Gudrun Frerichs, PhD

Change Your Mood With Your Body

One thing is sure there are a whole lot of depressed people in this world. You can easily spot them when you observe people while sitting at the beach, waiting for the next bus, or sipping a wonderfully brewed Moccacino.

How will you spot them? They usually are walking hesitantly rather than striding confidently, avoiding looking at people, slouching with their upper body, having an earnest face or frown, and staring at the ground. The body expresses the person’s inner state and, equally, perpetuating it. You can try this out right now. Sit with your head down, letting your shoulders slouch forward, breathe shallow, maybe let a sigh. You can NOT NOT feel low of energy and depressed.

Love is a Human Need

“From birth to death, love is not just the focus of human experience but also the life force of the mind, determining our moods, stabilizing our bodily rhythms, and changing the structure of our brains. The body’s physiology ensures that relationships determine and fix our identities. Love makes us who we are, and who we can become”. (A General Theory of Love, by Lewis, Amini, Lannon, p.viii)

10 Instant Stress Buster

In line with the topic of ‘Stress’, that has been the focus of my last newsletter, I would like to share with you ten of my favorite stress busters. They are easy to apply and you don’t have to go to large expenses. By the way, it is for the reason of high expenses that I havn’t included shopping as a great way of dealing with stress.

Getting Professional Help For Stress

When you pay attention to the signals of your body you will be able to do a lot of stress control without the need for professional help. However, some stressors are beyond people’s control – such as the death of a loved one, illness, past abuse/trauma, or general mental health issues.  They can not be changed or controlled and people might require help processing these stressful events and letting them go.

It can be seen over and over again, that people struggle by themselves and wait a long time before they seek professional help. I call that the dentist syndrome. (Who likes to go to the dentist?) Instead of going at the early signs of problems, when a simple drilling and cleaning could have restored dental health, people wait too long and end up with a root canal treatment.

Sometimes a few sessions can put things in perspective and provide the tools needed to deal with those incidents that cause stress.

Breaking The Routine

Breaking the routine is not only a powerful tool in managing stress but it is also useful in many other contexts. Have a different breakfast, skip the TV news and have your dinner at the beach, take your lunch break away from your desk, have a swim at mid-day, or visit a friend unexpectedly.

 Breaking the routine could also mean you spend a Saturday in the garden weeding, in the library checking out books, or going to an art exhibition.

If possible, make sure that you have a mini vacation ever now and so often. It doesn’t have to be something expensive involving hours and hours of travel. It can be a surprise ‘day-out’ with your partner or your children or a long weekend on a campsite or in a motel nearby.

 

Plan Your Day / Week

A common phenomenon is that people put too much on their plate and then get stressed with the responsibilities and commitments they gave to themselves or other people. The best way to limit stressors that are needless is by planning your day, week, or even month.  But you need to be realistic. Even when people plan their day or their week, they often don’t allow for fun and enjoyable breaks, they don’t consider that activities may take longer than planned or that they may be stuck in traffic. Leave plenty of time between activities so that you have room to move.

Planning your week will also allow you to say no to requests that are difficult for you to fit in or that are beyond what you can reasonably expect of yourself. Learning to say NO is a major tool in combating stress – especially for people who have been conditioned to be overly accommodating others.

The Stress Diary

Before you can deal with stress effectively, you need to identify the causes of your stress. Are your stressors external and relate to your work, to problems within family members, financial problems, a loss, housing, your overall work load, friends or neighbours, or your health? Or are your problems more located internally due to the way you think or feel? Are they due to you being a perfectionist, needing to be in constant control, being shy or afraid, struggling with your mood, or to difficulty controlling your emotions?

Use a stress diary – at least for wee while – to identify the daily stressors you are under. You can use the following link to Download Stress Diary

You can see in the stress diary a column for identifying the physical symptoms of stress. It is really important that you become aware of how your body reacts so that you can start identifying stress earlier and take more quickly measures to alleviate stress.

Grounding Meditation

Here is another relaxation / meditation exercise. This one is more focused on grounding yourself. Grounding is one of the concepts used in therapy quite a bit. In the widest sense it means 'getting both of your feet firmly on the ground'.

Do you feel shaky, spacey, or confused? A grounding exercise might be just what you need. Because all meditations/visualisations emphasise deep breathing, you will get the relaxing benefit of breathing regularly and deeply. This in itself brings you more fully into your body.

I found the meditation on YouTube

ENJOY! and let me know how you find it.

Trust Your Unconscious Mind

Have you ever experienced that you had to make a decision and you've been swaying too and fro and couldn't make up your mind? Some people find it very difficult to come up with an intuitive quick decision. Instead, they think deeply about the pros and cons, calculate all possible outcomes, and then decide one way or the other.

On the other hand those people, who make a decision quickly without 'thinking' too much about it, are often seen as not so serious or not quite reliable.

Here is now the good news for all quick deciders: The best decisions are made when you make it with your unconscious mind. Just don't think about things too much. Research is saying now for some years that making decision unconsciously results in much better outcomes than mulling over things and considering all the possibilities.

Read more about this research by clicking here:
Our Unconscious Brain Makes The Best Decisions Possible.

Enhance Your Brain's Performance

Many people look for ways of enhancing their brain's performance and their cognitive abilities. There are lots of 'tricks' that people have come up with. I clearly remember from my study years the 'sleep with the textbook under your pillow' technique, that was supposed to help with recalling information for next days exams. This technique never gave me anything other than a stiff neck. But there is no need for despair for all the followers of this way of learning. We know from research using placebos that the brain is highly suggestible. If people believe it works, it often does.