Exercise for wellbeing

Today I went back to the gym, after a few days off. I noticed I had been feeling twitchy, unkind and a bit blah. I knew if I thrashed around on the treadmill for a while I would find my balance. Also when I put on my Lycra clothes and sports bra I feel thin and powerful. Mostly because they are so tight, the restrictiveness makes me breathe in and stand taller. I feel like I can conquer the world when I am wearing my gear on my way to a workout session. Within minutes of arriving, I am exhausted, sweaty, and feel like I might vomit. I get off the treadmill and sit down for a bit on the rower, recovering.  I look at my biceps as I pull back the handle part, looking for any sign of definition. Nope. None.

What I have noticed mostly about scheduling regular exercise is that it helps my mind. It makes me take some time out from my own stuff and it shuts off the over thinking. It also means I don’t prowl around the house looking for another load of washing, then spend an hour on the lounge waiting for it to finish. At the gym, I am more aware of my body, I slow down, I breathe, I connect to myself and my thinking slows. I am find it hard to fill my head with negative self talk.

Positive mind talk

Often there is a personal trainer in the gym shouting something to someone else that I take on as my own. She says things that I wouldn’t normally say, but I’m happy for them. “You are a machine!” she yells. Yup, I think plodding away on Level 8, when I by now, I should* crank it up after seven months at the same speed. I am a machine. “You are on fire!” Yup, I think, listening to Karl Stefanovic snort laugh on morning TV. I am on fire.  “Look at you go!” I glance at the timer. Has it been 10 minutes, yet? Only 2.18? What the heck? Look at me go, sweating and puffing for another seven minutes and thirty two seconds…

I know I haven’t lost weight, because when I take off my high pant leggings, the spare tires and the tummy sag back into position. I don’t go to the gym to lose weight. I go to let off steam, to de-stress, to find my zen and to slow down my thoughts. Now instead of speaking to my shoulder in an negative way, like “You are so weak, the other side is much better than you…” I now, feel the difference between each side when I push out or pull down and say more reassuring things like “Wow –you are really getting stronger, thanks for sticking by me.” I notice that I can run the same distance with less encouraging talk, I notice my fitness has increased.

Positive body talk

It is important to be kinder to your body, to acknowledge it is amazing and doing great things. Because it is; and you are, anything less than this is self-destructive on a cellular level and the body begins to believe you.  Byron Katie tells us that when we as humans, fight and rail against things which upset us, we create our own frustration. Her theory is about loving what is, loving the round parts of our bodies, loving the firm parts, loving the dimpled bits and stretched out bits. She is about loving the calm and the storm. Watching it all play out. Her philosophy is fluid and makes sense; whenever we go against something, it hurts us and other people. It stops us finding peace in our lives and experiencing joy.

The more you lie on the couch saying to yourself  “I feel fat,”  or  “I’m just so tired,” your body and brain will believe it. For me, I always feel fat and lazy when I don’t exercise. I feel much better after. The chemical release of endorphins is what my body is craving. I often feel awful doing it, but always much better having done it.  So even if you don’t feel you are getting any visible physical results from exercise, you are getting results. Your neurochemistry is elevated, enhancing your mood, your heart and bones are getting stronger. Your nervous system is maintaining equilibrium.  Your respiratory system is working hard to send more oxygen to your body, your muscles fibres are on, pulsing with more blood and you are sweating, excreting nasty toxins.

Be kind to yourself, if you don’t feel like it, don’t do it.  Listen to your body. Be guided by what it is telling you.  More often than not, it can be helpful to listen to the body and ignore the brain! I have been to the gym tired before, because I felt I should, and I lasted 5 minutes before packing it in and heading home. Your body knows what it needs.  I will finish with two very profound words by a wise man named Tom Braun, “Should, shit.”*

* If you feel you should do something, it is often somebody else’s expectation of you. Sometimes it is more realistic to be driven by our own wants or needs, rather than someone else’s shoulds.

