is particularly true for high achievers, and understanding this shift from "I failed" to "this attempt failed" is one of the most important reframes available to us.
We also explore the cognitive distortions that make failure feel worse than it needs to be, including all or nothing thinking, catastrophising, and personalisation, and how contingent self worth, tying our value to our results, quietly drives fear of trying, burnout, and emotional volatility.
Combined with stress inoculation theory, the evidence is clear: failure does not just feel survivable. It actively builds the resilience we need to succeed long term. Finally, Dr Marcus brings it all together with a practical framework for reframing failure as data, setting rejection targets, and iterating faster. Because speed of iteration beats perfection every time.
📍 Pillars Explored
Introspection and Inspiration, Presence and Gratitude, Wellbeing and Joy
📚 References
Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In M. A. Gernsbacher, R. W. Pew, L. M. Hough, & J. R. Pomerantz (Eds.), Psychology and the real world: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society (pp. 56–64). Worth Publishers. https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2016/04/EBjork_RBjork_2011.pdf
Bjork, E. L., Little, J. L., & Storm, B. C. (2014). Multiple choice testing as a desirable difficulty in the classroom. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 3(3), 165–170. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2014.03.002
Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302(5643), 290–292. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1089134
Hsu, D. K., Wiklund, J., & Cotton, R. D. (2017). Success, failure, and entrepreneurial re entry: An experimental assessment of the veracity of self efficacy and prospect theory. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 41(1), 19–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/etap.12166
Kapur, M. (2008). Productive failure. Cognition and Instruction, 26(3), 379–424. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370000802212669
Kapur, M. (2016). Examining productive failure, productive success, unproductive failure, and unproductive success in learning. Educational Psychologist, 51(2), 289–299. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2016.1155457
Seery, M. D. (2011). Resilience: A silver lining to experiencing adverse life events? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(6), 390–394. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721411424740
🔔 Don’t forget to follow and leave a review, it really helps us grow 
📲 Follow us for more 👉 Instagram: @themoodboosterofficial 
👉 TikTok: @themoodboosterofficial 
🌍 Website: www.themoodbooster.co.uk 
🎥 Prefer video? Watch this episode on YouTube @TheMoodBoosterOfficial