TSHP334: How to get (and stay) organised

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What’s Coming This Episode?

Everyone’s busy, hey? It’s easy to be busy, in 2019. To be busy AND organised, though… that’s a little harder. Sean and Ed sat down to dish out some tips on how to stay organised.

Enjoy the show and take care, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

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Organisation vs OCD

 

We all need to be organised. We need to know where things are. We also know that what is inside is outside so that the state of our desk describes the state of our mind. But, to tell what is really going inside someone else’s head you need to understand them and to understand what it is that you are looking at. In that sense organisation is in the eye of the beholder. It makes sense to be organised. It does not make sense when the need for things to be tidy and organised becomes an obsession so that the person is unable to relax or stop. Organisation and obsession are different but they might appear to be similar.

To be organised is defined by the business dictionary as…

‘ …taking something that is messy, chaotic, or unordered and rearranging it logically, into a structured or coherent layout, or into specific and/or defined groups…’ 

We know that getting organised and de-cluttering can help us sort out our emotions and generally calm our mind. For myself the act of sorting out a cupboard or a drawer can be emotionally rewarding. The work of Maria Kondo, in showing people how to be organised and tidy, can reduce levels of anxiety allowing people to feel more emotionally and internally organised and at peace. However there is a point when positive need to be organised can become obsessive

Obsessions are thoughts, images, urges, worries or doubts that repeatedly appear in our mind so that we are then unable to stop or relax. Obsessions can lead to anxiety, worry and concern.  This may affect our ability to sleep, eat or interact with others. When obsession is repeated over time it can create compulsion. A compulsion is defined as need to  repeat an activity to reduce the level of anxiety that had been caused by the obsession. So that when we cannot relax because are having obsessive thoughts about something we experience the compulsion to act and do something about it.

While most obsessive behaviours are the result of stress or disorders thinking they can usually be solved through psychotherapeutic interventions such as mindfulness and talking therapies. In the extreme the obsessions and compulsions can move into psychiatry when they are considered a personality disorder. To be organised and to be tidy is normal behaviour. To develop obsessive compulsions and anxieties is abnormal.

Normal obsessive compulsive disorder can be moderated through regular mindfulness practice and developed self awareness.

Take care and be happy

Sean x

TSHP333: Winter Blues

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What’s Coming This Episode?

It’s that time of the year when some bright spark decides to changes the clocks for everyone. Thanks Siri! Not! The change of seasons can have a big impact on our mental health though, so let’s have a chat about how we can be READY…

Enjoy the show and take care, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

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Winter Blues

According to Kevin Loria depression may be our brain’s way of telling us to stop and solve a problem

There is a theory that suggests that rather than being a problem depression might be a specific behavioural strategy that we have evolved as a biological adaptation that serves a purpose. As Matthew Hutson explains in a Nautilus feature on the potential evolutionary roots of depression and suicidal behaviour , that the purpose of depressions might be to make us… 

…stop, understand, and deal with an important problem.

At this time of year people report symptoms of moderate to severe depression. It is the time of year when the sunlight fades and the levels of vitamin D start to drop and this reduces the level of serotonin in the brain. We are into depression season. 

Across the board in both the USA and Europe major depressive disorders are now so common that at as many as one in six people  will suffer from it.

So why does such a debilitating condition strike so many people? 

The traditional understanding is that depression is just a breakdown in the normal working of the brain. This is seen as a chemical imbalance that is treated by chemical medication designed to balance chemistry, change mood and create shifts in  behaviours.

Could depression have developed to help us?

Evolutionary psychologist Paul Andrews and psychiatrist J. Anderson Thomson first elaborated on this idea, called the “analytical rumination hypothesis,” in an article published in Psychological Review in 2009.

Their idea is that what we think of as a disorder is actually a way for our brains to analyse and dwell on a problem in the hopes of coming up with a way to deal with it. The researchers suggest it’s possible that a difficult or complex problem triggers a “depressive” reaction in some people that sends them into a sort of analytical mode which then enables them to change behaviours, strategies and attitudes. It allows them to stop long enough to solve a problem.

