Archive for category: Blog

Cyberchrondria has been with jus for many years. I always called it Google-itis. It is when the patient or the client has become so well informed about their condition that they often know more about it, or think that they know more about it, than their doctor or therapist. Sometimes, what they think is information can be ‘mis-information’ as the sources of their information maybe dubious and come from any site or chat room on the internet.

According to Laura Donnelly, health editor (UK) Daily Telegraph, 

 

    ‘”Cyberchondria”  is fuelling an epidemic of health anxiety, with one in five NHS appointments taken up by hypochondriacs and those with irrational fears, experts have warned.’

Well that was written before Covid-19 so I expect that there are many more appointments from people fearing that they have a covid related condition. Or it could be that people are avoiding the NHS for fear of catching it. Having had covid and having, what I assume is, long covid, which is not diagnosed as such, do I have Cyberchrondia? This information about the symptoms that I have been feeling are from other people and from the internet.

Cyberchrondia is the modern digital equivalent of hypochondria that is a fear of illness often morbidly so. Usually seen as delusional, often accompanied by the hysterical development of physical symptoms that are dismissed by the doctor or therapist. Sadly I do see, on a regular basis, those with genuine symptoms and concerns ignored by their physician, who suspect them of hypochondria, only to go on and develop full blow and, sometimes, fatal disease that might have been cured if diagnosed earlier. 

If the statistics are true and that twenty percent of NHS time is wasted, the money spent looking after people who are not ill we have a problem…. But, just hold on a minute, maybe we have this wrong and we do have a problem, just not the one that we think we have.

What takes these people to the doctor in the first place?

Why would someone invest so much of their time and energy in worrying about being ill? Ok, so maybe they do not have a physical medical issue but they certainly due have a issue. It might just be called anxiety. 

In my discipline of psychotherapy we recognise that around 60% of those visiting a general practitioner/physician have an anxiety issues rather than or as well as a physical problem. We also know that when patients do have a genuine physical issue it is often exacerbated through their anxiety and concerns.

This does not mean that these people are wasting NHS time because they do not have a issues, they very much do have an issue it is called ‘Health Anxiety’. In covid health anxiety had increased dramatically.

Health Anxiety

All forms of anxiety happen when the consciousness of the individual is projected into their future. They are not living in their present. Fear of flying, is not fear of flying it is fear of crashing, fear of heights is fear of falling and so on.

You need a good imagination

Any anxiety can be defined as the person projecting into the future and imagining things that may never happen and then living those fears in the present as though they are actually happening right now. The better the person imagination the more intense their anxiety. You cannot be anxious without a good imagination. The person with health anxiety is using their imagination to assume and fear the worst and living those fears in the present as if they are true.

Often phobias and anxiety fears run side by side. So that health anxiety can lead to many phobic reactions and changes in behaviour to avoid a supposed or suspected illness or infection. Because of this health anxiety is often accompanied by OCD or obsessive compulsive disorder, the obsessive recitation of actions or thoughts. in reality the need to visit and revisit the internet to Google symptoms and diseases is also a form of OCD.

Symptom substitution 

The problem for these people is not that it may not be ‘health anxiety’ it maybe that they have ‘anxiety’ disorder. When someone has learned the habit of anxiety, living a supposed future in the present, the anxiety will attach itself to whatever is the latest focus of their attention. So now, with covid, it just happens to be health. If we resolve this obsession with covid the anxiety will simply attach itself to something else. So, now we have fear of flying followed by fear of nuclear war, followed by fear of losing a job, followed fear of becoming homeless. The attachments made by anxiety can go anywhere on an endless list of possibilities.

This is a real problem

This is not a fantasy. For the sufferer it is very real. It is not something where you can tell the person to ‘pull yourself together and just stop worrying’. From my experience as a therapist, and from what I read, anxiety is a developing and increasing problem. We can see from these statistics from the NHS and from the information form the office of national statistics (ONS) that amount of hours and days lost to sickness absence due to anxiety is a growing problem. So, if we are to solve the problem the question is why is it developing and what can we do about it? And, accepting that covid is making this much worse.

