Tag: depression

Why Is Rumination Bad For You?

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I’m not closed about the fact that I’ve experienced mental illness in a major way twice in my life, post-natally, after the birth of each of my daughters. I had post-natal anxiety and depression both times, although my experience of each time was different. The second time I was prepared, and was also introduced to Havening by my lovely friend and colleague Lynley. The first time I was unwell for a whole year before I started to heal, and the second time was done and dusted within 4 months. What a relief that was!  And certainly no more babies for us.

Although the illness manifested slightly differently each time, rumination was a huge problem in both. Was it a symptom or a cause? Who knows. but it needed to get under control.

There’s disagreement in psychology as to whether it’s a mental illness in and of itself, or whether it’s a symptom, or, whether it is a cause of mental ill-health.

As with many things in the understanding of human psychology, there is no definitive conclusion! Most of my undergraduate essays would end with the rough conclusion: It’s considered a bit of both…

What exactly is rumination? Google says:

Rumination is a thought processing disorder meaning that worrisome thoughts or even neutral thoughts are given excess analysis by the person who ruminates.

And is considered to be demonstrated as four different types:

Brooding, reflection, intrusive, and deliberate rumination.

I think regardless, a good way to label it is simply: overthinking.

Here’s the thing: overthinking is absolutely correlated with depression, anxiety, OCD, and phobias. It can also be part of a healthy person’s every day life, they just don’t know that they’re doing it: it can cause sleep issues and, aside from the things I’ve mentioned, it’s also just highly unpleasant being stuck in your head and not being able to turn off your thoughts, which just loop and loop and loop… you burn your friends and partner out seeking a circuit breaker from them… a little wisdom to give you and out. It can be TORTURE! Your head is working WAY TOO HARD and you’re giving it WAY TOO MUCH OXYGEN!

Imagine being able to notice your overthinking patterns, observe them, and have a way of simply letting them go? Not just now, but every time? Come and learn how:

Sign up from my upcoming in-person workshop Use Your Body To Solve A Problem and learn how to get out of your head.

Sigh up to my internal dialogue eCourse – Inner Critic to Inner Coach and get those thoughts under control.

 

 

 

How Head-Brain Dominant Are You And What Can You Do About It?

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No matter who you are, you’re likely to share a common problem with most other people: you’re head-brain dominant.  I can relate to this, as I am too.

Here’s the thing: a lot of us aren’t aware or focused on what goes on below the neck on a daily basis, hour by hour. It makes sense, doesn’t it, that we’ve become accustomed to being in our heads. With the exception of sports, our schools are focused on what the head-brain can do. When we get into university and/or employment, we’re valued for our thinking or our knowledge application, or the basic skills that only a head-brain can generate. 

We love our head-brains, they’re amazing, and of course we are going to want to keep using them, they’re kinda essential!!

And, there are some downsides to doing this at the exclusion of the rest of ourselves. If all our attention and focus is in our heads and on our thoughts and we’re solely relying on our thoughts to guide us, then we are going to run into problems. Some of these are:

  • Cycling or looping thoughts that don’t lead to solutions
  • Getting stuck in your head – indecision
  • Overthinking and under-action
  • Rumination – which can lead into depression
  • Negative self-talk, which feels bad and can also lead to and/or exacerbate depression/anxiety/stress/low self-esteem
  • Overwork / overload / burn out
  • Sleeping issues as can’t switch head off
  • Lack of emotional awareness or emotional numbness
  • Lack of emotional regulation – overblown stressful emotions or under-felt pleasant emotions 

What’s the solution?

Relying on your head-brain to work everything out is like buying a top of the line coffee machine, and only ever using the one basic setting. You’ve got the equipment in there, now let’s work out how to use it!

Modern neuroscience can now demonstrate that we have complex and adaptive neurological centres, not just in your head-brain, which is the biggest of course, but also in your HEART and in your GUT. There are reasons why we have in-built phrases referring to these intelligence centres, which have been handed down to us through the ages: 

What does your gut tell you? 

I had my heart set on it!

I can’t get my head around it….