This intrigues me greatly because in the Ayurvedic model, my original training, depression is also seen as a gift, as a way of our system telling us that something was wrong and giving us the chance to sort it out. This would explain the increased rumination that arising in depressive episodes. Along side this in and increase in dream sleep. The two phases of sleep are deep sleep (NREM) and dream sleep (REM). It is assumed that deep sleep is the resting phase concerned with repair of the body and dream sleep is an active phase concerned with processing experience and emotion. In depression the dream sleep eats into the deep sleep so that despite sleeping for long periods of time the person does not experience rest and may become progressively more tired.

The concept that depression might be an evolutionary adaptation rather than a mental disorder is not the main consensus of the mental health community. in reality it cannot be true for all depression. It would be true for there are always those that suffer a reactive depression in response to a trauma or traumatic stimulus. Even so this could still account for around 80% of depressive episodes.

The problem is that in most cases depression is not the cause it is the symptomatic response to the cause. In western medicine we tend to only treat the symptom and pay little or no attention to the cause. 

It could be that if we accepted depression as a gift and took the opportunity to undertake a self audit to enable us to get our lives back on track. Instead we treat depression negatively as a problem and medicate the symptoms and fail to deal with the cause. It would make sense that if alongside medication we engaged in mindful therapy we could speed up treatment and help to dissolve depressive episodes. While some people do get referred for cognitive behavioural therapy it is not always an effective way to deal with depression. It is the addition of mindfulness that makes the therapy really effective. 

MBCT

Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy is designed to deal with and overcome issue of reactive or repetitive depression. MBCT, is recommended by the United Kingdom’s National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) for the prevention of recurrent and reactive depression and has also been shown to be effective in treating the symptoms of anxiety.

If we can look at the challenges that we face in life as learning opportunities rather than problems then we can to stop long enough to grow and develop. So, perhaps depression is the thing that can make us stop long enough to get our life right.

Take care and be happy

Sean x

TSHP332: What is Justice?

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What’s Coming This Episode?

Justice can be harder to come by than you might think. For many it is a given, but for far too many, it’s all too hard to come by. Social justice, legal justice and emotional justice, lets discuss them all…

Enjoy the show and take care, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

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Justice

The Uk was stunned recently by the American diplomat’s wife who allegedly killed a young man who was riding a motorcycle and then chose to claim diplomatic immunity and leave the country without having to face up or atone for her crime. This raised a lot of issues in the press and general conversation about the nature of justice. The issues of prison, punishment and retribution have been ongoing debates for hundreds of years and have led to extreme behaviours. At one end is the world of retribution and the extremes of sharia law at the other end are the liberal world of rehabilitation and learning.

I realised as we were talking about it that my own belief structures deal with this for me. It goes something like this. I see life as reincarnation and ongoing. That means for me that no one ever gets away with anything, that there are no free lunches and that all debts must be paid in full. I accept that for many people such ideas might seem ridiculous, for me it is very real.

The idea that life goes on and that our actions are all consequential is the basis of karma or what goes around come around or the idea that everyone gets theirs in the end. Quite simply  the concepts of Karma are those of the consequences of action. Karma acknowledges that the things that we do have an effect, this is the consequence. Attached to that is our responsibility for what we do and the effect that it has on both ourselves and on others. 

Often karma is mistaken as a law of negative retribution. But like most laws in the universe karma is neutral it is not concerned whether or not the effects of what we do lead to good things or bad things. Just like gravity, which has a universal effect on all things, karma is always in operation. It is true that if we treat other people well then the likelihood is that they will treat us well in turn, this is good karma. If we are treated badly because we have treated others badly then this is bad karma.

But we have a choice to allow the negativity of others to flow by so that we do not become attached to it. This is letting go of emotional negative attachments it is the forgiveness as described in step one of the Live In The Present book. We have a choice as to whether or not we become involved in karma. In this way we are responsible for how we feel about all that happens to us, even the most horrible and dreadful things. It is also the basis of how we see other people and how we judge the actions of other people. We are all judgemental and see the world from our own point of view. ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.’

