‘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.)

Lock down #5 – Staying in Control

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When a traumatic event hits – where your locus of control resides,
will greatly determine if that event will have a long term affect on your health and life.

Today my home state of Victoria just announced another (fifth hard sharp, five day lockdown) in Melbourne Australia.

So it is important to turn the trauma lens this week, on the effects of a lockdown to your health.

You can have a trauma in your life, if you have been: Failed, Attacked, Threatened, Abandoned, Terrorised or Abused by other human beings, and that their actions have made you feel (even for a split second) that you could die or be seriously wounded or hurt. Even if that didn’t eventuate.

This split second fear occurs because you don’t seemingly have control over your life’s safety. You could die – and for a moment there is nothing you can do about it. That moment is what fires the limbic brain’s amygdala, switching on a fire alarm in your body, which activates the lower brain into fight/flight to attempt to save you. And it can be quite a strong response in the body creating extreme stress and anxiety responses for years to come.

Having a fifth lockdown is now compounding the trauma/stress created by the first four lockdowns. Especially if people’s income/business have been severely affected. Losing a lot of income can feel like a serious threat to ones survival. And it can feel as bad as facing death, if there are no savings to fall back on.

So if this registers as a traumatic event, the fight/flight/freeze system kicks in. The fight – protests, anger, abuse for the government, blame and attacking. The flight – worry, anxiety, panic, firing staff, moving to the country.
The freeze – negativity, depression, giving up, feeling lost, withdrawing from the world. To name a few.

If your locus of control is outside of your body, then the lockdown can affect you as above. But..if your locus of control is within your body, you have a much better chance of limiting any traumatic reactions now and in the future.

To strengthen that internal locus of control, body mindfulness meditation is a great way to acquire that skill. Ongoing practice, helps keep that skill strong and a buffer to outside future unforeseen events.

Because from the inside you can control your responses. Body Mindfulness practice gives you more and more access to your internal world. The more you can access your body from the inside, the less affected you will be by outside circumstances and the quicker you can recover, when hit.

By focusing what’s happening right now in your body, you get more present, and can think more calmly in this moment, leading to better wiser decisions and less reactions day to day – however long the lockdown lasts

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.

Conviction and Repetition – The keys to greater health.

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“There are no incurable diseases. Only incurable people.”
Bernie Siegel MD.

With the escalating Corona virus at the moment, this is good to remember.

Dr Bernie Siegel is a surgeon who over twenty five years ago noticed how some of his patients healed in remarkable ways that were not expected. Looking at these exceptional cases he realised how the patient’s self healing ability came from their attitude, beliefs and emotional expression to name just a few.

Diseases that should have killed some patient’s didn’t. These patient’s found a way to self heal themselves.

It is good to read and hear about these well respected doctors. They confirm that we as humans have better healing abilities than we ever realised before.

Spending regular time to go within your body and spending deep meditative mindful time, giving your body and it’s 50 trillion cells more love and attention, is very powerful.

But to do this exercise/practice regularly, you have to believe that such ability is there within you.

Know that it is.

Hopefully you can feel the benefits of the reduction in body stress and allow that to spur you on to regular practice. This regularity and depth of focus (that only closing your eyes can do) accumulates to produce a much stronger immune system and a healthier freer functioning body.

If you find it difficult to get that depth of focus, coming to a few of Mindfulness classes in a group can really help reset your connection deeper. Even if you have to travel a fair way (if you live in Melbourne) to get here, it is worth doing every now and then. If you live a fair way away, you don’t have to attend every week.

It can be once a month, or for a few consecutive weeks once every three to four months. The period doesn’t matter. Maintaining the conviction and depth does.

YouTube
My recent appearances on the Channel 31 TV show Health, Wellbeing and Lifestyle have concluded. All five interviews (each 8 mins long) are now permanently available on YouTube for viewing. Or you can click on each one below.

You can also subscribe to my YouTube channel (George Gintilas). There are many more videos to come.

I appear in the following episodes (and the topic):
Episode 5 – How we Heal
Episode 6 – Trauma (Biggest block to healing)
Episode 8 – Anxiety (Hyper Arousal)
Episode 11 – Depression (Hypo Arousal)
Episode 12 – Presence and Spirituality

Body Mindfulness – Your Everyday Active State

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“Mindfulness in Action – This is something to be practiced throughout the day, rather than just for 10 minutes.”

Leah Weiss – Stanford University’s Compassion Cultivation Program

Mindfulness in action. This is a good term. When you do a mindfulness meditation practice regularly, eventually what begins to happen, is that the inner focus you have while your eyes are closed transfers to your waking active state and for longer and longer periods, before the day and your intellect take over once again.

The ultimate aim of meditation is to have that inner calm connected aware state throughout your day. No matter what you are doing – doing it, in a mindful present state is much more productive and enriching than rushing through and/or over thinking everything.

It is not very enjoyable to live the moment in a rushed over thinking state. It is probably why people are doing whatever it is quickly, in order to get to that state that they long for, all the while missing it, in this present moment now.

