Category Archives: Anxiety/Panic!

‘Have an adult tantrum’: 40 tips to help your mental health during lockdown

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My July 15th 2021 Blog entry from my newsletter was used as content on social media to help more people cope with Covid19. The post caught the eye of a journalist and I was interviewed for this article that was published a few days ago online at the ABC Australian News Website.
https://www.abc.net.au/everyday/things-to-do-help-mental-health-during-covid-lockdown/100388366

It is very important to do the things that help free the build up of stress and trauma in your body. Positive thinking and distraction is not enough. This is a real world wide trauma occurring and your body is reacting on a daily basis. With each restriction or lockdown the stress multiplies if it is not adequately released in an ongoing way.

Don’t wait until your body hits overload to do something about it. Do something everyday. The list in the article is a good way to keep on top of the creeping stress build up. A few people have asked me to create a pdf of this list so they can check items off. It is on my to do list.

The two core health essentials during a lockdown for your mental health.

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Exercise (Movement) and Meditation (Stillness)
The two core health essentials during a lockdown for your mental health.

Today’s message is a simple way of maintaining a good habit for your mental health through lockdowns and other trauma effects of Covid19.

Exercise and meditation go together.

If you do one but not the other, you are losing a lot of benefit that you could be receiving for your mental and physical health.

I notice many people often do one of the two really well and neglect the other. There are the people who exercise a lot and are physically fit and energised, but are anxious and cannot sit still in a room. Then there are the people who meditate really well and deep but are depressed and slow moving, finding it hard to act when needed in the world, hiding from the world.

Those who exercise a lot, tend to be the extroverts in the world, and those who meditate a lot, tend to be the introverts in the world. This is their super power.

With Covid right now, both of those super powers are very much needed – together. Doing both is very beneficial and will help greatly in keeping you mentally stable and healthy through these lockdowns and world covid trauma.

So it is good to ask the two most basic questions each day –

Q1. Have I exercised/moved enough?
Q2. Have I meditated/centered myself enough?

Doing both, you are helping reduce any excess anxiety and any excess depression brought on by the ongoing effects of Covid19.

One, helps reduce the trauma effects of the fight/flight response. The other the trauma effects of the freeze response. One connects you to the world, the other, connects you to yourself.
One helps you go in, one helps you come out. Both of the in-and-out movements are necessary for a healthy stable mind in times of trauma, instability and change.

So which one were you missing today?

Always make time for both each day.

Freeing your Covid19 Lockdown Trauma

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The previous post focused with a trauma lens on the effects of a lockdown to your health. It can be very traumatic. In this post we look at what to do to undo those effects, even during a lockdown.

As you feel the stress in your body build, some of it can turn into a traumatic response. Freeing the trauma response as soon as possible is ideal. So what can you do? You can’t think it away, it’s not a prefrontal cortex (cerebrum) problem.

Answer: You have to move and feel it away.

Freeing the Fight response – Boxing bag, Pillow Fights, Weights, Gym, Kicking, Martial arts, Tai Chi, Competitive Sport.

Freeing the Flight response – Walking, Jogging, Running, Trampoline, Rebounder, Up/Down Stairs, Swimming.

Freeing the Freeze response – Meditation, Bubble Bath, Long Shower, More Relationship contact, Animals, Hugs/Cuddles, Heavier blankets, Massage, Play, Dancing. Stretches, Singing, Music. Reading, Gardening, Journaling, Being in Nature, More Sunshine.

Notice there is nothing on this list about watching more TV, playing video games, eating more, drinking more, working more, shopping, drugs, smoking. These are avoidance techniques that create addictions. They provide an initial brief relief, but cause more problems longer term.

Anything that doesn’t acknowledge the trauma in your body and offer a healthy outlet, only builds the pressure inside your body, making it worse later. Keeping your mind and body in limbo, is dangerous to your long term physical and mental health.

In fact it is important to make sure you are covering all these aspects at some point on an ongoing regular basis, Covid or no Covid, and even more so, if you have been traumatised in the past.

So how do you know which activities on the list above to do first? Enter your mindfulness meditation. Close your eyes, go down and connect in, wait and your body will tell you what it needs to do next.

The more you can let go (of that thinking brain), the more you will know (from your body.)

Corona Virus – Will it traumatise you?

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“Research shows that whether or not a person develops PTSD has more to do with the person’s ability to cope with stress than the event itself.”

Susanne Babbel, Phd – Heal the Body, Heal the Mind (2018)

What the world is experiencing right now with this virus spreading is a very heavy traumatic experience for many people.

