Positively Maybe

When you find yourself trapped in your life and you feel stressed and lost, how do you start to unwind? What is it even that you notice; is it a feeling of Groundhog Day -running around like a hamster in a wheel- or a steady worsening of your mood, a breakdown, or maybe it manifests as (chronic) illness? At some point there is a realisation that something isn’t right.

It starts with awareness. Awareness is key in the process of change as you need to be aware of what is happening and be willing to do some inquiry into yourself and your situation.

In order for this inquiry to take place you need some space in your mind which means you need to slow down. We are all running so fast, time is money. The mind thrives on input, the more sensory input it receives, the more it has to work with. The stream of consciousness -that voice inside your head which is constantly narrating your life story- wants images, sounds and smells so it can stay busy. Our modern world has sped up enormously with mobile technology, 24-hour news, social media, advertising, all constantly wanting our attention. The technology is designed to find clever ways to get your attention using a steady stream of light, colour and sounds drawing us back into the digital world. It’s highly addictive. We want more, consciously and subconsciously and we have less stillness, space and rest.

In order to get back to ourselves we need to create some space and quiet to be able to observe and turn inward. Much of the day we operate on autopilot, we live in our subconscious programming. All the repetitive tasks that we do often, brushing teeth, showering, commuting to work, eating, we tend to do without thinking, and we even start to multi-task. It’s great that we can do multiple things at once (remember time is money) so thinking about the day ahead while in the shower or the to-do list while brushing your teeth or reading some work emails while eating breakfast might seem like a gain.

The problem is that while we are in our autopilot, we are running a program from the past and usually thinking about things in the future. We are not present in the now. It’s almost as if we are not aware of what is going on around us right now but are creating stories in our heads on what’s to come or are being stuck with old stories that have been. This means we react to things in a way we have so many times before, based on old scenarios and memories, without thinking, and we do not pause and properly respond to what is going in this moment.

That’s why we need space. A pause, a moment to contemplate and respond without having to listen to that critical voice. But the critical voice is so used to talking; constantly comparing, judging and fixing our environment. Estimates are that roughly 50% of the time we are running on autopilot. And if you are used to multi-tasking in your work and daily life, that might be even higher, as you have trained your auto-pilot mechanism very well. We need to learn how we can switch autopilot off and practice doing this throughout the day so our auto-pilot percentage goes down.

How? By practicing mindfulness. Mindfulness teaches us awareness of our autopilot. It also teaches us to connect to the body so the focus can be away from the mind. It teaches us to slow down and be present to the moment. This way we can start to calm down, become curious about ourselves and practice self-inquiry to get to know ourselves better.

At the depth of my unhappiness I found myself in a chronic state of stress. It’s a symptom of our fast-paced world, that we always feel like we are (or need to be) busy. I was a perfectionist and felt the pressure to perform combined with the constant fear of not being good enough. A perfect recipe for stress.

Our emotional state is linked to our nervous system. The autonomic nervous system (ANS) consists of the sympathetic (SNS) and the parasympathetic (PSNS) branch. Sympathetic activity, or fight/flight/freeze, is the active branch where we operate from survival mode, increasing heartbeat, breathing and stress hormones (cortisol and adrenaline). Parasympathetic activity, or rest/digest, is where we are in a relaxed state and can digest food, repair cells and activate the immune system.

Through evolution we were designed to have short bursts of action, and long spells of relaxation. In modern life, because of our evolved brains which cannot differentiate between an actual and an imagined stressful event, we seem to have prolonged periods of stress. This means our bodies do not have enough time and space to rest and repair.

Our breath is directly linked to our ANS. We breathe unconsciously, all day every. Every inhale is a short burst of action, triggering the SNS and every exhale is a relaxation, slowing things down again via the PSNS. When we are just waking up after a restful night sleep, we usually have a slow, deep breathing pattern, with longer exhales. When we are working to a pressured deadline, we might notice a shallow, rapid breath, or maybe we might even subconsciously be holding our breath. Throughout the day our breathing varies, but for most of us we live in the shallow, rapid breathing pattern, enforcing that stressed, sympathetic state.

If throughout the day, we start practicing conscious breathing, this will have a positive impact on our unconscious breath. Just short periods of slowing down, deepening the breath and lengthening the exhale, will start to help us relax. It will also help to exercise our breathing muscles (mainly the diaphragm) as due to shallow breathing, these breathing muscles get tight. So, you might find that slow and deep breathing is difficult at first, just relax, don’t force anything, it might take a little time.

