BLOGS

The concept of the body and mind being connected and the importance of being attuned to both has been written and spoken about widely. Sometimes we can attune to the mind or body, which is useful. However, the ability to tune into both is helpful and can be difficult. Perhaps we are more inclined to listen to one more than the other? Perhaps we find it easier to listen to one more than the other? Perhaps we prefer the messages from one more than the other? When is that we are more able to listen and/or be connected to both?

Our thoughts

Identifying with our thoughts, their style and pattern and recognising how our mind feels can sometimes feel easier due to knowing our own mind well. Connecting with bodily symptoms and recognising how our body feels is something we do day to day, but making the connections of when they connect with internal psychological experiences, especially distress can feel more challenging. What is it that our body tries to tell us?

Our body

Sometimes we think we are ‘well’ or ‘fine’ psychologically, but then the body presents itself with aches and pains, or a general sense of unwellness. We might think we are coping well with something difficult that we are experiencing. We may even be ‘holding it together’ well, but then your body is in a difficult state. It can be the case that the way we feel in our body can not be explained medically, or that medicine is not really having an effect, or an enough of an effect. 

Our feelings

Sometimes negative feelings can also lead to stress and discontentment in parts of our life. Feelings such as these can come up in our body as well. Recognising how your body feels when you are doing things in your life and living parts of your day to day life can be important. We can pick up on messages about how not only our mind, but also our body feels? Examples might be that certain things that you do in your day to day life tend to make you feel more tense, anxious, stressed, in pain physically or leave you feeling heavy and drained. 

There are other things that our body make show to us, but the question is how to do you listen to it and what do you think it means? Sometimes we make sense our experiences in ways that actually take us away from the truth of our experiences. We may be do this consciously to be able to get on with something because our choices are few or we aren’t able to change things right now. Alternatively, we may without realising be suppressing how we feel as we don’t know what to do with the information and feelings.

The juggle and balance

Living in a modern world where many things are happening at the same time, having competing demands, balancing work and personal life can be a challenge, yet we tend to just ‘get on’ with it. We can fall into patterns of coping and juggling a lot in day to day. Our mind may be affirming to us that ‘I am coping and in control’. However, sometimes your body may be struggling to keep up with the ‘juggle’. Energy levels can be lower and we can feel run down. We can find ourself being in a vicious cycle of preventing physical health worsening and just not feeling ‘normal’ and ‘well’ enough.  

Trying to juggle it all can be a careful act of precision, efficiency and muti-tasking. Taking time to just stop and check in with ourselves at a deeper level can lead us to leading a conscious lifestyle. This is helpful, rather than just rolling on from day to day, routine to routine. It is vital to know how you prioritise what is key over other things that also ‘seem’ so important and necessary.

Juggling life can feel hard and at the same time being off sick from work can feel just as hard. In these times giving yourself permission to be off sick and lowering your threshold of what ‘unwell’ means to you can be helpful in terms of allowing you that space to stop. It is key to be open with one self when reflecting on mental and physical health. If you are not feeling in good form, it is useful to consider the usefulness and impact of taking time out. It is important to reset, refresh, recharge and reignite before you come back and take on what lies ahead. Try not to be consumed by guilt of not doing something, which may upset or offend others. Sometimes you need to stop for yourself without worrying too much about others’ (family, friends and work) responses. 

Time out

Whilst you read this, you might be thinking but what about all the pressures and the catch up of various thigs I’ll still need to be left with? It’s true taking a break, creating a space and/or even going off sick can feel harsh because you have more to deal with afterwards as a pile up starts. What can we do then? Wont things just be harder then? Isn’t it easier to carry on?

Rather than be in cycles of unwellness and prevention mode frequently, it can be helpful to allow yourself to be unwell, so that you can then have time to rest and recover. Lowering your threshold of what being sick or unwell means to you, tolerating less stress and physical pain can be helpful in allowing you to re-set. Trying to continue with aspects of life when you are sick and taking medicine can compromise your rest at various levels, emotionally, mentally and physically. Sometimes a break is needed at all levels to really allow your body and mind to recover.