Life style changes

The person that was, just a few generations ago, driving a horse and cart is now flying a jumbo jet.  The world has changed, we have not. In the preindustrial, pre-urban society we ate what we could grow, foods that were in season and our expectations were less. With industrialisation and production comes choice and we now know that choice is stressful. Research shows us that if, when we are in the supermarket, we have a choice of one hundred different types of cheese, this in itself creates stress for us. If the choice is limited to less that ten types of cheese the stress much less. Think of the level of choices that we all have in all parts of our life. More choice, more decision making, more opportunity to get it wrong, creates more stress.

From the moment you wake to the moment that you arrive at work or school you will have processed more information than your great grandparents would have processed in several months. Life and news is instantaneous. Most of us are contumely connected. We cannot escape it and simply relax. 

Longevity

With improved living standards, nutrition and medication has come a longer life. In the UK we are looking at female death age in the mid nineties and men in the late eighties. In one sense with more time has come more anxiety. Also with longer life has come more disease. Illnesses that a few generations ago people would simply not have lived long enough to get have now become common place. We probably all know someone who has had cancer. We are now told that 50% of us will get cancer. However, we also told that the majority of us will survive it. The message that we focus on will depend on our anxiety. Those with anxiety disorder are likely  to hear “50% of us will get cancer and die from it”. Those without anxiety disorder are likely to hear “most of us will survive it”. There are other aspects of potential anxiety related to longevity such as pensions, financial support and care homes etc. 

Expectation

Along with increased life has come increase expectation. Expectation of wealth and consumerism, an expectation of things, of stuff. Many of us are no longer prepared to save before we purchase we simply rely on credit. Just like anxiety, credit gives us a way to experience the potential future in the present. From car loans and mortgages to credit cards and store cards we live the future in the present. It is then that we experience the pressure, the anxiety of having to pay it all off. The average UK household currently has about £15,400.00 of unsecured credit, that is before mortgages and car loans. (Guardian)

Media

The development of our expectations is mainly fuelled by the media, advertising and marketing. It serves to convinces us that we need things that we have never known about before. The new phone that appears every eighteen months, the lasted model of car, fashion, bags, shoes and consumables. For many fashion equals stress as we are convinced of those things that we just must have. 

News

Alongside media is the news that is broadcast at us every hour of the day. News rarely  ever tells us anything that is good, rather it fires up the fears and anxieties of the listeners. News is rarely balanced. News is about all the bad that is happening and all the bad that will happen next. It feeds our fear and anxiety, it creates anxiety. 

Internet

When it come to health we have Google etc., that does everything from misdiagnosing our symptoms, to making us envious of those wonderful lives that we see on FaceBook and Instagram, to wanting products from Amazon and other online markets. 

Technology

But, we must not forget our need for the devices that allow us to play with the internet. Phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, smart TVs. I wonder what device you are using to read this on? 

Strangely the word ‘chondria’ comes from the Greek meaning cartilage. So hyper would infer an over focussing on the inner tissues hence the medical connection. If we take chondria, in a modern sense to mean “what we focus upon” Cyberchondria makes sense.

As we come out of covid and refocus our attention let’s try and focus on the positive and use the internet to reinforce what is good in life and not keep feeding the fear of what will happen next.

Take care and be happy and whatever your individual chondria is try and make it a positive one.

Sean x

 

Turning the covid experience into positive joy 

Following on from recent podcasts this week I want to look at the meaning of life. Many of us see ourselves as not who we but by what we do, which takes me back to the idea are we human beings or human doings. In lockdown, furlough and absence from the work place many people have lost that sense of identity on the basis of, if I am what I do and now I am not doing it who am I? It is a short step from having no identity to feeling that life is pointless. What is the point?

In the work that I do in both private and public organisations the lack of purpose and direction, during lockdown, has created stress that leads to a lack of motivation and feeling of what is the point? Those that feel that they do have a point have managed to maintain a clear direction and purpose, they are more energise and even dynamic. Those that feel that they have a direction and a purpose suffer less from stress related conditions. 

Having a direction is having a purpose.

