'Moving your inner voices out'

Mental Health Awareness (UK 13-19th May)

Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK is May 13 - 19th.

The theme is Movement: ‘Moving more for our mental health”. Here is a link to resources if you wish to use them to raise awareness.

Mental Health Foundation UK.

Movement is important for our mental health. But so many of us struggle to move enough. We know there are many different reasons for this, so this Mental Health Awareness Week we want to help people to find moments for movement in their daily routines. Going for a walk in your neighbourhood, putting on your favourite music and dancing around the living room, chair exercises when you’re watching television – it all counts!

A Friday vibe to help you Bougez (Move! in French.)

Walking Outside or Inside

Kaitlyn Elizabeth

wrote this article on ‘The Single Most Important Thing I Do for My Mental Health’. I recognised my 2017 self in this statement:

I haven’t always held such glowing sentiments toward walking. In fact, I used to fucking hate walking. I interpreted any suggestion of a walk to be a veiled attempt to get me to exercise because whoever was suggesting said walk must have felt my body was unacceptable as it was. - Kaitlyn Elizabeth

My own love of walking has been a conscious evolution that has become an ingrained habit. My tipping point was that I needed something I could control when everything was in turmoil. So I got a smartwatch and did 10k of steps every day. It was a functional need to restore a sense of agency.

I’ve moved past those control-focused times when I needed to hit the exact 10k number. There were nights when I was pacing my apartment living room close to midnight to ‘get the last 50 steps’ logged!

At the time, there was something very appealing to having an anchor to hold onto when everything else was unpredictable. It’s better than drinking and eating my emotions. I've been there, done that, and that’s why I needed to move.

Helpful tips: Curate a great playlist. If you type 115bpm or 120bpm into Spotify search, you can find a playlist that suits you. Strut-walking with a good vibe works!

If, like me you can’t easily get outside consider getting a simple treadmill. Mine has been a blessing. Having 30 minutes before the ‘routine’ starts, became a habit.

3 reasons that resonate with me about why it works so well:

• the meditative flow-state, when I was walking that helped to shift my mood.(Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, ‘The Father of Flow’¹)

• the mindfulness moments of being absolutely present that I could inhabit more easily after the walk.

• and now I’ve a new appreciation of walking thanks to Kaitlyn’s article. You’ll read about EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) and it’s connection with walking. The EMDR Connection

Piggybacking the habits² I used the precious time to learn more; a brain workout.

Every hour on the treadmill was an opportunity to listen to different podcasts like ‘Hidden Brain’. You may find this one interesting.

Befriending your Inner Voice (August 2022) Shankar Vedantam interview Ethan Kross

Here’s the book by Ethan Kross

[Clicking the image will take you to my Carer Mentor Affiliate Bookshop, where I will receive a commission for your purchase.]

As a pragmatist, and a self-starter I hadn’t anticipated the volume of ‘guilt’ voices, or how automatic it became to call myself an idiot, or worse, out loud.

Inner chatter is normal. Difficult emotions are normal. These emotions evolved to help us thrive and live in the world. Existence of these difficult thoughts, emotions, our stories- they’re all normal. We are constantly needing to make sense of the world through our energy, emotions. - Dr Russ Harris³

Caregiving is synonymous with running around, wearing many different hats to resolve issues, communicate to pharmacists, doctors, but also a neverending ‘To-Do list’ of house admin, laundry etc. AND care for our loved ones. It can all lead to a feeling of drowning, heart tearing and under pressure.

Love sets us an impossibly high standard of care. This is why, resetting expectations and your personal definition of success is so important.

You don’t need to complete the to-do list. It’s an illusion, it’s us trying to control something. Choose the most critical action. Choose one thing, focus on that and try to get it done. Review, rinse, repeat. In tandem to centre checking yourself and your loved one. Pace and pause.

Ensure you’re finding ways to get more energy to keep going and aligning with your loved ones on what matters. Please be kind to yourself.

Resources: 'Managing the Mental Load'

An oldie goodie. The Power of love -’it may be cruel sometimes…but it might just save your life’ Love for yourself as well as your loved one.

A small reminder - pursuing happiness is counter productive.

'Why does pursuing happiness, make us unhappy?’

It’s an illusion an expectation we think is success. Doing things perfectly, thinking you can make everything better, but what’s in our head isn’t what always what your loved one wants, or even realistic for you to do.

2015 to 2020 there was only so much we could do for Dad. There was a inevitability to the outcome, and there were so many ‘shoes that dropped’ along the way. Egg shells that crack and a constant overactive state of hypervigilance that exhausted all of us.

When things feel out of control it could be easy to spiral on the negative thoughts. Breathe.

The Box breathing relaxation technique: how to calm feelings of stress or anxiety

Today, I’m relieved that our care-routine is simpler, and calmer. The tempo of everyday is more manageable - phew!

We’re all only perfectly imperfect humans. Life may be messy but we have only one. If we can find a way to live with, and navigate the messy emotional moments through discomfort we could be living life to its fullest. More easily said than done of course!

The things that make life rich, full and meaningful give you plenty of painful emotions as well as some very pleasant ones. - Dr Russ Harris

Here is one of my favourite resources. Dr Sophie Mort’s ‘A Manual for Being Human’

Here is the book summarty:

A Manual for Being Human is the book you need to read.

Do you want to understand how your childhood affects who you are today? How it affects your relationship with yourself and others? How school, bullying, gender expectations and even the social media you consume each day affects your emotional wellbeing? Do you want to know what your emotions actually are, where they come from and how to manage them when they threaten to overwhelm you?

In this practical and insightful guide, Dr Soph will help you to understand why we all feel anxious, stressed, insecure and down from time to time. Her three-step methodology, developed through years of experience supporting people to make genuine change in their lives, will help you to identify problems arising from past experiences and current life events, look at the patterns, bad habits and negative cycles that may be keeping you stuck, and then draws on established, proven therapeutic techniques such as mindfulness, journaling, self-compassion, grounding and breathing and relaxation techniques to provide a toolkit of go--to techniques to use any time.

Reassuring, knowledgeable and kind, Dr Soph offers support to those feeling lost at sea in today’s troubling times and gives you the tools you need to help get the most out of life.

Here is her website: Dr Soph

‘Taking psychology out of the therapy room. Making it work for you’. - Dr Soph

‘A truly wonderful, warm and wise one-stop shop for any inquisitive human. Packed full of prompts, practical tips and pep talks that will guide you through any situation.’ Emma Gannon

Two quotes from the book that stuck with me and relate to emotional agility:

‘Thoughts are the words and stories your brain puts together to make sense of the predictions your brain makes, the emotions you feel and the experiences you live through.’

‘Learning that our thoughts are not facts does not take away the validity of our experiences. Instead it shows us that the thoughts that plague us, undermine us and derail us need to be examined, challenged and reworded in order for them to reflect the actuality of the world.’

I highly recommend her book and using a new journal notebook for reflections.

Let’s move!

The link to the MIND organisation, which supports anyone with Mental Health issues in the UK

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Thank you for your ongoing support.

1. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The Father of Flow

2. Emotional Agility: 'Moving on' with the help of Piggybacking Habits.

3. Dr Russ Harris, M.B.B.S., is a physician and psychotherapist, working in private practice in Melbourne, Australia.