Re-evaluation

If you can be off sick and return to your ‘normal’ routine that is positive. However, it might be useful to consider what are you returning to in terms of working environment and relationships, personal relationships, home life and generally, the things that make up your life. Is there some level of stress, unhappiness and/or discontentment that weaves through some of these areas? Take a moment to examine your level of purpose, morale, enthusiasm and passion? How do you feel emotionally in relation to parts of your life? Is there support in these parts of your life? 

Asking yourself can be eye opening and with that comes challenging, upsetting and possibly relieving that the realisation is there. With that you can then review your life style and choices. Change maybe an option for you, or re-evaluating how much you juggle, what/who you investment into and how you live and work maybe things to think about. If you’d like more information on how to do this, read my blogs on:

• • What are values? How do I lead a value led life? – Kataria Therapy
  • Work stress, work-life balance and therapy – Kataria Therapy

Recently, I developed some presentations on stress for two very different corporate clients. Previously, the topic had been work-life balance. These topics are interlinked, stress can affect your work life balance. As I developed these bespoke presentations, I was mindful of considering the information I had about their organisational culture, attitudes to well-being, and essentially the struggles that they may have with organisationally, or the narratives that exist. I was thoughtful in how I framed the content of my presentation for the audience to be sensitive, yet thought provoking in delivery.

These presentations led me to reflect upon how working within the NHS in some ways can be quite containing due to the frameworks, systems and the clarity of the roles due to tight job plans. Some roles become more uniform across the UK as NHS service transformation occurs. The work becomes more demanding and prescribed in mind with service models and delivery.

However, my reflections here connect with the wider topic of work and life balance. It also also connects with the pressures linked to the expectations of how we should perform in our roles and the level of activity we should be demonstrating in our working week. The quandary and strain of fitting duties in and feeling over worked. There just aren’t enough hours.

All work environments have the power to influence our well-being in a magnitude of ways. Often the loyalty towards a work place, being passionate about the work and positive working relations relationships keeps us in role. Perhaps even the realisation that roles elsewhere maybe similiar. So, what do we do in these kinds of situations in our career and work?

The fundamental questions are…

• • Where does that leave us in our chosen careers and our work-life balance?
  • How do we step away from stress inducing roles when in your industry you’ve always come across high pressured roles?
    
  • How do we listen to ourselves as well as each other as colleagues and as leaders/managers to our teams when someone (even ourselves) feel that the expectations placed upon us are too high?
  • How do we name and locate this pressure within the organisation and away from the notion that we need to be more effective and work smarter?

Essentially, being aware of our limits and boundaries is key and voicing these to managers/leaders. Always holding in mind our well-being and the ability to make a different choice. Perhaps the time for that is not now, maybe it is something you need to work towards, but you can work towards it. Working towards change can be a process, it does not mean acceptance or resignation of a set of circumstances.

During times like this, therapy can help you manage the impact of work stress, or difficulties of keeping a work and life balance. Understanding your values, priorities and choices can also help you make the right onward decsions for you. If you feel you might want to explore how therapy can help you, make contact with Kataria Therapy.

This is a heartfelt post for men. 

I have witnessed and experienced personally and professionally how many men from different backgrounds experience mental health/psychological difficulties and sometimes don’t even realise it. Sometimes, they can’t face the reality of their difficulties. Sometimes, the knowing of difficulties is there, but not knowing what to do next.

I have seen it in the form of being depressed, anxious, difficulties in one’s identity, issues with confidence and self esteem, feeling uncertain or unsure, worrying a lot, drinking, smoking cigarettes, taking illicit drugs, working in excess, and difficulties managing emotions. To recognise these experiences and patterns requires self awareness and courage. To self help requires even more courage and strength.