This can takes us to the fundamental questions of life. When life feels meaningless and we feel we have lost our purpose in life our value can feel diminished. Many people question their own validity and why they are alive.

Question: What is the purpose of your life?

That is a big question and is the one that can create a lot of stress and can lead to… 

Why are we here? What’s is life all about? What happens when we die?

The deal is that we all need to fill in space in between birth and death. We can either find a meaningful way to do that or we can blunder through and try to cope and survive this thing called ‘life’. Often we have no need to think about these deep issue. We are born, we go to work, raise our families and eventually retire. Unless something happens to make us question life then it simply just is.

When we ask the questions why I am alive and what I am supposed to be doing with my life we will get a variety of answers. Biologists tell us that our role is to reproduce. Some scientist tell us that life is just a chance mistake and that we should just put up with it. The religious lobby tells us generally that life is hard and life is earnest and that we are here to learn and grow in a spiritual way and, that if we are good we will get our reward in heaven. One priest told me that we all have “our own cross to bear” and that we should see suffering as a good thing. Hey ho.

It seems to me that life is supposed to be happy thin and that each of us is entitled to our own fulfilment. Suffering to me is a bad thing but there are  those who believe that we all have to suffer. Suffering is a bad deal, I don’t like that and don’t want it, you can keep it.

So, my thinking goes this way. If we are going to live a happy life then we need to devote time to  doing things that make us happy. The question for all of us  is what is it that makes us happy? I guess this is another question point.

Question: What is it that would make you happy?

Despite Covid and lockdown and travel restriction and all the rest of it that will, in all likelihood, go on for a long time yet, we need to find our own happiness.

My life is simple I am happy when I have a supportive family and I can playing music and work with people. Working with people is a large part of my life, it is something that makes sense to me out of the mad things going on in life…

If all look after each other we will all be ok

Working with other people because it makes me feel good, it makes me smile and it gives my life a sense of purpose. If I got more joy from collecting stamps, being in the army or being a mortician I would be doing those things instead. 

As I talk to people as we are going through the Covid experience I see that the change in the way we have been living has made many people question their life. I have seen relationships created or  strengthened and damaged or destroyed. I have seen people create their purpose and start, or plan to start, new projects and businesses. It is as though the suffering and stress of the covid experience has shaken people into making decision and facing up to life.

The extensions of joy

Right now in this Covid madness it is good to take some time to consider your life purpose and meaning and decide what you are going to do with it. The weird thing is that when you do connect with your purpose it really is exciting and creates joy and  inspiration. 

What ever you decide to do with your life let it be joyful, and it is wonderful if the life that you are now living creates your purpose and your joy, cherish it.

Take care and be happy.

Sean x

At times of stress we all need somewhere to go that is stress free to relax and rest our system. This reduces stress hormone and blood pressure improves mood and makes us happier. At the present time the need to get away from the stresses of everyday life have rarely bee greater.

If you are lucky you have a physical place that you can to and just chill and relax.  It might a special place near where you live. Or it might be somewhere like a room in your house. It could simply be chair or a special corner of a room.

Using a mobile safe space

However if you can’t find anywhere around you there are other options. It may be difficult to create a safe place while you are at work. At home have kids or family to look after. Or you might be in a situation where there is no place to go or nowhere in your home. It is then that you need a mobile safe place that you can access at anytime, anywhere in any situation. This is when you need to go within yourself and create an internal safe place. Then you can simply close your eyes and just go there. The more you visit your safe place the easier and quicker it is to get to.

Safe place and your brain

Right in the centre of your brain is the amygdala. This is a tiny almond shaped organ that is responsible for the stress response that is called ‘fight, flight or freeze’. The amygdala becomes aroused, for reasons often below your awareness. These could be unresolved emotional issues, you may need therapy, or current stressful situations. Then stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol are released in the ‘fight, flight or freeze’ response. These are designed to keep us safe as a common reaction to threat and stress that allows us to respond. When the system is often activated in this way we call it anxiety. If the activation is continuous when no real stressor remains present it is described as generalise anxiety disorder or GAD. However the pressures of everyday life can lead to a continued level of stress hormones in our body and brain.

