Making Mornings Feel Better

Hi there I thought I'd talk today about the early morning blues that we can have because often I find on a Monday morning that I wake up and I think uh, the start of another week and I quite often feel quite worried about how I'm going to cope with the coming week I've relaxed over the weekend and then you get up on Monday morning and you think oh no I've got all this stuff to do and you can feel a bit overwhelmed with it – certainly I can – and if not to say a little bit grumpy about it, about the start of a new week

So the reason I thought I'd share this is because I've been doing a bit of studying around something called Compassion Focused Therapy and it just made a lot of sense to me what happened yesterday If any of you have seen my little video that I did yesterday I showed a video of a leaf that was almost floating in mid-air and the reason was was that it was attached to a spider's web just a single strand of spider's web and it was floating about a foot above the ground swinging backwards and forwards on the spider's web and that was something I discovered yesterday morning when I was going for a walk I think what happened yesterday was I woke up, we'd had a really nice weekend but I had stuff on my mind, and I started to feel a bit down – but the day started with a brisk walk to the station with my with my husband because I wanted to get out and about in the fresh air and then I took the dog for a walk in the park And as I began to walk around and enjoyed just looking around me that's when I saw the leaf and I was really enjoying the autumn colours as well and I realized then the bit of theory that I've been learning last week clicked into place I realized what was happening

What compassion focused therapy teaches us is it models the way we work as though we've got three different drive systems and one is called the threat system and that's at a very basic level This is whenever we feel threatened our threat system begins to drive us and that will always override anything else that's going on inside us but it's an evolutionary thing it's to keep us safe it's to help us get away from danger and so if we ever feel under threat our threat system takes over There's another part of our system which is called our activation system and this is where we go out and we're resource seeking, we're looking for things, we're working and often that's a really important part of ourselves to engage because it motivates us to get out and about, it motivates us to work but both the threat system and the drive system are very much focused activities and they're very much in our heads, whereas the third system is what is called the soothing system otherwise known as rest and digest and it's really important that we activate that system as well and that helps us with the threat system if we can activate our soothing system, it can help us when we're feeling anxious and worried because quite often what we're feeling anxious and worried about is not actually a real danger it's just the way our brains work in that we are unable to relax and because we're feeling threatened our brains aren't able to work very well I'll sometimes find when I have new clients coming in to see me they can be really nervous at the start of the first session and when I ask them to fill in their details they do things like they forget their telephone number or the name of their GP and the reason is is they're feeling so nervous their brains can't really think about those sorts of details and obviously for us if we're in that sort of system and we're going to work we're not going to be able to think straight So it's much better if we can try and lower our threat system down and the way to do this is with our soothing system

What I discovered yesterday and was reminded of was by going out for a walk, taking some time, by being calm, that enabled my soothing, my rest and digest, system to get going and I felt so much more calm and peaceful and my day improved immeasurably – and I was reminded that it's really useful to look to stop and to notice what is going on around us such as that little leaf floating in the mid air, such as the lovely autumn colors that are around us at the moment, and if you can incorporate something like that into your daily routine I think that will help your mornings to seem better So could you do something like walk some of the way t to work just to get the endorphins running in your body, to get things going, to help you feel more relaxed? Could you take five minutes just to sit quietly and breathe slowly? If you can do something like five slow breaths in a minute that will actually activate the calming part of your body, of your nervous system, so just five minutes slow breathing can make a real difference to you And so see if you can do that with your day and what you might find is you're then able to appreciate perhaps the smaller things in life – things like a nice cup of coffee, things like sitting down on the train, things like being able to have a nice chat with someone Just small things that you can notice – being able to take a little bit of time out at lunchtime and go for a walk, just to appreciate those small things which you can make happen in your day – and your day will feel a lot better when you look out for the small things that can help you feel happy So thanks very much for watching if you'd like to get in touch with me you can contact me via Facebook via the messaging system

Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next week Tuesday at 9:15 Bye!

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