 

Rachel Wilkinson is a holistic counsellor and massage therapist working at Step into Health in Mansfield Park, Brisbane.  Depending on what is going on in her life, she is also a regular member of a gym. She listens to people for a living, so in her downtime she talks a lot, to friends, work colleagues, random people in the supermarket and delivers many life lessons to her small children, when they are trapped by seatbelts in the car. She finds relief in writing.

 

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Mind your own business

My minding my own business face

I’ve been called on my judgement a few times. Never as loudly as the time I was told to mind my own business, by a man washing his clothes at Kirra Point on a Tuesday morning.

I try really hard not to be judgmental, or if catch myself making a judgement call in my mind, I try to talk myself around it, or understand the person has permission to be as they are. So the man washing his clothes at the lookout may not have been homeless; he may have been on a surfing safari whilst renting his Honolulu apartment out on Air B&B.

My problem is, I don’t have what my drama friend calls a neutral face. I think I am more on the opposite end of the spectrum with my what the heck? face. I am not like Lady Ga Ga. I’m not even terribly good at UNO, let alone having a poker face. You can actually see me thinking, “Woo-hoo! I have a wild card pick up 4 and you are going down!” or in the supermarket “Why the hell would you wear a bra with a strapless dress?” You can see my face crumple, the brow wrinkle, the lip turn down and the head tilt. I think I even have a what the heck? wrinkle near my mouth. I usually get caught out when I do this, by walking into a pole, knocking over a display in the aisle, or a small child appears in front of me, forcing me to trip over my own feet. When I am in your business, I am not minding mine. I’m not watching where I am walking, or driving, for that matter.

My business, Your business, God’s business

So Byron Katie, has a theory about thoughts. She was depressed for many years and spent a lot of time thinking about thoughts and how we relate to these thoughts. She says in life, there are three types of business: your business, my business, and the Universe’s business, or God’s business; (these two are interchangeable, but basically represent the huge things we can’t control in life), like the stock market, or traffic lights, or the weather.

When the man at Kirra Point yelled at me, it was a very good reminder about staying in my own business. I suspect he also saw my what the heck? face. He was washing his T-shirts under a council tap and hanging them on the fence to dry. His business. So he saw me looking and yelled very loudly “Mind your own business, you need to focus on your own stuff, not what I am doing, this is not YOUR business.” True. Not mine at all. I was ashamed, averted my eyes and walked down the very steep hill in a bit of a dangerous hurry.

Byron Katie asks us to think about when we are in somebody else’s business, who is minding our business? I tend to preoccupy myself with what everyone else is doing as a way of escaping my own reality. I think this is how reality TV has found its audience. I can yell at the TV “You’re an idiot!” and “I can’t believe you would speak to someone like that!” when in fact, I speak to my family, loved ones and sometimes myself in a similar way. When I judge others, it is another way of taking the attention away from me, hiding my own shame and behaviour while gossiping about others. So who is watching my business, while I am sticking my neck out into someone else’s?

Acceptance

Byron Katie believes the reason we get stressed is because we are rallying against the things we can’t change, instead of accepting them. So when I get angry at the rain for drenching me in an unexpected shower, I should really be accepting it is raining, and realise I didn’t bring my umbrella. Or, if I was more evolved, I could be grateful for the rain, because it has been so hot and dry and be happy because the farmers need it and the dams need to be filled to ease the drought.

Byron Katie does exercises using a worksheet, where a person can investigate a thought or belief like “I hate my life,” or “I am fat,” or “Nobody likes me.”  When you do what she calls, The Work, she asks you to say this belief out loud, question its validity, then give examples to support why it isn’t true.  A simple question. “Is it true?” A simple look at how we think. So rather than get angry or stressed about something, accept it as it is and move on. Acceptance in itself can be a huge change for some people.