Cardiovascular responses

When our system is in continual stress response of fight, flight, freeze the stress hormones negatively effect our cardiovascular system. The first thing that happens is raised blood pressure. With this come the increased risk of heart attack and stroke. Hi blood pressure often underlies many diseases. The second is the with continual levels stress hormone, adrenaline and cortisol etc, can lead to a hardening of the arteries which further increases the incidence of heart attack and stroke. It can also be the cause of vascular dementia. In reality stress hormone is probably the biggest cause of heart attack, stroke and vascular dementia above all other causes.

Relaxation 

In our society many people are doers not be-ers. The ability to just ‘be’ is an art form. When we give more value to what we do and what we achieve rather than how well we can relax and simply just ‘be’ then life goes out of balance. Creating a safe place rebalances the system and teaches us to learn ‘be’ rather than continually doing.

Meditation and a safe place 

The ability to meditate can be part of creating a safe place. Meditating is not doing something though it is actively doing something it is being. To learn to simply ‘be’ through the process of meditation will transform your cardiovascular system and your psychological mood. Making you happier and healthier.  Meditation is a technique, there are many techniques, and creating a safe place is a method using a visualised space that you create in your mind. Both meditation and visualise safe place have beneficial effects on health and mood.

Finding your safe place

If you close your eyes, relax and visualise a safe place where would it be? It could be somewhere that you have visited such as a park or a wood. It might be your family home or a room. It could be complete a fantasy that you have created in your mind. It is somewhere where nothing can hurt and nothing can harm, where all you need to do is to relax, free from the stresses and anxieties of your everyday life. When you visit that space you are completely and utterly safe and secure.

Come to the beach

On the Live In The Present website in the mindfulness toolbox you will find a recording called The Beach. This a guided relaxation/meditation for you to visualise and create your own safe place. You construct your own beach. It might be one that you already know or one that you could imagine would be your ideal, perfect beach. 

Essentially a visualise safe place is somewhere where you can go in an instant at any time where nobody wants anything and nobody needs anything. Where you are completely and utterly safe and completely secure. Where nothing can hurt you and nothing can harm you al you have to do is relax and simply just be. Regular, even daily, use of an inner safe place can be life transforming to the point where people may ask you what is different about because you seem so different and calm.  When you learn to use your safe place you will find that the things that once made you feel stressed and anxious now make you feel calm. This is because they no longer have a negative effect on your amygdala and your levels of stress hormone are now drastically reduced. Pretty good for the investment of twenty minutes a day, and you might even life a longer, happier and healthier life.

Be happy stay safe and enjoy your safe space

Sean x 

In the last podcast we were looking at people’s fear of returning to the workplace and imposter syndrome. Alongside these fears is the fear of failure. I have been trying explain to people that what we see as failure may not actually be a bad thing, how else do we learn? As my American friends say…

…we don’t have problems we have learning opportunities. 

If we can change the concept of failure to being a learning point then our previous experience of failure can become a positive and not a negative. After all had we not had we not had the experience we would not have had the opportunity to learn the lesson.

The opposite of failure is an attitude

We live in a world of opposites that are totally dependent on each other, one cannot exist without the other. Hot and cold, high and low, rough and smooth, light and dark, happy and sad, positive and negative, rich and poor, good and evil, the list is endless. Yet each of these symbiotic twins are relative to each other. Though they only ever a relative concept. For example something will only seem cold if it is at a lower temperature of what we have labelled hot. Just as something will only seem hot if it is a higher temperature then what we have labelled cold. The difference between these twins is never an ‘actual’ measurement it is a ‘relative’ measurement.

Compared to the ceiling the floor is low. Compared to the sky the ceiling is low. Compared to the moon the sky is low. Compared to the Sun the moon is low. Compared to Alpha Centauri the Sun is low. It is all just the way that we look at it. Our concepts of success and failure have such a profound effect on our self esteem and our ability to function happily in our life. Even if you are on benefits in the UK, you may feel relatively poor but, you are actually in the richest 10% of the worlds population. I worked with someone who felt a failure because all the houses in their street has two cars and they only had one. This type of attitude os known in psychology as relative deprivation. Because it is a relative relationship our experience and beliefs will vary. 

