Unknown speaker
Good morning, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us this morning at Vivo Health. My name is Avril Ivory and I’m a health psychologist and a psychotherapist. I wanted to talk to you this morning just about different aspects of psychological wellbeing.
Unknown speaker
So this is one of my favourite topics because as a health psychologist and psychotherapist, there are kind of two different bodies of work, if you like. One is about helping somebody have really good psychological wellbeing from a top-down perspective and a lot of psychotherapy involves talk therapy, for example, where we’re using techniques like reframing the way we see things, looking at how we respond in our daily lives now that may be linked to previous events in our early lives,
Unknown speaker
etc. Psychotherapy has a lot of what we call top-down regulation, where you’re viewing the world differently and you learn tips and techniques to view the world differently. But the other part of psychological wellbeing, and I want to talk to you a lot about this this morning, is what we call bottom-up regulation.
Unknown speaker
And that basically means changing how you feel about the world by changing how your physiology responds to the world, okay? And so this is what we call kind of balancing the nervous system or down regulation of nervous system.
Unknown speaker
So I want to talk to you a good bit about this and then this the talk will take about 40 minutes. I see probably some of you just joining now. So those of you just joining late, my name is Avril Ivery, health psychologist, psychotherapist here with vivo health.
Unknown speaker
So This talk takes about 40 minutes and then you can put any questions there that you want in the chat. At the end I will answer them and then you can go to the networking which I think goes on till about half past 12.
Unknown speaker
So the key aspect and I know we said we try and do kind of eight different aspects of well-being and it’s so difficult to pin it down just to eight. But what I wanted to talk to you about today is first of all wanted to talk to you about understanding your nervous system and how you regulate the nervous system.
Unknown speaker
And I want to talk to you about well-being. You know so many people their psychological well-being has been tested to the very limit in this last year that we’ve had. And what I want to talk to you about is some of you may have experienced even almost micro traumas from this pandemic if not a full kind of feeling of overwhelm.
Unknown speaker
And one of the greatest ways to recover psychologically is to keep your nervous system in balance and also to do a thing called improving your vagal tone. So I want to talk to you about this nerve, which is a vagus nerve, it’s the 10th cranial nerve, and it comes down from the brain stem down into to the gut.
Unknown speaker
And if we have good vagal tone, we feel psychologically resilient. And even if something is really stressing us out, we bounce back quickly, we recover quickly from stress. And you see, if we can balance our vagal tone and balance our nervous system, it’s easier for us to regulate our emotions.
Unknown speaker
And this is, you know, psychology is very much heading in this direction that we are mind-directed. So yes, sometimes we need to reframe things and explore things in our minds and see things in a different way.
Unknown speaker
But very often, we also need to help our nervous system to stay in balance so that up to the vagus nerve, it sends a message up to the brain to say, nothing to see here, no problems here. You know, this person is not under threat.
Unknown speaker
I’m laughing as I was preparing this talk this morning because as a health psychologist, you know, I would know so much of the, I practice so many techniques in my own life so that I would have my nervous system in balance.
Unknown speaker
But I’ve just come through weeks of working in, and sometimes under kind of pressurized circumstances, working with people who are really struggling with their mental health. And I’m saying to myself this morning, I’m giving a talk on rebalancing, particularly cortisol and vagal tone.
Unknown speaker
And I could feel cortisol in my body when I woke up this morning, because I’ve basically been, you know, working to this deadline and then saying, oh, I have the long weekend off care activities and all my rebalancing and bring my nervous system back in balance.
Unknown speaker
balance, but don’t do what I’m doing in terms of don’t let it happen, you’re too busy in your work or too busy in your life and you’re not doing your different activities that make sure you’re not secreting cortisol because this morning I definitely could feel a little bit of cortisol in my system.
Unknown speaker
So let’s start with cortisol because we’ll talk about how we reduce cortisol and how that helps us develop emotions and we’ll also talk then about different techniques that really help us, like savouring for example, practicing gratitude, training our brains to react and practicing self-compassion.
Unknown speaker
These are all key activities that retrain our brains to stay in out of the amygdala, which is where we often have too many emotions, experiencing fear. So, first of all, our nervous system, and any of you who have done leading psychology will remember this really well.
