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Three Steps to Better Sleep
You're not alone if you struggle to get a good night's sleep. Millions of people struggle with insomnia, and the effects can be devastating, leading to fatigue, mood swings, and other health problems. But there are things you can do to help improve your sleep. Here are three key things to keep in mind:
Stick to a consistent sleep schedule
One of the most important things you can do to improve your sleep is to stick to a consistent sleep schedule. This means going to bed and waking up at the same time every day, even on weekends. This will help regulate your body's internal clock, making it easier to fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning.
Create a relaxing bedtime routine.
Another critical step in improving your sleep is to create a relaxing bedtime routine. The key is finding activities that help you relax and wind down so your mind and body are better prepared for sleep. This can include reading a book, taking a warm bath, or practicing yoga or meditation.
Limit exposure to screens before bed.
Finally, it's essential to limit your exposure to screens before bed. Avoid using electronic devices for at least an hour before bed, and consider using a blue light filter on your devices if you must use them. The blue light emitted by electronic devices can interfere with your body's production of melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate your sleep-wake cycle.
How to Manage Anxiety
Living with anxiety
Living with anxiety can be incredibly challenging. It can impact your daily life in countless ways and leave you constantly on edge. However, it's important to remember that anxiety is a treatable condition, and there are things you can do to manage it.
Educate Yourself
First and foremost, educating yourself about anxiety and how it affects your body and mind is essential. Understanding the biology behind anxiety can help you better understand what's happening to you and make it easier to manage.
Establish a Routine
Additionally, it's essential to establish a routine that includes relaxation techniques such as deep breathing exercises, yoga, or meditation. These activities can help reduce anxiety symptoms, such as racing thoughts and muscle tension.
Challenge Your Thoughts
Another practical step in managing anxiety is to challenge your thoughts. Anxiety can make us focus on the negative, and it's essential to identify and challenge these negative thoughts. Learning to manage stress is also important, as stress can trigger anxiety. Identifying the things that cause stress and finding ways to reduce or eliminate them can be incredibly helpful.
Reach Out for Support
Support can come in many forms, whether talking to a therapist, joining a support group, or confiding in a trusted friend or family member. It's essential to know that you're not alone in this and that there are people who care about you and want to help. It's also important to reach out for support when needed.
Anxiety and Social Media
Here you can listen to an interview about anxiety related to social media usage.
What is anxiety?
Here you can listen to an interview all about anxiety, what it is, and what you can do about it.
How Can I Cope Better With Flashbacks?
Often life is good, but sometimes life can be challenging. Whilst we can mostly get through it, sometimes the things that happen to us can prove so overwhelming that our ability to cope becomes seriously compromised. This can occur following a traumatic incident such as a car crash or other life-threatening experience. Still, it can also happen in torture, abuse, bullying, and sexual or physical assault. When things like this happen to us, and it may not always become immediately apparent, we risk developing either Post Traumatic Stress or even what psychologists call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
You can follow this link for further information about PTSD.
What Are Flashbacks?
One of the most distressing types of PTSD symptoms is flashbacks. These are a kind of re-experiencing of overwhelming events in part or their entirety. A leading trauma therapist has described flashbacks in the following way:
“Traumatic flashbacks are comprised of sensory experiences of terrible events replayed with such realism and intensity that they are difficult to distinguish from in-the-moment reality.”
The most common type of flashbacks appears to be images or sounds. These can be particularly debilitating and confusing because they impinge on reality in such realistic ways that they can be tough to identify as unreal. Visual and auditory flashbacks exacerbate this problem, often accompanied by high levels of distress, terror, anxiety, and other powerful sensations. In other words, flashbacks can temporarily take us over, and we can become completely immersed in them. People who suffer from flashbacks have described them as having nightmares while awake.
Flashbacks can occur at any time of the day or night and last from a few seconds to several minutes or longer. They can comprise emotional or behavioural responses to specific triggers, so they are not just images or sounds. We can behave strangely or have seemingly inappropriate emotional reactions to things.
What Causes Flashbacks?
Researchers believe flashbacks are caused by the survival-driven suppression of certain brain functions during traumatic experiences. Specifically, the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for processing events and giving them a beginning, a middle, and an end, is suppressed when we are completely overwhelmed. This suppression is believed to provide traumatic events with the potential to feel like they are still happening to us long after the actual triggering event is over. So, for example, specific events, sounds, images, or people may trigger a flashback that feels like we are right back amid the original traumatic event like it is happening all over again.