Is this breathing really that important? A well-known nutrition expert once told me (when I was asking for advice regarding my diet for Crohn’s disease); “The best thing you can do, is to improve your breathing.” I remember at the time I was taken aback. I was already practicing yoga and thought I knew all about conscious breathing. Now I realise that short periods of conscious breathing throughout the day, resetting my breathing pattern, has a major impact. Remind yourself to take a few deep, slow breaths throughout the day!

The wonderful thing is that there are many different breath practices you practice; to help you relax, but also to help you focus, balance your emotions, clear your mind and help with anxiety and depression. It’s free, and you don’t need any props. Some informative websites on breathing: click here for videos from James Nestor, and click here for consciousbreathing.com

In order to feel bétter in life, we need to learn how to féél better; engage our sensory system. With our busy minds, we spend most of our day thinking about things, which means we are spending a lot of time living in our heads. For me this led to a feeling of disconnect from my body. This worsened when I got ill and my body was hurting a lot, as by now I didn’t wánt to feel my body.

It became apparent when I was doing a body scan meditation where I was guided to focus on parts of my body. The idea was to feel those parts of the body, but I was struggling as I was stuck in thinking mode. “Focus on your right big toe”, said the teacher, and I found myself thinking about what my toe looked like, thinking about where it was, but I wasn’t able to just féél my big toe. I found it very difficult. Fast forward a few years and I am able to feel the sensations in my body, but it took a long time to get out of my head.

A mind-body practice such as yoga, somatics, tai chi, qigong, will help to reconnect mind and body. All these practices require consciousness of the breath. Breath is the bridge which connects the body and the mind. Once we start to connect, we find that we move from doing to being, from forcing to allowing, from thinking to feeling. We are no longer conceptualising and analysing our feelings but experiencing them as they are.

Only when that transition from mind to mind-body has been made, can we start to tune into the signals the body is giving us. We can start to use our movement practice to notice where there is tightness and constrictions and work with these areas. We might even start to feel where there is ease.

We can then become more conscious of our day-to-day postural habits before they cause more serious aches and pains. Our posture improves, our pain eases and we feel better.

Now we are able to feel our body better, we might find that it has become quite tight and rigid over the years. The saying “use it or lose it” is also appropriate for our lack of flexibility. As kids we are always running around and stretching, spend a lot of time on the floor or just generally playing and running around. When we get older, we become more sedentary. I was unfortunate and chose a career in an office. It meant spending long periods of time seated at a desk.

“Sitting is the new smoking” became a headline not too long ago, and it sounds silly at first, but sadly there is a lot of truth in it. Unfortunately, you cannot offset nine hours of stillness with one hour of exercise.

Our hips get tight, our back starts aching, shoulders are tight and the neck hurts. On top of that our abdomen can be compressed which will compromise our breathing, encouraging a shallow breath. Add to that the many little quirks we develop; habitually leaning to the left or crossing our legs – just observe how far you are removed from the ‘ideal sitting position’ (which we now know, isn’t ideal). After many hours, days, weeks and years this wears the body down and this pattern becomes visible in the body. We can start seeing lifted shoulders/hips, rounded shoulders, forward head, arched back and a many more patterns appear in the body. The start causing aches, pains and sometimes illness.  It can also impact your mental health, but more on that later.

Movement practices like Somatics can help release permanently tight muscles. We want to also target the connective tissue in the body; connective tissue is a collective name for the tendons, fasciae, and ligaments. Yin Yoga stresses these tissues in order to increase circulation in the joints and improving flexibility. You can also use props like myofascial release balls (ordinary tennis balls can also work). If the areas of constriction are too intense or you find it difficult to know what will work best, you can try myofascial release (MFR), where the practitioner will try to release the constrictions of the connective tissue. This gentle hands-on therapy looks a little like massage, but it works more targeted to the issue. For more on MFR see here.

One final point on tightness in the body; drink water. Throughout the day try and filtered water drink regularly in order to not get dehydrated. Dehydration becomes tightness in the body. Tightness in the body, translates to inflexibility in the mind.

I touched upon flexibility of the mind in the previous section. How is it that sometimes we can get completely taken over by the thoughts and emotions in our head? For this it is important to understand how the mind works. The brain is the physical place where the mind resides. The mind is an activity of the brain in the form of thought, perception, emotion, determination, memory and imagination. In order to better understand mind, we need to first take a look at the evolution of the brain.

The concept of the triune brain, was first introduced in the 1960s. It describes the three evolutionary layers of the brain and their function. The first layer is labelled the reptilian brain and consists of the brainstem and the cerebellum. It’s the oldest part evolutionary and sits deep in the brain. It controls the body's vital functions such as heart rate, breathing, body temperature and balance. The second layer is the mammalian brain, (or limbic system), consists of structures such as the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the hypothalamus. The third layer is the human brain (or neocortex), which is the outer layer of the brain, was last to evolve.