Unknown speaker
Our nervous system is in two parts. It’s in the sympathetic, which is the fight-or-flight, and it’s in the parasympathetic, which is the reject. Now, even before the pandemic started, many of us were spending too much time in the fight-or-flight in this sympathetic nervous system, where we just didn’t feel completely relaxed in ourselves, and actually, you know, yes, there is an adaptive function to being in fight-or-flight in this.
Unknown speaker
But really, we want to spend as much of our lives in parasympathetic as possible, because this is where we feel really well. This is where people and social, socially engage, and this is where we sleep properly, in our bodies, and where we can really focus and concentrate and be productive.
Unknown speaker
But what happens is, because we live in man so much of us, and particularly, you know, that we all are supposed to be so good at so many things, and to be able to manage so many situations, and our Western culture is very much striving culture, mastery culture.
Unknown speaker
And this has a lot of us tipped into this sympathetic dominance. And when we’re in sympathetic dominance, what happens is, you know, we have left the liver in our mouths, our digestive system shuts down, and our pupils dilate, and what happens is, you know, it’s an evolutionary function.
Unknown speaker
There’s a bear in the wood. We need to get away from the bear in the wood. So mobilise your glucose reserves, which, you know, pools the blood kind of in the centre of the body, gives you the energy to get away from the bear in the wood.
Unknown speaker
And what’s happening in modern lives… is people euphemistically are seeing a bear in the wood several times in the day. So they’re releasing a little bit of adrenaline each time. And then after a period of time, the pituitary hypothalamus in the brain says, you know, I can’t keep on test out here and that you’re releasing a bit of adrenaline.
Unknown speaker
So I’m going to up a gear in your physiology. And we’re going to start the chemical and that is called cortisol. And so if we allow ourselves to get into an overwhelm or like me in the last too busy and not doing my yoga practice and by daily swims, you know, the system moves just a little bit out of parasympathetic into sympathetic and we start secreting cortisol.
Unknown speaker
Now, how would you know if you were secreting too much cortisol? Well, the first thing is you might have early morning waking. So, you know, you might wake five thirty six o’clock before your alarm goes off.
Unknown speaker
and have difficulty not to sleep. You know, cortisol is different for different people. In the clinic at the moment, we’re seeing a lot of people who are feeling the pandemic and who are definitely secreting that little bit of cortisol in their systems a little bit more than they should be.
Unknown speaker
And they are presenting things with like a feeling that the breath, that the chest feels a little bit tight, or they may feel that they have like a knot in their stomach or butterflies in their stomach, or what I’m seeing a lot of is in with, you know, shoulders, the trapezius muscle is really tight, the neck is tight, or the jaw is tight.
Unknown speaker
And they say to me, oh, you know, my dentist was at the dentist and my dentist said that I need a splint because I’m grinding my teeth at nighttime or my jaw clenched a lot of the time. These would be typical signs of system being out of balance.
Unknown speaker
So when we learn to down regulate the nervous system and to stop this extra cortisol, we feel so much better in ourselves. And also we can regulate our emotions more because when we secrete extra cortisol, that activates the amygdala in the brain, which is where there’s fear and anxiety and it kind of more intense emotions.
Unknown speaker
Whereas when we learn to down regulate nervous system and take the cortisol out of our systems, we’re more likely to be in the prefrontal cortex, particularly if we’re very good at problem solving and very good at kind of down regulating stress and managing our physiology and taking our breath and, you know, doing our exercise, we’re more likely to be in the prefrontal cortex.
Unknown speaker
And that’s the left side, that is the balanced problem solving, analytical reductionist part of the brain. And that’s ideally where we want to be able to go to if we choose to go there. So, how do you down-regulate the cortisol?
Unknown speaker
If you’re feeling you’re a little bit stressed and there’s a bit of cortisol in the system, due to just maybe external stressors in your life, or it can be internal stressors. And these can be things like striving for perfection all the time, not constantly having yourself under pressure, thinking that you have to be all things to all men, trying to please everybody, thinking you have to be liked by everybody,
Unknown speaker
these are what we call intra-psychic stressors, and they can also push us into this sympathetic nervous system dominance and create this extra activity in the amygdala. So how do you down-regulate the cortisol?