How Can I Cope With Flashbacks?
The first port of call if you suspect that you may be suffering from flashbacks should be your G.P. Provided that you can be honest with them and be specific about the difficulties that you are experiencing, your G.P. should be able to make an accurate assessment and make some recommendations for further steps that you can take to get the support that you need. These might include a referral to other NHS services, some suggested medications, additional reading or online resources, and the option to seek private counselling or psychotherapy.
Other steps that you can take for yourself would be to try and ensure, as best you can, that you are getting adequate rest, that you are finding supportive relationships, friends and family that you can share some of your difficulties with, and that you are eating healthily and exercising regularly.
In terms of therapy, seeking a trained and competent therapist who has some experience and training in the specifics of trauma symptoms, including flashbacks and PTSD, would also be recommended. Your therapy may likely include learning and practising techniques to help you with flashbacks, such as body awareness, relaxation and muscle toning exercises, focusing on your breathing, finding ways to feel more grounded and in the present, mindfulness techniques, becoming familiar with and increasing the range of resources around you to help you cope better, recognising and actively drawing on the help that those around you can offer, as well as a range of other interventions.
But most of all, therapy should be about beginning to regain control and feel safe again.
If you would like to talk more about what you are experiencing, you would be very welcome to get in touch.
Are Relationships Important?
This week (16th - 22nd May) is Mental Health Awareness Week; this year, the focus is on relationships. According to mounting research evidence, relationships are a crucial predictor of good mental health, and the actual quality of the relationships we can form with those around us: family, friends, colleagues, and others, is also essential.
It turns out that good relationships (as opposed to abusive or conflictual relationships) are vital to our overall well-being. It has been shown that social relationships are just as meaningful regarding the effect on our long-term health and mortality as the results of smoking or alcohol consumption. Social relationships also influence our health more than obesity or physical inactivity.
Harvard University researched over the past 80 years into what makes us happy and recently published the results in a 2012 book called 'Triumph of Experience'.
The findings indicate that not fame, wealth, or working hard makes us happy, but that happiness comes from our relationships.
Childhood Experiences of Relationship
We first begin learning how to 'do' relationships through our interactions with our parents, guardians, and caregivers in our early lives. Our attitudes towards others, the way we make sense of how other people behave towards us, how we believe others perceive us, and the unwritten, unspoken 'rules of engagement' when we are socially interacting with others as adults have all been formed during our earliest experiences in the relationships of our childhood.
It is also important to realise that our early relationships have severe implications for us in our adult lives. According to the Mental Health Foundation:
"The attachment that a child has with its parent or guardian is a central predictor for mental health and wellbeing, as well as relationship satisfaction, during adulthood."
5 Steps to Better Relationships
The Mental Health Foundation suggests five steps we can take as individuals to develop more healthy relationships. These are:
Give time - Try to dedicate more time to building connections with others, particularly with friends and family.
Be present - When you are with someone, then be with them, don't multitask or think about other things, but focus on the interaction with the person you are with.
Listen - Try to hear what the other person is saying, non judgementally and from their perspective.
Be listened to - Be honest with the person you are with about how you feel and allow them to support you.
Recognise unhealthy relationships - Remember that, whilst positive relationships are beneficial, unhealthy relationships can impact our well-being negatively.
How Might Therapy Help?
Suppose our early relationships have been problematic, complex, abusive, and neglectful. In that case, we may find ourselves in our adult lives sometimes struggling to build healthy, fulfilling relationships for ourselves. These are not easy patterns to shift even when we want to, but exploring these patterns in a supportive, confidential environment can go some way to helping change them for the better.
Therapy can be one way of exploring and understanding how we relate to others. Sound therapy can often help when it comes to wanting to change for the better some of the habitual ways that we interact with others, which we very likely learned when we were young.
How Can I Sleep Better?
Good quality sleep is essential for our physical and mental health, and not getting enough of it can impact our lives in many ways. According to research commissioned by The Sleep Council, 27% of British people experience poor quality sleep regularly. It is thought that most people will experience some form of sleep problem during their lifetime. Poor quality or too little sleep can leave us struggling to focus during the day and depress our mood.