My doctoral thesis many many years ago was on South Asian men’s mental health. Years on I still feel passionate and empowered to raise aware of the importance of everyone’s mental health, but specifically men as I recognise the barriers to accessing help at so many levels.

I hope we all, not just men can go deeper in our thinking about our mental health without fear, anxiety, shame, embarrassment and stigma. For men to let go of the stereotypes and ideas of how men ‘should’ be, feel, think and cope and just be themselves. If that means showing vulnerability as a human and getting support, that’s ok. Do what you need to better your health and experiences.

I’ve worked in the NHS many years and have my own private practice and what I’ve seen first hand is that change is possible. I’ve worked with men in therapy and never has a client not benefited. We all have potential to change.

Life is short, let’s all look after ourselves physically and mentally.

I have chosen to write about values in this blog because life is precious. My values are something that I regularly think about in order to remain connected to what really matters to me and to question how much I am living in line with my values. Below I will share with you some of my thoughts along with some helpful questions that I ask myself to stay connected to what matters to me as I move through life and all its demands. 

Being in touch with our values can be really helpful to us because often when we feel disillusioned and stuck in our life patterns, we can find the notion of creating change overwhelming and difficult. We may be having multiple questions running through our minds. Where to start when trying to create change? Do you focus on work or personal life? How do you know what to change and how? 

Firstly, let’s define values. Values are our ideas and desires for how we want to live. This can involve taking into account how we want to act in the world, interact with other people, the kinds of relationships we want to have and how we want to spend our time. Values can represent what is important to us, what matters to us in life and how we want to be thought of by others in our lifetime. Values can be representative of the sort of person you are and the life experiences that you have had that have influenced you and your growth.  

Values can fit into various aspects of our life, for example parenting, family, relationships, work, recreation, community, social network, personal growth, religion, spirituality, activities and health. There are many more areas of our life where values can exist. Values are different to goals. Values are leading principles that can guide us and motivate us as we move through life. A goal is a desired outcome that can we can work towards.  

It can be easy to get carried away with the flow of our lives by having an approach or attitude of just ‘go with the flow’. Sometimes months or years can pass as we continue with our routine and the choices and decisions attached to it. Sometimes it can take a major life event, or an epiphany moment when we begin to question our life choices and whether we are living a life that is meaningful to us right now. The question of what is meaningful and more specifically, meaningful right now can change depending on the phase of our lives or what is going on for us.

Whilst values can remain fairly constant, they can also alter from different parts of our life and in response to changes in our life. Perhaps you are forced through life events to re-visit your values, or you may just want to review them to ensure that you are living a life that is in line with your values. Trying to lead a value based life is helpful to us as we are then more likely to be connected to experiences of contentment, happiness, satisfaction, personal growth and achievements. To help you connect to and understand your values, below are some questions that you can ask yourself:  

– What is important to you? 

– What do you want your life to be about? 

– What sort of person do you want to be? 

– How would you like to be described by others? 

– Consider your life achievements that you feel positive about, what values contributed to your success? 

Once you have identified values that are important to you, the next step is to select actions and goals that are aligned to the values. Although carrying out actions or activities may sound straightforward, often our internal, psychological experiences can get in the way. For example, we may have barriers such as negative thoughts, self-doubt, self-criticism, voices, anxiety, anger and hopelessness. Being guided and motivated by the values that are meaningful to you, will support you to take action. 

Exercise – there is a wonderful metaphor about driving a bus of your life and how we navigate through obstacles and challenges and yet stay committed to moving forward with the life that you want to live. 

To see a video demonstration of this metaphor of your bus of life, please watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z29ptSuoWRc 

Therapy can also be helpful to discover and understand more about our self. I have worked with many clients who have wanted to address their work and life balance, wanted to manage stress, fatigue, burn out and unhappiness. Other clients have simply wanted to continue to lead their lives in the way that works for them and have used therapy to stay on track with their progress. Whatever your circumstances, therapy can be a helpful place to stop and reflect upon yourself and life choices and journey!