The triune brain model suggests the reptilian brain evolved first, which is thought to be in charge of our primal instincts, followed by the limbic system, which is in charge of our emotions or affective system, then the neocortex, which is thought to be responsible for rational or objective thought. The mind works differently in each of these layers and sometimes there are conflicts between them. Over time we have evolved our stress-responses too; our oldest evolutionary response to threat was to freeze followed with the ability to fight or flight. The next survival skill was to learn to survive in groups and we learned to be vigilant. Our most sophisticated survival skill, unique to humans, is social engagement.

According to Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory (1994), our four stress-responses work in order from most to the least evolved. When we are well and balanced, we will initially try to make ourselves feel better through social engagement and usually this will suffice to make us feel safe. However, if we suffer from chronic stress or trauma, this social engagement strategy might not work. We will quickly become hypervigilant and if that fails, try to flee a situation (or become angry) before we freeze.

The ability of the neocortex to rationalise can only work when we are not stuck in our emotional centre of the limbic brain, as they cannot operate at the same time and often the limbic system (operating from autopilot) wins. This might lead to situations where you find your emotions are running away with you; where you are seeing red from anger and cannot manage to calm down, or where you feel so anxious or low that you want to hide away. Sometimes it is hard to understand why we are feeling certain feelings in the moment. It is incredibly valuable to start learning more about the physical workings of the brain, in order to better understand and perhaps change, the emotional side.

So far, we’ve seen that three brain structures direct us and they have different functions. Our instinctive brain is asking “Am I safe?”, the emotional brain is engaged in “What do I feel?” while our thinking brain is asking “What does this mean?”. There is a constant stream of consciousness, of thoughts and feelings in our minds all day long.

Our brain is part of our nervous system meaning our thoughts and feelings are part of our nervous system as well. A regulated nervous system can react to an event, a stressor, and will return to homeostasis once the stress has gone. Balance has been restored. However, a dysregulated nervous system can no longer smoothly respond to threats. Instead, when the threat has long gone, it can feel exhausted or overwhelmed. We can get dysregulated through trauma and chronic stress.

We might start feeling that we are the thoughts and feelings that we have, as they feel so real and constant. Finding practices which allow us to reset from stress-response to relaxation-response will help to balance our mind. Practices such as mindfulness and meditation, help to calm the emotional brain, and mind-body practices such as yoga, tai chi and qigong can help with emotions and the feelings that are stored in our body.

The most important thing is that we do not push away our feelings and emotions, which is something I used to do myself. Especially those uncomfortable emotions such as anger, sadness and grief. I felt that feeling emotions such as anger and resentment, made me into a person I didn’t like. I wanted to be nice and liked, so I pushed these feelings away rather than allowing them to happen. Research is showing that some of those pushed away feelings can actually start to cause harm; both emotionally and physically, especially in psychosomatic illnesses.

Inflammatory Bowel Disease has been associated with people who do not properly digest their feelings, “goodists” (people who want to be liked and therefor might hide their feelings), and people who view the world as distressing and unsafe. This does not mean you are causing the illness; it just means that there is another factor to be aware of (alongside genetics, environment, diet, etc). Also having a chronic illness may start to develop those feelings further. Personally, I think these unprocessed emotions caused a lot of havoc in my body. Having experienced some traumatic events in my past and then working in a sedentary highly pressured environment all contributed.

It is highly important to process your feelings properly. I wonder why this was not a subject in school as I think it is vital for our functioning in society. There is a wonderful tool Tara Brach developed: RAIN. It’s an acronym for Recognise, Allow, Investigate, Nurture. It teaches you to feel the feelings, separate them from the stories in your mind. To breathe through any unpleasantness so the feelings can pass through you, rather than get stuck in your body and help (further) dysregulate your nervous system. For more on RAIN click here. There was a similar program at Kripalu where I studied Yoga Therapy, called BRFWA: Breathe, Relax, Feel, Watch, Allow. For more on BRFWA click here.

Emotions determine what we care about and how we interact with the world. The ability to manage our emotions is key to good health and wellbeing and resilience. Resilience describes how well we can deal with adversity in life; emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually.  Flexibility in all four of these areas is crucial for coherence. It involves the ability to self-regulate emotions, have physical endurance and strength, have the ability to focus and have multiple viewpoints, and tolerance of other’s norms and values while also holding our own. Once we have balance and are resilient in all these areas, we feel coherent. It means we can understand life and that it has meaning, while being able to function well in the world.