How do you stop from going nutty over the next few months? How do you stop from breaking down, or getting PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) symptoms after the event?

This has been my specialty for 30 years in private practice. Helping people resolve underlying trauma that affects and limits their lives, sometimes for a lifetime (if not addressed).

How are you coping so far? What emotions are bubbling up in you that you are aware of? And what about the ones just under the surface? Stressful situations help to bring out what is already there that has probably been laying dormant within you for a long time.

This Corona Virus event doesn’t have to be traumatic – before, during or after the event is over.

Just because others are freaking or stressing out, doesn’t mean that you have to do the same. Sometimes the extra stress you feel is only because you feel you have to feel this way too, that this must be normal behaviour. It doesn’t have to be that way.

I will be offering (all free) mindful suggestions and meditations each week. And I’ll be posting them all with a short video. Video will convey the message much better. You will be receiving the benefit and experience of 30 years of deep trauma coping, releasing and healing tips, advice, techniques, tools and expertise. The Virus Buster will be the first, coming soon this week.

The limit of each mindfulness class this week will be four, to allow safe enough room between participants. (Half the participants showed up last week and that was completely understandable.)

At some point soon (highly likely next week) the classes will go online. You will be able to attend from anywhere in the world and the classes can be much bigger. I will be using the Zoom meeting software. It is free for you to use and fairly easy to run, once you learn. Youtube has a lot of instructional videos on how to use it. I am happy to help anyone where possible, that might need some help.

Zoom, Skype, Facetime, Messenger, WhatsApp and others will all become very important for continual social interaction during the Corona virus period.

The free instructional video for the Virus Buster mindfulness technique that I’ve been talking about, will be ready this week. I will follow this up with a free guided meditation to help you actually do it.

The Stress and Trauma of Modern Times

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“Mindfulness involves paying attention to something, in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally….You actually have to tell your brain that is your intention. It won’t know what you’re doing, and it will priorities its activities based on your emotions or your mental energy or your physical needs.”

Stan Rodski, The Neuroscience of Mindfulness, (2019)

Another good book released earlier this year on mindfulness. A psychologist/cognitive neuroscientist, talks about the basics of mindfulness.

Unless you take control of your thinking mind, it will run you. Your conscious awareness needs to direct your thinking mind to stop. It doesn’t need to stop for long to de stress your over cluttered thinking thoughts. But stop it must.

Without conscious attention to stopping, your brain will run on auto-pilot and continue to rehash all the unresolved traumatic events of your past.

This fast paced period of time in our history is stressing your fight/flight emergency system out. Most of our stress is from past traumas where our nervous system has not fully come down from the high alert state, created by one event or the high level of continued pressure from many events, in our current environment.

TV news is traumatic to your body. Video and satellite crosses and instant transfer of bad news from any part of the globe was never there one hundred years ago. Now it is on tap, through TV, social media, radio, newspapers etc. And your body responds as if it is a secondary traumatic event happening to you now.

Witnessing a traumatic event can be just as traumatic to your body as actually being in the event.

So it is very important to consciously each day have the awareness to switch off and stop at some point, or at a number of points.

De stressing daily is vital to your health.

Your body – the door way to greater health

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“The remnants of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted and then let go of, join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body.”

(Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, 2005)

Last week I quoted from Eckhart’s book that preceded The Power of Now. This week the quote is from the book that followed The Power of Now.

Everyone will have events in their lives where there are strong negative emotions that are hard to deal with. People find ways to cope with such events.

But coping is not healing and at some point those negative emotions need to be dealt with and released. If not, as Tolle says, they accumulate and join together to form tensions, pressures, pains, muscular restrictions, energy drains, limitations, stiffness, and then later, affect our thinking creating anxiety, depression and if still not dealt with, much worse, disease and even serious injury.

The good news is that you can do something about it for yourself by mindfully connecting to your body on a regular basis. Taking time to connect within allows you to contact the cells that are carrying that built up negative emotion.

By switching off distracting thoughts you open an inner door way within your body that allows you access to the community of cells that make up the different parts of your body. This crucial connection allows for a lot of self healing that scientists and doctors are still coming to grips with.

Learning to connect within, gives you unprecedented access to your physical vehicle as well as your past unprocessed emotions and traumas. Facing this past material is not always easy but it is worth the resulting freedom, reduced drama and enhanced health that is waiting on the other side of that old hidden pain.