Unknown speaker
Well, the first thing is your breathing. Breathing is absolutely crucial because the quickest way to go from sympathetic dominance into parasympathetic is to slow the breathing down. So most of the time we’re breathing about 10 times.
Unknown speaker
in a minute and ideally we want to bring that down not all of the time but just some of the time to take slow deep breaths and bring ourselves into six times in a minute so even as you sit there listening just put one hand on your chest and another hand on your belly and I want you just to breathe for me okay first of all I just want you to breathe normally and I want you to see where are you breathing like is the hand on the belly rising or is the hand on the chest rising now if your breathing is quite shallow if you’re a bit stressed it will be clicular breathing so your upper hand is going to rise more so just practice taking a deep belly breath in you know a three-phase breath where you’re breathing into the belly into the upper abdomen and into the chest and just feel the difference that that makes in your body or another breath that’s wonderful to do it’s called 7-11 breathing where you’re inhaling through the nose for seven and you’re exhaling for eleven any of you who do maybe a yoga practice would be familiar with breath techniques 7-11 breathing is a brilliant technique to use and actually that’s the one that I would recommend the most for bringing you from the sympathetic dominance into parasympathetic and you’ll literally feel yourself switch down but supposing you’ve been stressed and busy and there’s cortisol in the body how do you break it down how do you actually get rid of that product in the body so that your nervous system is calmer well if you put in you know into YouTube trauma polar bears you’ll you’ll see footage of a polar bear that has been really stressed out and the first thing he does to try and relax is he shakes vigorously okay as human beings we need to do the same what the polar bear is doing is getting rid of that cortisol in the body and that’s what the shaking is for so our way of doing that is exercising now not everybody can exercise bad necks or bad knees or bad backs etc and various different disabilities.
Unknown speaker
If you can exercise great, make sure it is part of your daily life, make sure you do a hundred and fifty minutes of vigorous exercise in a week which is really only 30 minutes a day ideally five six days a week and that’s going to break down cortisol.
Unknown speaker
So your breathing is your first point of call then your exercise, a hundred and fifty minutes rigorous exercise is the second point of call and then sleep. If you’re not sleeping properly you’re more likely to have this activity in the amygdala and less in the prefrontal cortex.
Unknown speaker
A new Canadian research piece has come out saying 25% of us are not sleeping properly. The research was done in Canada but we can probably extrapolate the results to here, same pandemic. So make sure you are getting a minimum of seven hours sleep.
Unknown speaker
I would be suggesting eight if not nine hours sleep and make sure a good first hour of that is before midnight hour so that you’re in your circadian rhythms and you get some non-rapid eye movement which helps the nervous system regenerate not too many hours after the light goes down because that’s when the melatonin is secreted.
Unknown speaker
So you’ve got your breathing, your exercise and your sleep and I know many of our mental health agencies have been saying these things but I think having the deeper understanding of what’s going on is really really helpful.
Unknown speaker
Why these mechanisms actually work physiologically and also how do you relax you know all of us have different ways of relaxing but a brilliant way if you’re listening to this and you think that you know my nervous system has definitely been feeling the stress of this year.
Unknown speaker
A great thing to do is take up a mindfulness and meditation practice it is absolutely brilliant for example mindfulness-based stress reduction. This is what I use in clinic and normally I use it for myself but I haven’t this week and it’s a brilliant way of making sure that you are diminishing the activity in the amygdala and making new strong neuronal connections in the prefrontal cortex particularly the left side.
Unknown speaker
Now it takes eight weeks to rewire our brains but what is lovely to know is that with the research on neuroplasticity we can rewire how our nervous system is and the reason this is so good to know is so many people will have had difficult childhoods and you know adverse childhood events or maybe even in utero the mum was stressed and that had an effect on the nervous system wiring of the unborn child.
Unknown speaker
You know there’s a lot of trauma research saying we can even inherit a genetic tendency to exert activity in the amygdala through maybe trauma from our ancestors. So learning that we can rewire the brain and get this extra activity and new neuronal connections in the prefrontal cortex is just brilliant news.
Unknown speaker
So if any of you are listening to this thinking, palousemindfulness.com and that will bring you to a mindfulness-based stress reduction program that lasts over eight weeks, completely free to do. It’s from the University of Massachusetts, brilliant, brilliant program.