Coherence is also a state which can be measured, physically in the body. It’s done through Heartrate Variability (HRV) which is the measure of time between heartbeats.  We might think that our heartbeat is regular like a metronome, but this isn’t true. Remember the autonomic nervous system (ANS) has two branches, the SNS, speeding up heartbeat, and the PSNS (through the vagus nerve), slowing it down. As our body is constantly trying to return to homeostasis, there is a constant play between the two branches. This is why there is variability in the seconds between the beats, it’s a positive thing as it allows to return to balance.

In fact, research has shown that the greater the variability, the better. A high HRV equals better physical health and fitness, greater capacity to handle stress and positive emotions. Low HRV means less tolerance to stress (leading to anxiety) and it has been linked to inflammation, chronic pain and illness and depression. By improving our HRV we can improve our health and wellbeing. For a video on HRV, click here.

Modern technology is developing tools to stimulate the vagus nerve which in turn will improve HRV. There are also practices that you can do to stimulate the vagus nerve; meditation, abdominal massage, singing, humming, gargling, cold exposure and laughing to name a few. The most effective tool is a breathing practice. Slowing the breath down to breathing 5-6 breaths a minute is called resonance breathing, will create a smooth sinus like curve in the heart rate.

The heart and brain are in constant communication via nerves, hormones and electromagnetic fields. Just like we can measure the electric activity of the heart via ECG, we can measure brainwaves via EEG. The frequency of the brainwaves indicate whether we are relaxed (slower alpha waves) or focussed (faster beta waves). Slowing our brainwaves down further to theta waves, happens during meditation or REM sleep. We can create coherence between brain waves and heart rhythm, creating a heart-brain coherence. A slow and mindful breath, focussing your attention on your heart-space and then adding a positive emotion (such as joy, gratitude, love) has been shown to be one of the quickest ways to increase HRV. For  more research check out the resources at HeartMath.org.

I’ve touched on emotions previously and about the importance of allowing ourselves to feel the things we feel. First let me just write about emotions and feelings, as I use the words interchangeably but actually there is a difference. Emotions happen in the body, feelings in the brain. Emotions are a neuro-physiological reaction to a stimulus, which means they happen in the body, without us having to think about it. They are happening subconsciously. Feelings follow on from the emotion, it’s when we have perceived them by the rational part of our brain. Feelings in turn can trigger emotions, so they can fuel each other. Emotions are inborn and common to us all, but the way we interpret these emotions into feelings is very personal. Feelings are shaped by the experiences we have and if we feel feelings often enough, they become our mood, our character.

This is important to understand as for people like me, where there was a disconnect between mind and body, as I wasn’t able to feel properly. I would find it difficult to identify emotions in my body. When I would be at work, feeling frustrated, judgemental and maybe sarcastic towards others, these where all feelings. They were also part of a narrative, of the story of my life. Having struggled so much with chronic illness, surgeries, and was suffering chronic pain, there was an underlying anger as to the unfairness of the situation. This translated into feelings of frustration and a lot of judgement towards others.

There was also a massive lack of compassion towards myself. Instead of being kind to myself, I pushed myself harder, not wanting to appear weak, and also afraid that at some point I would be so ill I might not be able to work anymore. I also hated my body for being broken, instead of nurturing it, after it having to go through so much trauma. There was a lot of negative self-talk. Negative feelings towards yourself, cause you to be incoherent (remember HRV?). This is bad for your health, physical and emotional. This is where the power of positive emotions comes in.

Self-compassion is the single most important skill we can teach ourselves. As a society we have become about striving, about doing and achieving. We are all trying to fit one mould of success. We have become about self-esteem; as long as we achieve what is deemed to be success, we are good, otherwise we are failures. But life needs to be lived authentically, otherwise you will not find meaning in the way it is. So practice being kind to yourself, increase your heart coherence, and only when you can be kind to yourself, can you truly be kind to others.

Also practice gratitude. Our brain is hardwired to find the ‘unsafe situations’ so it is looking for the negative. You can use your evolved human neocortex to seek out the good and focus your attention on that. This, over time, will become a habit.

Finally, set an intention. Focus your energy on something meaningful to you. Start the day with something in mind that you want to focus on that day. It puts you back in touch with your values, it aligns you with who you want to be. It might be that you focus on listening better one day or being more grateful another. The world’s your oyster, the options are endless. More focussed energy, rather than letting the day wash over you. The more you can be intentional about how you are living, the better, as you deepen your life by living intentional.

Connect to your Soul, your spirit, your deeper Self.