The topic for this blog is worry and anxiety management because it is so relevant to our day to day life. There are so many demands upon us every day ranging from personal and professional that are often multi-tasking throughout the day. Whilst we in some regard may be skilled at multi-tasking and think that it may be necessary in order to get through the things we need to do or may be even expected of us to be effective. The truth is it can be tiring at multiple levels. With so many pressures upon us and trying to stay on top of things, it is understandable sometimes we can feel prone to worrying or being anxious about aspects of our day to day life. It may be that you notice that you are someone who worries and gets anxious even when life is going fairly OK and that’s fine too. The intention of this blog is to give you some ways to begin to respond to anxiety and worry.

There are many triggers to anxiety and worry. Sometimes we don’t realise that we are anxious or worried until we have time to stop and connect with how we are feeling. Feeling very worried can also bring on symptoms of anxiety, which can be emotional, mental and physical. Excessive worrying can also make people feel exhausted and demoralised as this can affect their daily mind-set. Sometimes this can lead to avoiding people and/or situations in order to minimise experiences tat affect them or even turning to substances, such as alcohol or drugs in order to get away from and not feel unpleasant feelings.

Some help way ways to manage anxiety and worry are:

• • ‘Worry postponement’ or ‘worry time’ – this involves postponing worry till later or having a dedicated time to connect with your worries, but from a problem solving and solution focused mind-set instead of just worrying.
  • Distraction – using activities and experiences to keep the mind away from worrying. This can help you have a focus on something more pleasant and also help you change your mood to one that is less worried and anxious.
  • Routine – having a routine and within that having activities that give you a sense of achievement, some connection to others and pleasure can help you feel more positive and have a balanced outlook on experiences, situations and aspects of day to day life that may mean you worry less.
  • Mindfulness – this can help with coping with anxiety and worry. Mindfulness teaches us to be more present in the moment. This can then help change our relationship to our experiences, thoughts and feelings that can then help reduce anxiety and worry.

When trying new things in our life, it can take time to get used to responding or doing things differently to how we normally would. Be patient and kind to yourself and when it feels hard to do things differently, remind yourself that your intention is to help yourself out and if that takes more time and practice to develop a new habit or way of coping then that’s fine.

The topic for this blog is people pleasing. My reasons for picking this topic are that I wanted on this occasion to write about something that many of us experience in our day to day life. Perhaps it is a current issue for us, or maybe we have experienced it in the past. People pleasing for some people may be something that they don’t recognise that they are doing due to many reasons. So, let’s think of why people might be doing this.

What is people pleasing? Is it normal?
Let’s acknowledge that to some degree we do want to please people that we care about. Being attuned to others needs, thinking about them and doing things for them is not a bad thing. However, we do need to balance thinking and doing things for others and being able to feel that we can be our own person and think about ourselves and do things in line with our wants and well-being. When this ability is compromised and/or damaged and it begins to affect a person adversely, then it is useful to stop and think about oneself. Let’s look at some examples of situations involving people pleasing to make sense of it.

Do you find yourself often agreeing with people, the majority viewpoint or preference of others over your own and seem to go with the flow even though it’s not what really works for you?

Do you let go of things that you would like to do for yourself to make others happy and then feel unhappy within?

Do you pre-think people’s views, ideas, preferences, and actions and fit in with them or the situation to make them happier even if it is not in line with what you want and think? Or perhaps you feel they will be disappointed with you if you did something different, so you become agreeable?

Do you disappoint your partner by not being considerate of their needs or what they may want from you and the relationship because you are thinking too much about the needs of the immediate or wider family and not disappointing them, but instead disappoint your partner?