We’ve always been aware on one level, and now we have the technology to scan the human body and confirm exactly what activity goes on and where. Here’s what we know:

  • Head: Cephalic brain: 50 – 100 billion neurons. Competencies are: cognitive perception; meaning making; thinking. 
  • Heart: Cardiac brain: 30 – 120 thousand neurons.  Competencies are: emoting; values; relational affect.  
  • Gut: Enteric brain: 200 – 500 million neurons. Competencies are: core-identity; self-preservation; mobilasation (action). 

On a more spiritual level, it’s believed that all three of your intelligences have a “highest expression” – meaning that when these brains are balanced and working at their best, they enable you to have access to specific resources, which you don’t have access to when they’re out of balance and misaligned. They are:

  • Head – it’s highest expression is CREATIVITY
  • Heart – it’s highest expression is COMPASSION
  • Gut – it’s highest expression is COURAGE 

(Source: mBraining.)

Who couldn’t do with a little more creativity, compassion and courage in their lives?!

Personally, I have found so much value in very consciously taking my focus away from what’s in my head, and placing it into my heart. Parenting is a GREAT example for me. My head can tell me all kinds of stories about how hard it is (I mean, it IS hard, but it doesn’t mean I need talk to myself about that all day). At the end of the day for me, the way to embrace parenting, is understanding that it’s a heart-led process, guided by love.

If YOU can learn how to acknowledge, connect to and balance out all THREE of your intelligence centres, you can start to solve problems, make decisions and process emotions more EFFICIENTLY, because you have THREE engines available to do the work for you, together, rather than burning out that one engine at the top. Imagine being able to let go of all that thinking, and allow your body to do some of the work for you? If you value efficiency as much as I do, it’s worth some discovery!

In this workshop – Use Your Body To Solve A Problem – you come with a specific life-challenge in mind, and we teach you how to access and align all three intelligent parts of you to get them working together, to process your problem. The aligned yoga postures help the body process this, and tap into your energy centres too. 

You’re allowing your body to DO THE WORK FOR YOU. 

Now, the question is, is your head-brain curious enough to come along and test it out?

Video 3: Creating More Happiness (not depression)

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This is such a wide and important topic! And today, we are focussing on one key element – how negative self-talk is inherent in the creation of ‘depression’ and what you can do straight away to begin to turn that around, while debunking a major myth in the process. Even if ‘depression’ is not something you identify with, and you just want to create more of the good stuff, keep on reading!

**NB: when I reference the word ‘depression’ today I’m talking about mild, episodic, temporary periods of depression, and not persistent, severe or what may be termed a ‘clinical’ depression. If you have these issues, this may help you, but your spectrum of treatment obviously needs to be considerably broader. Please consult a professional if in any doubt.**

Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology teaches us two very important concepts. Firstly, we used to believe that negative and critical inner dialogue (self-talk) was a symptom of a depressive state. We now know and understand that instead it is one of the key causes of it. And this makes perfect sense in the understanding a simple equation – talk to yourself like crap, judge and criticise yourself, and you’re going to feel bad.  It’s not possible to talk to yourself in this way and feel good at the same time. Your brain can’t do this.

Secondly, the solution to this is NOT blind optimism, or Pollyanna Positive / rose tinted glasses kind of thinking. In fact, from his analysis he found that this kind of thinking no more served us in our lives then the really negative stuff did. People who thought this optimistically were not equipped to deal with life’s inevitable adversity when it arose, and they were therefore unable to build useful resilience in response to such events.  Listen to his definition of learned optimism (vs pessimism) here.

Michael Yapkow, an expert in the fast reversal of depression using brief therapy, has found something similar to be the case, which he teaches to his patients:  it’s not that happy people go around giving themselves high-fives every day for tying their shoe laces, or look at themselves in the mirror and say “you’re SO awesome!”.  No. In fact, people who are living happily rather than depressed still have their negative dialogue, it’s just they have learned not to listen to it any more or take it seriously.

I teach this in much more depth in my upcoming online training, because this understanding helped me form one of the key principles of developing a useful and healthy Inner Coach practice.  If we don’t want extreme optimism and high-fives, then what is it we are going for when developing an Inner Coach, that’s actually useful to us? This is all explained.

For now, imagine you had a volume control on that Inner Critic, as if it were a bad radio station you were tuned into. Try imagining you could simply turn it down, so you don’t have to listen to it all the time.  Now, what’s that like?

Any questions or feedback, give me a shout. I’d genuinely love to hear form you.

Warmly, Charlotte.