This can be difficult to believe if you have been brought up thinking you have to always take something when you are unwell.

But if you learn how to face something now,
you most likely won’t have to take something later.

Healing the effects of Bullying at School

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A strong traumatic event from the past that clients often share is being bullied and teased at school. This can have such a strong effect on people’s lives later on. Many clients will say just how much bullying affected them in their lives. There has been more focus on this issue in the recent past but I thought it was worth mentioning it here again.

I enjoy working with kids with this issue. Parents will sometimes bring a child in for help with the anxiety and stress of such bullying.

Body based and movement work is excellent for this. Helping a child fight and hit back at the bullies in a session (kicking and punching into a big cushion) helps to release much pent up fight/flight stress in the child’s body. They feel great after, their confidence goes up and often the bullying stops.

So it is good to get it early in a child’s life. Sessions help provide a safe place for a child to gently get their physical power back. They may hit into a cushion tentatively at first, but eventually they can be pounding with a strong force that gives enormous confidence after. With strong overpowering bullying a child will retract and hide their power away for safety. If this happens for too long, a child will forget that they have this power available within them. Sessions help to coax this important fight reflex back out again.

Healing Trauma Naturally

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One of my specialty areas in my therapeutic work is helping with healing trauma. Traumas that are anxiety and panic creating within you that won’t switch off. Many people have such places within them, reactions that can’t be switched off easily and that can be triggered at the slightest hint of an unsafe situation or reminder of the original cause of the fear.

I attended a seminar recently that updated on the latest neuroscience research. One thing that perked my ears was hearing that scientists are working on discovering what causes this reactive fear in people and finding a way to switch that off. It was labeled as an ‘old brain’ reactive part carried over from our ancestral heritage that isn’t useful to us in this day and age.

My view is a bit different to this. I don’t think this ‘old brain’ piece of programming within us is such a bad thing. What we really should be looking at is why this reaction was created in the first place. And that takes us back to the cause of the problem, an old traumatic event where we couldn’t protect ourselves adequately enough, leaving unfinished the fight/flight response.

So what we should really be looking at is, asking the question – how can we access and complete this flight/fight response in the body and mind? This is the work and research that I do everyday. Finding better ways to access and release this old fear/trauma response in the body. It is done naturally, and in a holistic way. This work fills the missing experience that the person did not have at the time of the trauma.

Once it releases a client will comment, (a real example:)
” I feel I have unlocked some part of me that hasn’t rested in a long time.”

That says it all. Some part has finally rested and relaxed for the first time in a long time. And a big fear and anxiety has just melted away permanently. No need to find a switch and use chemicals/medications to ‘switch it off.’

Anxiety and panic reactions are there for a reason. It is the body saying, ‘HELP! I’m scared!’

It is not advisable to go around switching this alert response off.

This is what medications/drugs do. Numb out a persons feelings so they don’t feel the body’s cry for help. The anxiety is covered over. Unfortunately there are side affects and other feelings get covered over too. Resulting in a lower quality of life and aliveness. This is not a solution – walking around half alive.

When a client releases a trauma naturally, they feel the difference within them, they feel the relief, the freedom, the lightness. They feel more alive, more authentic and more human again.

Working with the body, mindfulness and subconscious carefully enough, creates these types of results regularly.
This is the ‘real thing’.

“Learn to live with it”

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I’ve heard this line many times. A statement made by well meaning therapists to clients of mine who were seeing such people in the past.

I heard this line again recently from a client referring to a friend of theirs who had been seeing a psychologist and getting CBT for their anxiety.

“Learn to live with it.”

I’m glad my client wasn’t happy hearing that. And needless to say nor was I.

With what’s available in the body based therapies now, anxiety is completely healable. What I can’t tell you is how many sessions it may take.

I’ve lost count as to the number of clients I have worked with over the years, who now have no, (or virtually no) anxiety to speak of. They have no anxiety that needs to be “lived with” for the rest of their lives. It’s gone. Finished. Completed. No more. In fact many even forget that they ever had it.

There are very advanced therapeutic methods available now that help completely heal anxiety and panic. The key –  is that they are body (nervous system) based, not cognitive based. Go to a cognitive based therapist and they can only really help you to “live with it” because they are only cognitive based trained. And this has it’s value too.

My aim with every client who wants it, is to heal the anxiety completely, 100%. And I don’t care how bad it is or how long the person has had it. It is healable completely.

In fact once it does heal the person is rarely the same again. They frequently end up even better than before. Transformed.

This is very transformative work.