Why and how does people pleasing happen?
As a person you may have grown up learning to put others before yourself and thinking of other’s needs primarily before yours. Maybe whilst growing up more emphasis was placed on being thoughtful and thinking of others often, this can be linked to people’s family dynamics, culture, circumstances, values, roles and relationships. You may have learned that they need to put others’ needs first as that is what is expected of them. Additionally, it may be really hard to think of oneself as this is difficult to do having little learning or experience about this in life. Feeling that you are not worth thinking about, worrying that putting yourself first is selfish, being concerned that others will be disappointed in you or receiving negative responses when you have put yourself first may mean that you engage in people pleasing. One or many of these factors can affect a person to please others and be overly concerned about how others feels about them and how they are viewed by others. I have touched on just a few reasons here that may be present for people, but there are many more.

What are the consequences of people pleasing?
The consequences of people pleasing are that you may find it hard to think enough about yourself, your needs, desires, wishes and wants. Therefore, you fall short in thinking about yourself and your well-being. It may also be that you feel disappointed in yourself, or your life as you maybe living in line with what others may want from you and you feel you don’t have a strong enough voice or identity. This can undermine your sense of who you are as a person and can influence your levels of self esteem and self worth. In the long run, you may feel insecure, self-conscious, and doubtful of yourself resulting in depression and anxiety, or even relational difficulties affecting work, friendships and relationships. You may feel deeply unhappy within yourself and connect with feelings of inauthenticity and emptiness. Your happiness may feel contingent upon making other people happy and therefore, you are in a cycle of feeling unhappy and only happy when you act in ways to make others happy before you can feel happy.

What can you do to lessen and/or stop people pleasing?
So, the question is what can a person who identifies with people pleasing do? It can feel difficult to know how to change longstanding patterns when we have been a particular way or lived like that for some time. It may feel nerve-wracking to start to think and behave differently and worry about if others will notice this and what they will think, say or do.

Firstly, you may find it important to be honest with yourself and see if you can figure out what makes you engage in pleasing people? Then it can be helpful to think of the situations linked to this and what impact does this have on you and your day to day life? Once you have a bit more understanding about yourself and situations, it might be helpful to think about how you may think and behave differently so that you can begin to consider alternative ways of being and responding.

You may find it helpful to have a mindful approach to situations involving people pleasing as they arise so that you can be aware of how you naturally tend to respond and take some time to notice to patterns and consider responding in different ways. It might also be helpful to consciously begin to try out different ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving to situations and people to slowly notice how you would like to respond in the future.

Slowly, beginning to take forward new ideas into your day to day life is important and necessary to begin the process of change. Making notes or journaling what you notice about this process, how it feels and what happens when you do this may also help you to work through experiences that arise. You can also begin to learn and understand more about yourself. Remember being patient and compassionate with yourself is important as change can bring on varied challenges and experiences.

Speaking to people you trust openly about your tendency to put them or others first and/or think of their needs above yours might be helpful. Sharing with others that you would like to work on that to think about yourself as well as them may be an important step in getting support from people in your life with whom you have close relations.

It might be helpful to also hold in mind that whilst we change parts of who we are and our personality undergoes growth, people in our network may not necessarily be receptive to the changes we are making. Reasons for this are that as we change whether that be through our thinking, feeling or behaving that affect our ways of relating to others, the dynamics changes and therefore, people may need to adjust or do things differently. As relationship dynamics change, so do roles and relationship patterns and so, this can cause discomfort to other people for a few reasons. For example, reasons may be that they are used to us being a particular way and/or us changing becomes disadvantageous for them.

Finally, it’s important to hold in mind that change hardly occurs in an upward trajectory, we move forwards and sometimes backwards and even stand still. Be kind to yourself in this process and seek out help from self-help book and therapy is needed.

 

What is mindfulness?  

Mindfulness can be described in many ways by different people. However, most commonly it is known as the process of purposely bringing our attention to the current moment with a non-judgmental, open, curious and accepting attitude. It involves simply observing what we are experiencing, right now and being curious about what arises. Mindfulness can be applied to any aspect of our day to day life. We can learn to be mindful of the tasks we do throughout the day the experiences we have as we go on through our day and also the inner experiences we have within. The principle of mindfulness if to be curious about your experiences with curiosity, warmth and acceptance. In some mindfulness practices, our intention is to bring our awareness to one or a couple of experiences, such as the sensations of breathing, hearing sounds or noticing sensations. 