We can become attached to the consequences of our actions or the actions of others. But, we do have a choice, we do not need to hold onto negative feelings. When difficult things do happen to us rather than seeing them as hurtful or bad things, we could perhaps just view such things in a neutral way. Or we might even see them as useful things from which we might learn and grow.

We don’t have problems we have learning opportunities

Often, when I work with people who are in difficult circumstances, the therapy is about them realising their own responsibility for their situation. Many of us want to blame others for how we are. It will always be true that the things that we experience will have an effect on us, but we have responsibility as to what we allow that effect to be.

We are never effected by events, it is our response to those events that is the effect

Because we choose our responses we can become intimately tied up in our experiences and create own karma. In the end we can never really blame other people for how we feel or for what has happened. Understanding this leads to personal growth.

If, after a difficult experience we can then choose to get our own back, we then get involved in retribution and vendetta. By doing this we feed and build our negative attachments or karmas and we do not grow or develop.

Both individually and collectively we have to decide how we will treat the wrong doers in our society. For some the thief should have their hand cut off or their forehead branded. For the liberalist the thief should be cared for, understood and re-educated. Neither way is right and neither way is wrong. It is simply that each has a consequence. Once we choose a consequence we choose what it is that will happen next. All the time we are either feeding or resolving karmas.

What you feed grows and what you starve dies

Take care, be happy and let go of hate or negative attachments

Sean x

TSHP331: World Mental Health Day 2019

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What’s Coming This Episode?

It’s World Mental Health Day so we thought we’d have a chat about this most important issue. Why is it so high profile now? What do we really need to do to keep a level head? All that and more…

Enjoy the show and take care, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

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World Mental Health Day

We are back to international mental health day. there is a big push this years to encourage people to talk and many celebrities have lined up to be honest and tell there own stories – it is good to talk

Mental health is generally defined as something like,  

‘a person’s condition with regard to their psychological and emotional well-being’.

According to .gov it is…

Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make choices. Mental health is important at every stage of life, from childhood and adolescence through adulthood.

Are you sane or mad?

I don’t believe in sane or mad models of human behaviour, I think that we are all mad it is just that we all have differing levels of madness that manifest in different ways. Think of it like this…

Imagine a cartwheel. The hub of the wheel is your core self which we might think of as the sane you. Out from the hub extend the spokes of the wheel. Imagine that each one of these spokes is an emotional or mental health spectrum numbered from 1 at the hub up to 100 at its end . So if one spoke is labelled ‘Anxiety’ where would you put yourself on that spectrum, 1 being no anxiety ever at all and 100 being continual full bloom panic attacks? We will all appear on the anxiety spectrum somewhere and depending what is happening in our lives we will be moving up and down sometimes more anxious than at other times.

If we look at the other spokes we will score somewhere on every spoke. There is depression, obsessive compulsive behaviour, anger, bereavement/loss, claustrophobia, agoraphobia, insensitivity, bullying, substance abuse, attention deficit, eating disorders, post trauma…in many ways this is endless. 

Mental health, just like physical health, is not in a static state, it fluctuates depending on what is happening and whether or not we are looking after ourselves. Just as our body will get ill from time to time so will our mind and our emotions. A virus in the body will keep on relocating until the resources of the body muster a defence and destroy it. It is the same in the mind and the emotions. One we get a little thought or feeling and start to ruminate on it, then it will grow and get bigger until we muster the defence mechanisms to overcome it.

Staying emotionally fit requires that we give ourself both the value and the time to attend to our needs. These may be physical, mental and emotional. I am forever asking people ‘what have you done for yourself in the last week?’ Sadly many people answer ‘nothing’ and then they wonder why they do not feel so good. You are the most important person in your life and if you do not look after you then you will never be able to really look after another person.

When you have become emotionally unwell it is usually time to talk. That might be to friends or family or you might require some more professional support from counselling or psychotherapy. You may also require some medication, just like your physical body, sometimes needs a hand to get things right.

The big message for this year’s International Mental Health Day is don’t hold it in and keep it to yourself, talk, share and let it out.