My concept of success might be your concept of failure. 

Let’s say your success is to have one million pounds and for me five hundred pounds would be my success. You may then experience my success as a failure. When the average wage was about £18k I remember being told that is you did not earn £40k you were not even on the first run of the ladder. the ladder was their relative concept of success. Life is not a competition it is a journey. I is not what we have it is what we do that is important.

I have often said that I see competition as a senseless wast of time. My example is that if nine people embark on the 100 metre dash only one person will experience success while eight people will experience failure.

It is taking part that counts not winning

Competitive types tell this is the wrong way to look at it because the eight that didn’t win the race will be driven on to do better next time and become winners. The person who continually comes fourth managed to come third so this is a success. Or one runner improved their time and felt success. In my world to have competed at a high level meeting at all and to come last might be experienced as success and one not to be missed.

Failure could be the mother of invention 

I am reminded of Eddison and his quest to invent the light bulb. His problem was finding the right element that would glow without burning out that would create light. He tried over 200 different elements before he found tungsten that worked. That is over 200 experiences of failure, or was it. I have often thought about his tenacity. At what point would I have conceded failure and given up. Was it that each element that failed spurred him on to try the next in his determination to succeed?

Remember both success and failure are our own individual concepts

I suspect that it is our concept of failure that is vitally important to our achieving our concept of success. Just as there is no up without down, and there is no success without failure. The point from which we start anything is the down point and the goal that we are aiming for is the up point. When we look up to where we want to be we are setting our goal. Achieving our goal is our success and this is often tied up with our self esteem just as not achieving our goal is our failure and leads to a loss of our self esteem.

Learning from our failures

My experience, both personally and working with others, is that that the pain of failure is the spur that creates the energy that drives us towards success. A business person can learn from a bankruptcy so that it never happens again, we come out of a failed relationship with the knowledge that allows us to succeed next time, the injuries that we experience in training enable us to adapt to succeed in our sport.

When failures become learning points we learn and grow

So, I want to challenge the concept failure and the idea of success. In this world of twinned opposites we need to continually learn from one to achieve the other. So, I prefer to think of “failure” as an opportunity. We don’t have failures we have learning points that, if used consciously and creatively, enable us to move towards our success. In that sense there are never problems only opportunities.

Planning our success

Ok, so if we have a starting point and we have a goal we need to make the journey from one to the other. Most people set the goal too high and then don’t reach it. This is then allows them to label themselves self as a failure. To make the journey it needs to be broken down into achievable steps that create the path to success. 

Forward Base you success

Forward basing is an exercise that I use with individuals, couples and teams who need to achieve a goal. You can do this right now in your kitchen, If it is a team I am using a gym hall. On one wall I stick a big sheet of flip chart paper. On this I write where we are up to in the NOW. On the opposite wall I put another sheet of paper. On this I write where we want to get to, this is the GOAL. The next job is to put sheets of paper on the floor that become the stepping stones from where we are now to the goal we want to get to. This is the plan. Each step is set at an achievable distance so that with each step there is the feeling of ongoing success. Once the steps have been set out we then can create a timeline along the wall so that we have the steps that we need to take set in a time frame. This is a plan.

None of this is set in stone. The time frame can vary and the steps can move. If one step is not completed we go back to the previous step and either try again or adapt or change it. The point of forward basing is to create a flow of continued success that builds self esteem and drives us on to our desired goal. When we forward base we are able to use success rather than failure as the drive towards our goal.

1: What do you consider to be your failures?

2: How can you turn these into useful learning points?

3: If you were to forward base what would you write on the NOW sheet and what would be on the GOAL sheet?

4: From this you can create your steps and your timeline.

Failure, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder only you can define your failures and acknowledge your successes. In my own life I have had many learning points. The only failures that I would Identify have been when I didn’t attend to the learning points and then needed to repeat the lesson. I also acknowledge that I have had many, many successes and that makes me a happy person who feels successful.