Unknown speaker
So if you’re really interested in rewiring and deep relaxation, that’s a brilliant thing to do. Be careful as well of too many stimulants. Like that, if you’re high cortisol, and you’re waking early in the morning because your nervous system is out of balance and then you know you’re tired when you wake up and so you’re sitting at your desk and of course the high cortisol can diminish performance so you’re reaching for the cups of coffee and then too much coffee is going to make more cortisol in the body so just to be careful of that and of course a great way of rebalancing the nervous system is practicing self-compassion.
Unknown speaker
A lot of us will have what’s called an inner critic or a voice that we’ve internalized from maybe earlier in our lives that says oh you know what you didn’t do that right oh that’s a disaster oh you’re no good at this or so and so over there is having a better pandemic than you are you know all of these irrational thoughts we can get particularly when we’re tired because we have mood congruent thoughts so if we’re excess cortisol and we’re a little bit low with that and a little bit tired we’ll have anxious thoughts and our thoughts will say things like that to us so if we change our internal voice it says you know what you’ve got this you know what okay it wasn’t brilliant but it was good enough you’ve got this you’re doing really well and you know a lot of the research on mindful self-compassion will actually show that that kind of conversation changes our brains so it’s really interesting exciting stuff so I want to move on to the second point which is about vagal tone so this is a nerve that is a key part of our parasympathetic rest and digest it influences breathing digestive function heart rate and all of this of course has a big impact on our mental health so when we increase our vagal tone we activate the parasympathetic nervous system higher vagal tone means our body relaxes faster after stress and the vagal response reduces stress and it reduces our heart rate and our blood pressure and it changes the function of the brain by moving us into parasympathetic so if you have good vagal tone.
Unknown speaker
Your nervous system is going to respond really quickly, bounce back after stress, you feel sharp, alert, you can relax easily, and you’re also just more likely to feel happy and resilient. If you’ve poor vagal tone, you might feel a bit nervy, you could have things like irritable bowel syndrome, for example.
Unknown speaker
So how do you change your vagal tone? How do you improve it? Well, first of all, just to say to you, there’s probably a bit of a genetic component with vagal tone. Some of us would be born with good vagal tone, some of us wouldn’t be.
Unknown speaker
So, you know, if we don’t recover well from stress, if it lingers or we’ve a tendency to be anxious, that indicates poor vagal tone. But once you know what to do. So some of this overlaps very much with reducing cortisol.
Unknown speaker
For example, you’re deep breathing back to six breaths a minute, you’re 7-11 breathing, a brilliant way to improve your vagal tone. But another way is chanting, humming, singing. The vagus nerve goes down behind the throat at the back.
Unknown speaker
or when we hum, particularly at a low reverberation, a low resonance, that gets the glottis going and that affects the vagus nerve. So any of you, some of you might sing in a choir, you know that lovely feeling of singing in a choir and or maybe you know in the days where we used to go to live performances and we believe God they will be back soon but you’re singing along with a favourite song and you just feel great or session in a pub for example,
Unknown speaker
that’s actually improving your vagal tone. So I think Tony Bates, some of you may have heard him last Saturday on RTE and he was absolutely brilliant, he was talking about improving our vagal tone and an elderly aunt of mine who’s 86 and she’s really really struggled in the pandemic, she ran me and she said well I’ve heard Tony Bates on the radio and she said all I have to do to feel better is start going vooooh and this is what Tony Bates was talking about improving the vagal tone by just doing vooooh.
Unknown speaker
So she has been wandering around Kalina Hill every morning doing vooooh and it’s really helping her but the way he described it she just completely got it and completely understood how nervous she had felt and that this would help her.
Unknown speaker
So singing, humming, chanting, we’ve talked about exercise, brilliant for vagal tone, yoga is brilliant for vagal tone. So with yoga you know and some of you can just maybe learn a few postures online you know and always check with your doctor obviously if you have any you know issues that would maybe be a bad neck or something that it would knock it out but yoga can be like medicine and brilliant teachers online.
Unknown speaker
I’m really fond of the half moon is a brilliant yoga posture and the half moon, the tree, the dancer and the warrior and these are quite simple. The dance is a bit more advanced. really simple, particularly the warrior and the warrior has a direct effect on the vagus nerve and it has a brilliant way of resetting the vagus nerve.