Benefits of mindfulness

Managing thoughts and worries

We can all become consumed with many thoughts throughout the day whether that be about the things we need to do, things happening in our life, external events in the world, relationships, situations, preoccupations with our inner personal experiences or perhaps certain worries. Sometimes our worries are current and sometimes about the future. We may be questioning ourselves or thinking hypothetically about what may happen and the consequences. These are common experiences many of us have and they can be more intense or frequent if you experience low mood and/or anxiety. During these experiences of over thinking or worry, it can be helpful to practice to help you stay in the present moment. Mindfulness can help you to stay in the here and now and in the present and let go of the thoughts and worries and not engage with them by changing your relationship with them and not reacting to them.

  

Lessening autopilot mode

Many of us try to manage multiple things in our day to day life and juggling and multi tasking is sometimes spoken about as a helpful skill. Whilst it allows us to do many things at the same time, we are often absorbed with multiple thoughts and feelings and engaged in a number of experiences all at the same time. We will be able to carry out a task without even thinking too much about it, for example driving somewhere and not having paid much attention to the drive. This is known as operating in auto pilot. Mindfulness allows you to focus and engage in what you are doing. During mindfulness you can ask yourself what your experience is right now and what you notice about your experience more fully, for example, what you can see, smell, taste, feel and hear.  

  

Responding differently to our experiences

When we become more aware of our thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations, we are less in auto pilot and have the potential to be more connected in the experience in the moment. When we begin to change our relationship to thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations are being more observant of them, non judgmental, accepting and curious, we minimise the tendency to react to them in habits or ways that are most familiar to us. This for us, opens up the opportunity to respond in a different way. You may be able to self help sooner, make different choices and change your experience.

Slowly becoming more aware allows us to develop skills in managing our psychological experiences to a higher level. Mindfulness can help you to let go of your experiences of difficult thoughts, feelings of bodily sensations, without fighting them or trying to remove them. You change your relationship with these experiences instead.    

 

Practicing mindfulness 

There are lots of ways to practice mindfulness meditation. Some popular ones include mindful breathing, mindfulness of the breath and body, mindful walking, mindful eating, guided imagery, body scans. Most people find the best way to practice is to listen to audio clips. These can easily be found on YouTube, or a range of apps that are available on our mobile phones.

  

Incorporating mindfulness into your routine

First of all, let’s admit starting new things can be hard even if we are willing to try them. Finding the right time to engage in new habits is hard in the busy lives we lead and changing our routines can create unsettling feelings. Here are some tips to help you get started:

• • It is important to be kind and patient with yourself and acknowledge that all new things take time, practice and effort.
  • It is also handy to practice mindfulness on ‘good’ days as well as trying it on ‘not so good’ or ‘bad days’. If we can become more rehearsed at something when we are in a space to try and learn and get the hang of it then it’s easier to use that approach when we are struggling within ourselves.
  • Create time in your routine specifically for the new habit, such as mindfulness. If you keep forgetting to do this, then it may be helpful to set an alarm or reminder on your phone to remind you. 
  • Be realistic in what you are expecting of yourself. We can not be mindful all of the time and therefore, it is normal for our minds to wander.
  • It can be helpful to notice the times when the wandering mind is linking to distress for you or experiences that are challenging and have an adverse effect of you. In these moments, you can perhaps try to be more mindful so that you can change your relationship to those experiences. Learning how to choose how you want to respond to matters and experiences is more beneficial than just reacting with little control.
  • Don’t be worried if being mindful feels scary or anxiety provoking to you. When we are not used to paying close attention to ourselves, we can sometimes feel overwhelmed and/or unsure how to interpret our experiences and what to do.
  • Take your time in slowly getting to know yourself through mindfulness. Be accepting, warm, curious and non-judgmental.  

Good luck!