Take care, be happy and successful 

Sean x 

After we did the podcast on smell several people have spoken to me about the idea and other ideas around it. Most seem to agree with me that the constructed world that we live in is no longer natural and rather than smelling like us it smells like a chemist pallet of poisons. Someone said to me that they started thinking about when they were a kid and the phrase ‘someone who has a nose for business’. They payed out to me the tapping of their nose with the first finger of their right hand which, when I was kid translated as ‘good deal’ or ‘a word to the wise’. Anyway the conversation continued to the idea of being  able to smell a rat, a fiddle or a bad deal. Then, we talked about the variety of scams that are now hitting us from the internet. That took us back to another podcast when we had spoken about one of the main deficits in online video calls is the complete lack of smell. The comment was ‘online it is harder to smell a rat’. Interesting comment especially as a we all, apparently, are cash rich from the savings that we have made in lockdown.

Money, Money, Money

Money makes the world go round!  Or so they say. In lockdown the world of retail has, in many ways, ground to a halt. At the same time savings have grown. Now the shops are opening up again and they want our money.

Is it time to send, spend, spend ?

Money is a fantasy. It doesn’t actually exists. The piece of paper, the token, that we call a note, is just that. It is a piece of paper. Every bank note, in every country, has some kind of statement that implies that it is a token that has a value, “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of…” yet if you were to go to the bank of England and ask for your pounds they will probably think that you are mad. The basis of money is that we, as society, agree that the token, the note, has a value that we all agree to maintain.

The need to use money tokens to get beyond the problems of barter became an essential. After all if I am buying your chicken and I want to trade my cow how will give me my change? Anyway, we all use money, often in the form of credit, to create a pool of energy that we can exchange for goods and services, and Christmas means spend, spend, spend. 

If you follow our blogs and the podcasts you will realise the importance of the relationship between various addictive issues/substances and the production of dopamine in the brain and, guess what, money is the same. The need to spend money can spike our dopamine levels. the need to continually spend is a dopamine addiction. Dopamine is known as ‘the love drug’. It is produced by the pleasures centres in the brain and creates feelings of happiness and euphoria. It is these feelings that we crave and become addicted to.

When we crave a ‘love object’ that we just need to buy, our brain is telling us that it needs a squirt of dopamine. But dopamine is a fickle friend. As soon as we achieve our love object, as soon as we buy what we were craving, the drive for dopamine ceases and the love object becomes yesterdays news.  

Lockdown lust

Have you been craving to buy something, perhaps spending many weeks or months saving the money. Now at last you can buy it. It may be your flavour of the month for a little while but soon these feelings will wear off. The problems is that because of your addictive habits your brain will now crave more dopamine. So now you will need a new love object to get it going again. More spend, spend, spend.

Advertisers know this and, like Apple, will change their designs and specifications to keep the dopamine needs of their followers flowing. No one really needs to continually update devices at the rate that the market dictates and yet we all buy into it. Sales people and teams understand this and their sales techniques are designed to get our juices flowing, to increase the flow of dopamine.

In big stores the lighting, the music and the displays all are designed to create more dopamine and, to create the need to have, to own and, to buy. 

When your expenditure exceeds your income, on a regular basis, and you are not living in poverty, then you are probably addicted to retail therapy. What that means is, that like all addicts, you have trained your brain to connect an activity, in this case spending money, to the production of dopamine in your brain’s pleasure centres.

Just as there is nothing wrong with having the occasional blowout on booze there is also nothing wrong with having the occasional spend fest. It is all a matter of proportion. It is when it is out of proportion that it becomes a problems and that means therapy. As with everything in life when you have a problem do something about it, see someone, talk, seek help.

So what cravings have you developed in lock down? What are your love objects?

Holiday? Meal out? New car?

Our drive for retail therapy can leave us open to be scammed. Right now there are lot of scammers who know that we are craving a money dopamine hit and they are after us. Watch your texts and emails. Question before you respond. If it sounds too good to be true it probably is.

My resource for this week is to download the app for your bank and use the facilities and advise that they offer. They all have information about how to avoid being scammed.

Overall when it comes to money the deal is…

love people and use money, do not, love money and use people…

Be happy and spend responsibly enjoy

Sean x