Unknown speaker
So yoga is brilliant, meditation we’ve talked about. Another really random one is probiotics. If you’ve been responding to the pandemic with a lot of refined sugars, a lot of processed foods and maybe a bit more alcohol than you would normally have, then that creates a problem with your gut microbiome in that you can get bad bacteria in the gut or the gut microbiome is out of balance and this vagus nerve is bi-directional.
Unknown speaker
So not only does it come from the brainstem down to the gut but it’s 80% of the nerve fibers in the vagus nerve are afferent. I always get mixed up between afferent and efferent but sending messages back from the belly, back up.
Unknown speaker
to the brain and this is why we’re talking about balancing ourselves from the bottom up because we send the messages from the vagus nerve up to the brain. Now if your tummy has butterflies because you’re very stressed and you haven’t been doing any self-care or your gut microbiome is completely out of balance, that sends the message from the belly up to the brain to say oh there’s something not going right here stay on alert but if you’re doing some breathing,
Unknown speaker
you’re doing your exercise, you’re doing maybe some yoga stretches, whatever works for you and if you’re taking probiotics for example to recolonize the gut flora so your microbiome is in good shape that message goes back up to the brain saying nothing to see here this person feels safe you don’t need to stay on alert.
Unknown speaker
We are exquisitely designed as our human physiology so take your probiotics if you feel that your vagal tone is poor. Probably my favorite tip to improve vagal tone is cold water because any of us could do this.
Unknown speaker
Now some of you listening might be sea swimmers and you may be you know those crazy people who launch themselves into the Irish Sea or the Atlantic at all times of the year even when it’s very cold and come out absolutely buzzing and feeling great well what you’ve done is you’ve improved your vagal tone but you don’t have to be swimming in the sea to do that if you have a cold a hot shower in the morning for the last couple of minutes just switch on freezing cold water and make sure you spray here in particular the receptors for the vagus nerve are actually here in the cheeks and they will send a message to the vagus nerve that you feel safe so freezing cold shower in for the last couple of minutes in the morning very very good to reset vagal tone so there is a link between our nervous system and our emotions.
Unknown speaker
because when we have regulated our nervous system in this way through all the tips that we talked about we’re more likely to be busy in our prefrontal cortex than we are to be in our amygdala because if we feel nervous and are overwhelmed that has a resonance then in activity in the amygdala which is where emotion is based and you know our emotions are not all of our emotions but a lot of our intense emotions particularly fear would have a lot of connections in the amygdala and some of us would have a tendency to a bigger amygdala or more connections in it which is why the mindfulness-based stress reduction is brilliant but our emotions serve a purpose for us okay they tell us something they you know they help us with to know what’s going on for ourselves and they say okay something that you’re not happy with here there’s something going on and they give us an impetus to change and to address important issues.
Unknown speaker
So it’s really really important we listen to our emotions but sometimes we’re in emotional mind where we respond to the stresses in our lives with too much emotion and our emotions are dysregulated. They’re less likely to be dysregulated if the emotion is if the nervous system is calm.
Unknown speaker
So I like to think of the mind in three three minds and this is part of what we call dialectical behavioral therapy, dbt. There is the emotional mind which is housed in the amygdala and then there is the practical mind or the rational mind and this is in the prefrontal cortex.
Unknown speaker
Now ideally we can go from one to the other quite easily. We can have our emotions, we can listen to what they’re trying to tell us and then we can move us into our prefrontal cortex and go into a problem solving mode and actually this movement from one to the other is what we call the wise mind.
Unknown speaker
So I often work with clients on this and I often remind myself to go into my wise mind if I’m having an emotional reaction to something where I would typically have a very strong emotional reaction is I would be a little technophobic and so this last year many of you maybe can relate to this you know I’m not somebody who’d be great on computers and I’ve had to do most of my work or a lot of my work on computer and so sometimes I’m about to do something and the technology will let me down you know there will be a firewall or something random and I will feel my whole body tense up and I’ll feel myself going to my emotional mind and of course when I go into my emotional mind my thoughts will be congruent and go oh there’s not going to be an internet connection or this firewall isn’t going to let me in or whatever it is but and I remind myself oh no just go into your wise mind come back back up the truck and go into the problem-solving mind.
