When we had to survive on our wits, gather and kill our food from scratch and be more at the mercy of our environment than we are today, we probably had enough challenge to keep our brains healthy.

It used to be thought that you stopped making new neural connections in your youth and from then on your brain was fixed and it was downhill all the way. But in fact as we know from our own experience we can keep on learning and learning means changing our brain on a physical level.

A sense of achievement improves general confidence and self-esteem.

A relapse doesn't mean you'll never walk down the path you prefer. But I think relapses are almost an inevitable part of any course of self-development.

The extreme of flexibility is chaos and the extreme of being structured is rigid and staying sane, or indeed using your creativity, is about being aware of these extremes and steering yourself to areas where you work best which usually tend to be more in the middle than at either extreme edge.

Whether you plan or whether you flow in order to be creative probably isn't the point. The point is to keep practicing to maintain neural pathways and to establish new ones by learning new skills.

I think there is probably something evolutionary in that we are drawn to the easiest option. But in our age of convenience, cars, ready meals and off the peg mean that we are in danger of being mentally under stretched.