The NHS links a lack of good quality sleep to an increased risk of developing more serious medical conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. In addition, a lack of quality sleep can shorten life expectancy and contribute to depression and anxiety.
The Mental Health Foundation suggests that sleep, when enough, contributes to our ability to process information, form and sustain good interpersonal relationships, and aids our immune system in protecting us from illness and infection. Sleep is important.
So How Can I Sleep Better?
The key to a good night's sleep is what experts call good 'sleep hygiene'. This means taking your sleep habits seriously and developing a regular and predictable routine around sleep and bedtime. This can help to prime the brain that it is time to sleep. Aim to start your bedtime routine at the same time each day and try to keep regular sleep hours as much as possible.
Relaxation
Relaxing before bedtime is also essential; you could experiment with different ways of doing this. Not everyone relaxes in the same way, but some activities that may work for you might include reading, listening to the radio, taking a warm (not hot) bath, listening to relaxation CDs, engaging in some gentle, non-energetic exercise such as yoga or pilates, or making a 'to do' list of all the things that you want to do tomorrow.
Environment
In addition, the environment in which we sleep can impact the quality and duration of our sleep. So, for instance, your bedroom should, ideally, be dark, quiet, warm, and free of any electronic gadgets, including TVs, tablets, computers or mobile phones, that reduce the brain's association with sleep and relaxation. Aim for a room heated to between 18 and 24 degrees centigrade, and try to reserve it for only rest and sex.
Mattress
You may also want to consider the condition and quality of your mattress. Bs should usually be renewed every seven years and sooner if worn, sagging, or damaged.
Sleep Diary
Increasing awareness of your own experiences, feelings, thoughts and activities leading up to bedtime and the details of how well you sleep each night may also help shed light on lifestyle issues that may adversely impact your ability to get a good night's sleep. A sleep diary, which is a way of noting some of these things, can sometimes help with this. You can record things that may impact your sleep patterns, such as: what you have been doing during the day, how well you have slept the night before, how often you have woken up during the night, the duration of each of these waking periods, if anything has made you anxious or upset during the day, how much caffeine or alcohol you have consumed during the day, what you ate, whether or not you have exercised and in what way.
Talking Things Over
If you feel that talking over some of the issues that may be troubling you in your life these days might help you get a better night's sleep, do feel free to get in touch. Sometimes getting to the root of some of the more complex issues in your life that may be impacting you can have the additional benefit of helping you to sleep more easily at night.
What is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)?
The World Health Organisation estimates that approximately 3.6% of the world's population has suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In a recent study of 21 countries, over 10% of those who responded had experienced some form of a traumatic event, including exposure to war, witnessing or experiencing interpersonal violence, accidents, or trauma to a loved one. In addition, PTSD may develop following neglect or abuse (sexual, emotional, or physical) either in early life or more recently.
Post-traumatic stress disorder is classed as a form of anxiety disorder. It can affect a person's life in complex and complicated ways. The symptoms can often be quite debilitating and interfere with everyday functioning. Symptoms may include frightening flashbacks, nightmares, mood swings, increased fearfulness related to being outside or travelling, difficulty sleeping, and irritability. If you have PTSD, then you might also often feel pretty isolated.
PTSD can develop many years after a traumatic event, leading to noticeable changes in thoughts, feelings and behaviour. If you think that you may have PTSD, then a visit to your GP may be a good idea. Your GP can let you know if your symptoms indicate PTSD, and they will be happy to advise you regarding the available treatment options. These will usually include some form of talking therapy, medication or EMDR therapy (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing) in which a therapist will use a simple eye movement technique that can help reduce the emotional impact of traumatic memories.
If you wish to discuss your symptoms, or concerns regarding PTSD, then I offer a Zoom Consultation in which we can explore together what is on your mind and discuss the best course of action for you.
What is Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)?
Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is a type of depression that occurs at approximately the same time each year. This is usually as the warmer, brighter summer weather begins to give way to winter's darker, wetter weather. Many people experience 'Winter Blues', but SAD is more severe than that and is thought to affect approximately 2% of the population.
The symptoms of SAD are similar to depression. They can include difficulty sleeping or restlessness, increased irritability, a low mood that does not seem to lift, lethargy, and a sense that many activities are less appealing than they once were or even pointless.
SAD is believed to be caused by the effects that a seasonal reduction in daylight can have on our brains. This can include reduced melatonin and serotonin levels, essential hormones for feeling awake and happy, and an adverse effect on the body's internal clock.