Unknown speaker
You know, my kids laugh at me, they say, Mom, you’re so calm most of the time, but with technology you are not a calm person. So I’d really had to train myself to back up the truck when I am with technology and go into my wise mind.
Unknown speaker
And what’s important to know about how we change the brain is the key to growing any psychological resource is to have repeated experiences of it. And these get turned into lasting changes in neural structure and function.
Unknown speaker
So for example, self compassion we spoke about, that’s incredibly important. When we’re too hard on ourselves we trigger the amygdala and then, you know, the response is we’re full of cortisol. When we are compassionate to ourselves we release oxytocin and this helps us to feel safe and reach out to other humans.
Unknown speaker
So it’s really important that whatever you decide to do for your wellness, do it over and over and over so that it is affecting change in the brain. So mindful self-compassion, if you just Google that, if any of you want to look into this more, if you Google mindful self-compassion, you’ll see there a lot of work by a writer Kristin Neff, N-E-F-F, and she does this lovely technique where you just become aware of the emotions and you find where they are in your body and then you soften the tissue,
Unknown speaker
the muscles, wherever that holding is, you say you’ve been not in your stomach or say your jaw is too tighter, you find it, you soften, you soothe and you soothe by just being nice to yourself saying look, you’ve got this, you’re okay, you’re doing really well, you’re kind of talking yourself down and you allow the emotions to be there and you’re breathing into them, you’re down regulating your physiology at the same time as soothing the emotions and being self-compassionate.
Unknown speaker
So that’s a lovely technique to use and I use this a lot with clients at the moment. I’ll say to them, where in your body are you feeling that anxiety or that sense of stress? Because a lot of people at the moment, they are meeting the criteria for clinical anxiety but actually it’s a real nervousness that has been triggered by the pandemic and maybe there’s some unresolved issues that are going on for them.
Unknown speaker
So mindful self-compassion can be so helpful and changing your inner critic. Another technique I wanted to address was savouring and this is a lovely technique for wellness. So we have a set point of happiness.
Unknown speaker
So we all have a tendency to be you know happy at a certain level. Some people are naturally a little bit happier than other people and of course there’s all to do with our wiring again and we can change our happiness set point but you know the way people think I’d love to win the lotto now that would really make me happy to win the lotto but what’s really interesting in research on lotto winners is that after I think it’s about 18 months the person who’s won the lotto comes back to the same set point of happiness that they had before they won the lotto so they you know they have this great well-being for maybe 18 months or two years and then they revert back similarly if had somebody said something really difficult to happen then more they’re dealing with the bereavement or they’ve lost their job or you know something really difficult but they go back you know initially they feel terrible and they’re really struggling with it and all of us who’ve had bereavement will know this but they you come back in most cases not all not 100% of cases and in most most most cases we do come back to a set point of happiness.
Unknown speaker
And, you know, the research indicates that it’s not life events that are going to move the dial and move the set point upwards for us. It’s actually inner processes that we take on that change the dial, move the dial.
Unknown speaker
And I think this is really interesting. And again, you probably tired of me talking about mindfulness, but again, the mindfulness based stress reduction program like the MBS or to lose mindfulness. And that, because it changes the wiring in the brain, it actually helps you access more positive, healthy, happy emotions more easily.
Unknown speaker
So that moves the dial. So mindfulness definitely helps improve our happiness set point. But another thing that helps us move our happiness set point is learning to savor, to be absolutely in the moment.
Unknown speaker
And this moving back to the set point of happiness, by the way, the technical name is hedonic adaptation. And it’s literally just moving back to a set point. So what reduces hedonic adaptation? Well, savoring, and this is something we can all learn to do.
Unknown speaker
And it is the act of stepping outside of an experience to review and appreciate it. So there are things that we do that help us to enhance savoring and to do more savoring. So, you know, first of all, it’s being absolutely present for the experience.