Take care, be happy and keep talking

Sean x

TSHP330: Managing Stress in a Stressful World

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What’s Coming This Episode?

Who’s busy? I’m busy! You’re busy! Everyone’s busy. When does ‘busy’ becomes ‘stressed’, though? How can stress be managed and brought under control? Let’s dive in…

Enjoy the show and take care, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

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Dealing with Stress

 maybe you can lift it with some positive mindfulness

This week we were looking at the concepts of stress. We both identified that we have experienced that bone tiredness of stress and fatigue. We were talking about how we each get stressed and what we do with it. My route, after venting, is to resort to mindfulness  and meditation on the basis that i can let it go and stop ruminating. That got me thinking about the differing levels of stress that can so easily become fatigue. Real stress, not just being busy, becomes debilitating,

Fatigue is a different thing to tiredness. Tiredness can be resolved with a little rest, relaxation or sleep. Fatigue is like being bone tired, it is deep down inside you and the more embedded that it becomes the more it takes for you to get beyond it and hopefully get rid of it.

The experience of fatigue has been given many titles, some of which are accepted by the medical profession and some are referred to psychology as though they do not really exist. From my work as a psychotherapist I see many forms of fatigue. In most cases the experience of fatigue is a learned habit, and as you know from the live in the present work, all habits can be changed or replaced.

Let’s have a look at a few reasons for fatigue.

Under-load is the opposite of over-load. When someone is under-loaded they have little or nothing to do. This is the classic couch potato. There is weight gain, poor diet, and a resultant lack of energy. 

Clinical depression, is when the body chemistry is out of balance and can only be adjusted with medication. This chemical imbalance can create feelings of fatigue. Clinical depression is mainly treated with medication along with psychotherapeutic support.

Reactive depression  is when we have been subjected to an emotional trauma that has effected our body chemistry and created an imbalance. Again medication will help but the key here is psychotherapy.

SAD seasonal depression is when the vitamin D levels drop in the winter due to the reduced sunlight. This can be treated with vitamin D supplements.

Repressed anger is when people have internalised anger about people or events that is not dealt with or resolved.

Post Viral Fatigue Syndrome (PVFS)  this is when the body system has been compromised by the infection and needs to rebuild itself. Some medication will help but in most cases it is time, good food, and rest.

The following are not recognised by all medical authorities who can sometimes write of people’s fatigue as psycho-somatic. These include:

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis  (ME) 

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome CFS

Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome CFIDs

In some cases even polymyalgia and fibromyalgia are seen as all in the mind. However, my colleagues in the pain clinic successfully treat many forms of fatigue using traditional medicine, psychotherapy and even acupuncture. 

Overcoming fatigue usually means that you have to take responsibility for your own system and become the expert in your own body and your own emotional system. It does start with ruling out health problems first.

So here are some ideas that you might consider.

Lack of sleep is bad for you. If you sleep less than seven hours or more than nine hours per night you have a problem. Less sleep indicates anxiety and more sleep indicates depression.

If you can’t sleep find out why and do something about it. Excess weight will also make you tired as will stress. If you find that you feel down in the winter and have SAD syndrome, get a vitamin D test, talk to your GP and maybe consider investigating St John’s Wart a herbal broad spectrum anti-depressant.

Things to consider…

Exercise – get your heart beating fast for twenty to thirty minutes everyday

Yoga – is a good way to promote feelings of relaxation and reduce fatigue in you muscles

Hydrate – with water, drink around 2 litres a day, feed your body and your brain

Bed early – get enough sleep but not too much

Meditate – research suggests that the ratio of meditation to sleep is about 5 to 1, that means that 10 minutes good meditation or relaxation is the equivalent of 50 minutes of sleep

Siestas! Afternoon nap – and power napping can boost your energy and you immune system

Don’t ruminate

When you ruminate on an issue it grows in your mind – ‘What you feed grows and what you starve dies’. The more you ruminate the more it takes over your system either good or bad.

The last bit is have some fun. Laughter and smiles that can raise your spirit and reduce your feelings of stress and fatigue.

Take care

Sean x