Old beliefs

Some of our thinking can also be old, outdated, or can actually belong to somebody else. My mother used to say “If you go out with wet hair you will catch a chill,” I used to go out every day with wet hair because I didn’t have the patience or energy to blow dry. What is a chill anyway? Why do we sometimes hang on to these outdated thoughts? Sometimes I have almost said this to my children, and caught myself with the thought, “Hang on a minute, isn’t a chill or a cold caused by a virus?” and “when is it ever cold where I live anyway?” So often our thoughts are not true, we just think they are, or we are just used to thinking them. Quite often, it’s a habit, or our thinking has just fallen into a negative pattern.

Yesterday when it was raining and I was driving behind a car swerving all over the road and I said to the person in the other car “What is wrong with you?” I was watching the car swerve all over the road in front, I think I may even have yelled “Are you drunk?” I was so caught up in criticising his behaviour, I didn’t see the pothole he was swerving to avoid and I hit it with a bone jarring doink.

I know it is hard to stay in our own business, but ultimately it can be less stressful to only worry about the small space we take up in the world, rather than what everyone else is doing. I believe judgement can sometimes have a place, my children know if something feels weird or creepy, it probably is, but that is more like a gut feel than a criticism of behaviour. I think too much, to have any room in my head for anyone else and their behaviour, the thoughts are there, but I often now tell them to go away, I don’t believe them, they are not true and I don’t have time for them. They can go and mind their own business.

To understand a little more about The Work and how Byron Katie does this, you can follow this link. 

To look at one of the free worksheets for adults and children you can download here.

 

Rachel Wilkinson is a counsellor and massage therapist at Step into Health in Mansfield, Brisbane. She studied Holistic Counselling and The Work of Byron Katie with The Awakening Group. She works on judgement all the time. She has tried to stop saying ” No judgement, but” as it is always seems to precede a judgy sentence. She now realises when the young kids say “Just sayin”” it is also a way to excuse how judgmental you are. Just sayin.’

 

 

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Anxiety – how to put it back in its box.

Nothing to see here…

Anxiety is a friend of mine. It’s taken me some years, but now I know some ways of backing her off, calming her down and gaining control of my body. It has taken many years and many lessons and just when I think I have taken control back, she comes again. I now understand that anxiety is a protective mechanism the body calls on when it senses danger. It is instinctive and an ancient part of our biology. It comes from a small part in the brain called the amygdala and there is nothing you can do to stop it from happening. You can, however, calm it down by breathing and some self talk.

Recently the whole fight or flight theory gained another friend. The freeze. So now it is understood that the reaction our body goes into is either:
1. Fight
2. Flight
3. or Freeze

A few years ago, I was taking the washing off the line when I saw a black snake. My daughter was jumping on the trampoline behind me, with the snake in between us. I had to say to her in a calm voice, when I was really not feeling very calm at all, “Darling there is a snake on the ground, don’t move”. She looked at me and I looked at her and I was frozen. I couldn’t get to her to rescue her and I could not move. She went into flight mode and jumped off the other side of the tramp and exited safely by the pool fence. I just watched her and the snake, paralysed. When I realised she was safe and the snake had slithered away, I noticed it wasn’t really black at all and maybe more a dark green, I could go back inside. I noticed that even though I often felt in the words of Bruno Mars I would jump in front of a train for ya (her). I couldn’t even rustle up the sensibility to throw a clothes peg. That’s the amygdala, freezing me, keeping me safe.

Sometimes on my drive home in the afternoons I have to stop in the middle of our street for a big water dragon. He will often be ambling halfway across our narrow road when I tear around the corner, safely wrapped in a car, so I’m not scared of him. But he freezes. A massive lizard, doing the old “I’m closing my eyes, I can’t see you, so you can’t see me, let’s pretend I’m not really here.” I usually have to wait until he lumbers off,  sometimes I’ve had to get out of the car and shoo him across the road. The amygdala is an animal instinct. We are the same, they also fight, take flight or freeze. Nothing to see here…

When we get anxious the body takes over in order to prepare us for the fight, flight or freeze response. When we are in a situation where we are frightened, our brain instinctively steps up to protect us. So a number of things happen, which are out of our control.