Unknown speaker
And I had this experience recently, my son got his, bought his first car and he asked me for a driving lesson. And my daughter sat in the back with her dogs. And we just had this moment where I thought, you know, this is…
Unknown speaker
a moment in time I’ll never have again, his first driving lesson and that I’m teaching him to drive and I had this sense of sorrow for a moment or wistfulness because my thought was oh this is such a precious moment and it’s so fleeting and it will be gone and I had to bring myself back to savour the moment and go and I’m so lucky at this exact moment in my life to be having this lovely experience so this is savouring and it’s really worthwhile teaching yourself to do it and the things that enhance it are if you tell another person about how good it felt sharing moments with other people so you know that helps us savour thinking of just how lucky we are to have this exact experience in this exact moment so a lot of savouring is also being fully present for the moment and appreciating the tiniest details of that moment but oftentimes you know we do things unbeknownst to ourselves that stop us savouring the moment.
Unknown speaker
We’re focusing on the future, we’re thinking oh this is going to be over soon, we’re comparing this moment to something else or we’re thinking oh this isn’t going to last forever or maybe this is never going to be as good again as this, oh this could be better this way or maybe you know I don’t deserve this moment.
Unknown speaker
So teach yourself to savour moments. It’s a really precious thing to do and it’s another thing that stops this hedonic adaptation and it can be the smallest thing that you learn to savour. I remember Klein saying to me in the clinic you know in the depth of the pandemic she was saying that she had done a course in the school of philosophy and they had done a lot of training around savouring and she said she would go down in the morning she would lay out the most perfect breakfast table for herself and she’d have some wildflowers from her garden,
Unknown speaker
she would put on her coffee pot and she would just look at the flowers as the pot bubbled up she’d smell the aroma of the coffee and you know she said just that early morning quietness at her table before the family got up with the flowers and the coffee and she just that set her up for the day.
Unknown speaker
I thought that was a lovely example of savouring. We talked a lot about mindfulness and basically mindfulness is changing the brain by changing the mind and it’s being perfectly mindful in the moment you know and non-judgment of the moment and a brain that learns to be mindful is an integrated brain so it’s the practice of open and non-judgmental awareness in the present moment and mindfulness is to the physical to our brains what exercise is to the physical body so many of you probably exercise for wellness and you know the way it keeps you fit and flexible and well and mindfulness is the equivalent only it’s for your neuronal connections instead of your body and it can also be described as being fully awake in our lives and for the exquisite vividness of each moment and we forget that actually we are only alive in this exact moment and you know just there’s only this moment and then of course we let go of the breath and there is only the next moment so just training ourselves to pay attention in a particular way on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally it’s just brilliant and that is what mindfulness is and you know when we’re mindful we’re not in the future and when we’re in the future we anticipate troubles and worries and we may have all kinds of anxieties and when we’re in the past we could have sorrow or regret When we’re in the present,
Unknown speaker
none of that happens. So human beings are actually at their optimal when they are in the present. So mindfulness and being present is my tip there. The next one is train yourself to be optimistic. And again, some of us, just from the way we were weird in our childhood, may be more optimistic thinkers than other people.
Unknown speaker
But the research shows that optimistic people are happier than pessimistic people. And optimistic people expect that they can solve problems successfully. And they expect that they can accomplish their goals.
Unknown speaker
And they expect to be happy. The pessimism is often learned in childhood. So if you have that tendency, accept it, name it, and just work on being positive. Decide that you’re going to change the way you think about things.
Unknown speaker
We have 50 to 60 thoughts in the brain every day. And there is a proclivity to focus on the things that are not going well for us. And that’s very normal, kind of a design in the human psyche. But you can decide, well, I’m not going to be like that.
Unknown speaker
I’m going to change the way I think. And I’m going to make sure that I have more positive thoughts than negative ones. And I’m not saying suppress anything, because it’s so key we never suppress our emotions, that we listen and we’ve got our guided by our emotions.
Unknown speaker
But listening to all of our thoughts, if they tend to be negative, leaves us a merry dance. So this is another reason why mindfulness can be so helpful, because it gives us a dispassion to our thoughts.
Unknown speaker
We learn we are not our thoughts. And we can step back and separate out from them. So we can learn to be optimistic and remembering that what we experience over and over changes the brain. Another top tip is gratitude.
Unknown speaker
And gratitude is just basically the quality of being thankful. and a tendency, it’s a mindset where we show appreciation for what one has. It improves our physical health, we know that people who are grateful have fewer aches and pains and it also has a huge psychological effect.