If you think that you may be suffering from SAD, then it might be a good idea to get in touch with your G.P., who will usually be able to assess your state of health and offer a choice of recommended treatments. These may include self-help activities such as exercise and more specific treatments such as light therapy (exposure to a particular type of artificial light), talking therapy, or medication.
For more information about the seasonal affective disorder, have a look at these web links:
Is My Therapist Any Good?
Are you feeling any better since seeing your therapist? If the answer is yes, then your therapist is probably doing fine. If the answer is no, it's probably time for you to start being as honest with your therapist as possible. Challenge them, ask questions, and test your therapist's emotional resilience. Remind your therapist, in whatever way suits you best, that you are in therapy to experience positive changes. By challenging your therapist and experiencing how they respond to you, you will begin to get a much better sense of what kind of a person your therapist is and what they can offer you.
A therapist should be able to more or less cope with anything you say to them. Therapists can be shocked, they may be flustered, and they can even become upset, but they should never abandon you. They should always do their best to work together with you collaboratively in sessions to resolve any misunderstandings, upsets, frustrations, or impasses that arise between the two of you.
In the end, therapists are there to help you to feel better, and one of the best ways to bring this about is for your therapist to demonstrate to you that the therapeutic relationship, the relationship that you develop together during therapy, is robust enough to weather all sorts of difficulties.
When a reparative experience follows a complex interaction leading to a satisfactory resolution, we call this 'rupture and repair'; it forms the cornerstone of successful therapy.
If you notice this happening, you should stick with your therapist; they are probably good enough.
Am I Suffering With Anxiety?
Feelings of nervousness, worry, or fear typically characterise anxiety. It is a normal part of everyday life for most people, and in fact, it can sometimes help to increase a person's performance under pressure and keep us safe in potentially dangerous situations. Usually, anxious feelings subside after a while, and we can feel more relaxed again. These fluctuations in our state of nervous arousal are very normal. However, when anxiety does not subside and begins to get in the way of our everyday functioning, then it can become more of a problem.
High levels of anxiety are also associated with panic attacks. This is when your body has an exaggerated response to stress, fear, or excitement. Panic attacks can feel scary, and the physical sensations often include an increased heart rate, sweating, nausea, chest pains, and difficulty breathing. Panic attacks typically last 5 to 20 minutes, although they may feel much longer.
If you are suffering from anxiety, you can always speak to your G.P. about your concerns. Your G.P. will listen to your description of what you have been experiencing and recommend a course of treatment. This may include talking therapy, self-help interventions, or medication. Counselling and psychotherapy can help to get to the root of the problem and will often begin to relieve some of the problematic symptoms of anxiety.
Some useful sources of further support and guidance include Mind.org.uk, Anxiety U.K., and the NHS website.
Am I Depressed?
Depression is thought to affect between 8-12% of the population of Great Britain each year. That's a lot of people. Depression ranges in severity from simply feeling down and listless (mild depression) to find it almost impossible to get through daily life (severe depression). The symptoms of depression can include sadness, low mood, lethargy, a loss of enthusiasm about life, sex and relationships, possible suicidal thoughts, difficulty sleeping, numbness, restlessness, and many more. You can find more information about the symptoms of depression on websites such as Mind.org.uk.
In addition, anxiety can also commonly be something that can affect those who are depressed. This can make life even more difficult.
The NHS offer helpful information and guidance about depression on its website. You can view some of this information by clicking on this link.
If you feel that you might be suffering from depression, and are experiencing difficult symptoms for most of the day for more than 14 days, then speak to your G.P. and ask them to assess you. Talking therapy is often recommended for moderate to severe depression.
Am I In An Abusive Relationship?
An abusive relationship is one in which either party may exert an unduly coercive influence over the other, which may be maintained through threats or acts of a physical, emotional, or sexual nature. The abused party may feel, among other things, trapped, isolated, depressed, frightened, numb, or helpless.
Counselling and psychotherapy, individually or as a couple, can help clarify the dynamics of the relationship and the actual effects of the abusive behaviour on both the abused and the abuser. This increased understanding can catalyse positive changes. Although it can take time, self-esteem, confidence, and coping strategies can be developed within the security of a therapeutic relationship.
Mind, a national mental health charity, offers information on a broad range of subjects, including abuse and links to further sources of support.