 

The thing with anxiety is, because it is a natural response by the body when it senses danger, we can often make things feel more scary in our heads, when we catastrophise and over-think or imagine the worst is going to happen.

The first time I ran the City to Surf, I was a jumble of nerves. I was with my best friend who was fitter than me and I was worried I couldn’t make the distance. We had trained together for it, with scenic lunch-time jogs around the Domain, but at my best I had only ever run about 5ks. The race from the City to Bondi Beach is 14ks. At the starting point where everyone was assembling, I watched the lean Lycra clad bodies with their heart monitors strapped on and started to panic. The terror began in my head. “I’m a fraud. I can’t run this.” I watched people jogging on the spot and stretching out their hammies. “I’m not fit enough; I should join the walkers and the guy in the gorilla suit.” “Who am I kidding?” Then it hit me in the stomach. “I need to wee!” I squealed. I found the closest porta-loo, then when the stench hit me, I changed my mind. I think in my panic, I just made myself want to wee.

My friend was checking out the men and nudged me. “Phwoah, look at that!” I was frozen to the spot, looking at the ground, hunched over, “I think I’m going to vomit” I whispered. My face felt cold and all the blood had rushed to my arms and legs. “You are not going to vomit” she said, grabbing me in a side hug. “We are doing this, I will stay with you.” We did it, she stayed with me for the most part, then I let her go, at one stage the man in the gorilla suit overtook me. The adrenalin in my body and the cheering of the crowd got me over the line. The panic and anxiety actually helped by urging on my muscles and the crowd cheering got me mentally psyched up. In that instance when I did take flight, anxiety was actually helping me out.

If you don’t flee or fight, the feelings of nausea, panic and fear stay with you. When you feel anxiety because you are facing a new situation like going to a job interview or a new workplace, or you might be a teenager starting a new school, if you don’t end up fleeing, all the adrenalin, heart racing, sick vomity feelings get stuck inside you, until the brain knows you are in a good place. A way to stop anxiety in its tracks is, and it sounds way too easy but it works, is to breathe. This sends a message to your body that you are safe.

Breathing tells your nervous system that you are OK, you are not going to run or punch the fellow interviewing you, or freeze beside the locker at your new school, pretending you are not there. Deep belly breathing brings the oxygen back to your digestive system, wakes up the parasympathetic nervous system, changes the balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen and calms you down.

Sometimes we can talk ourselves into a panic. Sometimes we tell ourselves weird things like “ oh my god I am going to die” which is slightly over exaggerated and unhelpful or “ I don’t know if I am going to vomit or poo my pants, God, maybe both of these things will happen.” This is when I start to soothe myself by telling myself things like “OK, this job interview or new workplace or new school is pretty scary, but I don’t think I will die.” Or “Right, I need to do a nervous wee, so I will just find the closest bathroom and stay in there a bit longer than I need to, to breathe and calm down.” “I am going to be fine, this is all OK,  I can do this.” Gulp, breathe, wipe off the sweat from brow. ” I am the brave person.”

Sometimes if I can’t talk myself out of it, I imagine my friend talking to me she says things like “You are not going to vomit” and laughs at me. She also says “You can do this, you are great.” In times of panic, I often call on her, she can be very helpful because I am forever making up stories in my head. “They will never give me this job, if I wet my pants in the interview.” Because the stories I make up in my head, really never happen and are only just stories, if they did happen, I am TOTALLY prepared for that, but they rarely do.

So breathe deep belly breaths. Talk yourself down out of the panic area, or call on a friend or loved one in your mind to help “You can do this, you are brave and courageous and you probably won’t vomit.”

Rachel Wilkinson is a counsellor and massage therapist at Step into Health, Mansfield, Brisbane. She has been for several job interviews and hasn’t vomited in any. She suffers from anxiety in scary situations like around snakes, large crowds and new situations. She is currently putting together a workshop designed for parents and children to be brave in situations that can be quite terrifying. It will be a small workshop, because big ones are a little confronting.

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