Unknown speaker
It reduces a multitude of negative emotions including reducing envy, resentment, frustration, regret. Part of the reason I think that we get such positive side effects from gratitude is it teaches us just again, it brings us back to savouring, but also it reduces our levels of social comparison which is something humans tend to do.
Unknown speaker
So Emmons, who’s kind of the famous researcher on gratitude, he has shown that when you learn to be grateful it absolutely increases your happiness levels and reduces your depression levels. I’m grateful people…
Unknown speaker
keep better, for example. And grateful people tend to have higher self-esteem. And this is, of course, because they don’t do the social comparison. So Martin Seligman, who if any of you are interested in positive psychology, there’s a great website, positivepsychology.com.
Unknown speaker
And you’ll find there a lot of research by a particular man called Martin Seligman, is probably the father of positive psychology. And he’s done a huge amount of research on the power of gratitude to transform us and to make us psychologically healthier.
Unknown speaker
But, you know, one of the things he does is he gets people to write letters to people who’ve been kind to them. And, you know, maybe it’s somebody’s birthday, and, you know, instead of buying them a gift, you just write them a letter as to what you’re grateful for about having them in your life.
Unknown speaker
And he’s shown in the research that actually this improves our wellbeing when we do these kind of things. And there’s another lovely piece of research on gratitude in relationships. And I think this is really important because I know a lot of people have been locked down for a long time with families.
Unknown speaker
And in some ways, maybe we’ve been almost overexposed to each other. The intensity of being with our loved ones all of the time can sometimes create conflict or bring unresolved issues to the fore. But in this one particular piece of research in 2015 by Barton, they measured couples on what they called proneness to divorce.
Unknown speaker
And they wanted to see would gratitude have an effect on their proneness to divorce. And so they got them to just practice being grateful just for the other actually being in their lives, for being there.
Unknown speaker
And they found that that improved that alone just saying well you know this bothers me and that bothers me but I’m grateful just that this person is in my life and that alone helped improve the communication and reduced there the proneness to divorce.
Unknown speaker
So gratitude can just be a really helpful thing to do and it can be you know as simple as just keeping a gratitude journal. Writing down you know in the evening things that you’re really really grateful for what were the things in your day that you really you’re so thankful for or it can be to stop in your tracks a few times in a day and just say what is it that I am grateful for at this moment and it’s amazing how it’s a mind shift it just changes it’s like changing the gear in the car.
Unknown speaker
So we’re coming you know slowly to the end there of the talk this morning. morning and I know I’ve bombarded you with a lot of information there. We’ve looked at the importance of down regulating nervous system function through reducing cortisol levels or improving vagal tone and we’ve looked at the role of sleep, exercise, breathing, cold showers, probiotics, chanting, humming, singing and all of these different ways that are going to down regulate nervous system function if we’ve poor vagal tone or are tending to go towards the sympathetic dominance.
Unknown speaker
We’ve talked as well awareness of the practical mind, the emotional mind and the wise mind and holding that awareness and training ourselves to go into a wise mind and we have talked a little bit about savouring and mindfulness, gratitude, self-compassion and we’ve talked there about the role of optimism.
Unknown speaker
So we’re just coming up to quarter to 12 so I’m just wondering does anybody have any questions there or anything that they would like to comment on anything that maybe they have found useful during this pandemic?
Unknown speaker
Have any of you taken up any of these practices? Have any of you done mindful self-compassion or mindfulness or have any of you been doing cold showers or just love to hear if anybody wanted to just say what has been working for them during the pandemic or ask a question?
Unknown speaker
Okay, so one other thing before I direct you to networking, if you’re interested in kind of a neural psychology of this you know some of you I know are in HR and that there is a lovely model called the SCARF model S-C-A-R-F and basically the SCARF model is a model that we use you know within companies where you look at how you make sure people are down-regulating the nervous system and not being you know going into threat activation and not reducing cortisol by you know giving them real autonomy and certainty and fairness and relatedness it’s just a lovely model just might some of you may be interested in it so thank you so much to Zevo today for inviting me in to talk to all of you and thank you all for coming and I hope I’m going to see you again but the networking now is taking place so maybe somebody want to go over there and enjoy networking with each other and have a lovely long weekend and I hope you’ll be able to put some of these practices in place.
Unknown speaker
Okay, thank you very much.