As I emphasis in every mindfulness class – you are already perfect inside. That perfection, still, alive, loving, free self is already there within you. Closing our eyes and focusing within for long periods, help to get glimpses of this and helps to have those glimpses shine throughout your day in your daily actions.

The big value of Stillness

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“True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.”

Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks (2003)

Those still moments in your day are very precious. It is very important to have time in each day where you have that quiet stillness in your body and your mind.

In those moments you will think clearer and be closer to the real solution to issues and problems that you have to solve.

Rather than thinking through everything. You stop, be still, be blank, allow space and time for things to reveal themselves in a new way. It is a reset of your normal habitual pathways and programmed thinking.

By allowing stillness you affirm that there is an intelligence far greater than thinking thoughts which also exists. If you don’t believe this, you will highly likely never allow your mind to be still.

But this stillness time is vital to your health, productivity and fulfillment in life.

So, have you taken time out today to be still? If not, plan it in, make it important. You will progress much more smoother in life with such a practice.

If you are not used to it, stillness may initially look and feel like staring blankly into thin air or out of a window. If you haven’t practiced stillness much in the past you may find yourself drifting off. Your mental mind has been so over used with little pause, that it is exhausted when you stop and not think.

You haven’t used the pause button for so long that when you do, you feel the tiredness and habit of wanting to sleep or just staring blankly. That’s not quality stillness. That’s your body wanting to catch up, rest and recharge. So you may need to rest for a while before the quality returns and benefits are there. Although the resting will also be beneficial to your brain.

NEWS
For people in Melbourne, I will be appearing on a new TV show that started three weeks ago on Channel 31 titled Health, Wellbeing and Lifestyle.
It will air every Tuesday 12pm and repeat Thursdays 9am and Fridays 8.30pm.

I will appear in the following episodes (2019) and the topic:
Dec 24th Episode 5 – How we Heal
Dec 31st Episode 6 – Trauma (Biggest block to healing)
Jan 14th Episode 8 – Anxiety (Hyper Arousal)
Feb 4th Episode 11 – Depression (Hypo Arousal)
Feb 11th Episode 12 – Full Presence and Spirit

Each of my segments runs for around eight minutes. The show runs for 30 minutes. If you are not in Melbourne, the program will be streamed live and you can watch it here from Channel 31’s website.

Eventually these episodes will appear in my youtube channel.

How far ahead are you playing out your day?

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On describing why he meditates, AFL Football player Zak Jones recently replied..

“I started very slow, but then it became before every game to clear my head and try not play out the game before it began.

For me it was enjoying this for what it is. There’s going to be highs and lows and if you’re worrying about what’s going to happen you’re not enjoying it.”

This leads to a great point that meditation helps reduce worry. How far ahead are you thinking throughout the day? Your body only needs to deal with this moment right now.

Anything more than this is extra stress that is not necessary. Future worry creates stress on your body that affects the quality of your present moment action right now. It also adds extra stress on your body, (which is responding like it is real.)

So how far ahead are you playing out your day right now in your head, while doing what you need to do in this moment? Bring all your thoughts right back to just this moment right now, reading this. These words right now. Nothing more.

If you manage to bring yourself back to this moment and just reading these words right now, you will find there is more enjoyment, doing just this moment. There is also more peace and quiet in your head because you don’t need to be thinking and worrying about the future right now.

When it’s actually time to plan your day, then that’s when you deliberately do it. Any other time, is just added body stress and wasted energy.

Mindfulness meditation helps to bring your mind and body back operating more from this present moment.

Distraction is the way we avoid our inner Pain

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“As is the case with all human behaviour, distraction is just another way our brains attempt to deal with pain. If we accept this fact, it makes sense that the only way to handle distraction is by learning to handle discomfort.”

Nir Eyal, indistractable, (2019)

Stopping, closing your eyes and meditating on your inner world isn’t always comfortable if you are doing it for self healing. There will be times when uncomfortable feelings and sensations arise. And these will arise when you are disciplined enough to stay with your practice long enough, that you go deeper.

Going deeper isn’t always comfortable. When you have the first sign of an uncomfortable feeling you can tend to 1/ Distract yourself from feeling the pain. 2/ Stop sooner and open your eyes, 3/ Switch to focusing on the thoughts in your head rather than your body or 4/ Leave your body entirely and float off.

All of these are escapes from feeling what’s actually going on in the present moment in your body now. You cannot heal further if you don’t accept and allow the deeper pain to release.

Feeling the difficult feelings is the key. Making it okay to feel what is there in manageable doses. Accepting that they are normal. Staying with the body part and sensation helps to keep you out of your head. Adding a story about the painful feeling doesn’t help. Feeling it directly in your body is what helps it move and release the most.

It is okay to feel difficult and painful feelings. They are part of the human condition. Ignoring them will likely just create more problems later that you don’t need. So allowing pain, fear and anger to arise without judgment, in manageable doses, can go a long way to releasing painful feelings easily.

As you accept and release the discomfort, you will need to distract yourself less. So it becomes easier to stay on task and follow through on commitments.