John Corbett · Consulting Psychologist

Sleep Apnea in Women: The Symptoms That Are Different, the Diagnoses That Are Wrong, and What to Do About It By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong There is a version of sleep apnea that most people recognise. The overweight middle-aged man who snores loudly. Who stops breathing in ways his partner notices. Who wakes gasping. Who is demonstrably, obviously exhausted during the day. Whose condition, when it is eventually investigated, turns out to be exactly what it looked

Insomnia in Hong Kong: What It Actually Is, Why Generic Sleep Advice Doesn't Fix It, and What Does By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong Most people who come to me with insomnia have already tried everything. The sleep hygiene checklist. The no-screens-before-bed rule. The magnesium supplement and the chamomile tea and the white noise machine. The blackout curtains. The consistent bedtime that lasted three weeks before the schedule collapsed. The melatonin, which helped

By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong You probably don't think much about your dreams. Most professionals don't. Dreams feel peripheral — the strange, forgettable fragments that occasionally surface as you're reaching for your phone in the morning, dissolving before you can quite hold them. Interesting, maybe. Meaningful, possibly. But not exactly a professional concern. I want to make a case that this is a mistake. Not because your dreams contain hidden messages that ne

Sleep Apnea in Hong Kong: What It Is, What It Costs, and Why So Many Professionals Don't Know They Have It By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong You go to bed. You sleep. You wake up eight hours later. And you feel terrible. Not the ordinary tiredness of a late night or a disrupted sleep. Something more persistent. The kind of tiredness that rest doesn't seem to touch. The mid-morning fog. The afternoon wall. The coffee that helps for an hour and then doesn't. The sense

By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong There is a word that comes up constantly in conversations about mental health, wellbeing, and professional performance. It appears in corporate wellness programmes, in meditation apps, in the advice given after someone mentions they're struggling. The word is calm. Calm down. Stay calm. Find your calm. The prescription is so familiar that it has become almost reflexive — the default response to stress, to difficulty, to anything that

By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong You sleep. You wake up tired. You take the holiday. You come back tired. You have the good weekend — no work, decent sleep, time with people you care about — and by Sunday evening you feel, more or less, the same as you did on Friday. Not restored. Not ready. Just... resumed. And you tell yourself what most people in this situation tell themselves. That you need more sleep. That you're getting older. That the workload is genuinely he

sleep deprivation Hong Kong professionals

By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong There is a study I come back to more than almost any other in my work. Not because it's the most dramatic finding in psychology. But because it contains something that, once you really understand it, changes the way you relate to one of the central experiences of professional life. Here is what the researchers found. In 1998, a team at the University of Wisconsin surveyed nearly 30,000 American adults. They asked two questions: how m

By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong Let's start with a number. 43%. That is the increase in the risk of premature death associated with high stress combined with the belief that stress is harmful to health — a figure from a University of Wisconsin study tracking nearly 30,000 adults over eight years. But that's a different article. The number relevant here is this one: After 14 days of sleeping six hours per night, cognitive performance declines to levels equivalent to

Stress

Burnout

By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong There's a version of the entrepreneurial story that gets told a lot in Hong Kong. The pitch deck. The Series A. The WeWork hot desk at midnight that becomes an office of thirty people. The hustle, the exits, the LinkedIn post about lessons learned. It's an appealing story. It's also, in my experience, missing about half of what's actually happening. What doesn't make the LinkedIn post: the 3am anxiety that isn't about strategy, it's

self care reminder

This blog explores the importance of self-care on Valentine's Day and offers tips for creating a day that celebrates and nurtures your relat

Personality disorders are mental conditions that can damage lives and relationships if left untreated. If you believe that you or someone...

Many people are afraid of loneliness. We don’t like to admit it or talk about it, but as human beings, we need social connections. Some...