The Art of Self Soothing

Interpreting Dreams

In the last of my series on dreaming we look at common images and symbols in dream interpretation. I love working with the unconscious and find dreams fascinating. We can think of them as metaphors for what might be going on in the dreamer’s life and/or the...

Nightmares and Night terrors

It seems difficult for people to talk about their nightmares. Even if the person has told me during their assessment that they suffer from nightmares, I often find people don’t talk about them in any detail until we have been working together for a while. Maybe by...

Types of dreams

Types of Dreams Every dream is as unique as the dreamer, but there are specific types of dreamsthat most commonly find their way into my consulting room. These are daydreams, vivid dreams, recurring dreams, lucid dreams, nightmares and night terrors. This month, I...

Dream Journaling

How To Remember Your Dreams I often work with people who dream frequently and are interested in their dreams. Many suffer from nightmares and night terrors which they remember vividly.  I will be exploring these in a later post. But a lot of people don’t remember...

Dreaming

Photography by Gregory Pappas on UnsplashPsychotherapy and Dreams During an initial consultation with a potential client, I often ask about their dreams. Do they dream regularly? Do they have significant dreams from childhood? Do they have recurring dreams? This is...

Time for a Mindset Spring Clean

March is a hopeful month. Officially the first month of spring with emerging colour, bulbs bravely shooting through the ground and trees starting to sprout buds. A couple of years ago in the UK we had a mini heatwave in March. With the unpredictability of the climate,...

Cyber Bullying

Cyber Bullying When researching this subject, I was shocked to see the number of people who had taken their lives due to cyber bullying and sextortion. Between March 2019 and March 2020 19% or one in five children between the age of 10 and 15 in England and Wales...

Male Influencers

The MeToo movement has been wonderful for women’s rights and furthering awareness of sexual harassment and abuse. I know very few women who haven’t experienced sexual harassment at some point in their life and there is now an ability for women to have a voice, be...

What’s Your Online Persona?

Who Do You Think You Are? How Do You Want To Come Across Online? We all know someone who exaggerates their life online – we see the ‘official’ glitzy positive image they put on social media. For example, posts of holiday snaps look amazing but, when we meet to hear...

Striking the Balance – Parenting Children on Social Media

Children and social media: It can be a thorny issue for many parents. There is a common conflict. On the one hand, if you let your child engage in social media they can feel part of their friendship group and won’t feel left out or left behind, whilst on the other...

There is so much going on in the world now. It’s hard watching the news, in fact I am more likely to just quickly check a news ap than I am to watch the news in real time. Many people I speak to are unable to watch the news at all because they struggle to think of the terrors and violence that are currently happening in the world.

Bad new sells. As do violent computer games and violent movies and tv series. If we’re not careful we can become immune to violence and negative news.

Like Jung, I believe that we have a shadow side where we all have the capacity to hate and be violent. It’s important to be aware of it and listen to it so that we can better understand ourselves. But if we allow ourselves to be washed in negativity daily then it becomes part of our normal way of life just as violent games and pornography can become addictive. Over time it is possible for us to become immune to violence and bad news.

Personally, I think it’s important to be aware of global events (and act on them if we feel we can help make change) but its also important to know where our limits are. There’s a danger that we can become overwhelmed with what’s going on nationally and internationally and this can lead to anxiety and existential depression.

It’s very important to be able to switch off. To reset and feel ok again. For example, to say that you don’t want to watch the evening news and you’d rather watch a comedy instead before going to bed or that you’ll limit yourself to only watch the headlines.

There are positive steps you can take to help manage the effect the onslaught of bad news stories has on your mental health, such as: writing to MPs, supporting charities that align with your beliefs, joining local groups and meditating and/or praying for those in need of support and guidance. A friend of mine has subscribed to Positive News, which gives only good news and accomplishments globally and she finds it a wonderful antidote and an interesting read.

But I’m interested in our psyches. How do we stop the overwhelm? How do we take some calm for ourselves? How do we put our life back in perspective so that it feels manageable and even meaningful, and it can start to make sense again?

There are actually many many ways that we can do this. This new blog series is going to explore this. Ways to find calm in this crazy world. Ways to soothe ourselves when it all starts to feel too much.

Our bodies talk to us and show us what’s going on in our psyche, often before we’ve figured out what’s troubling us. Hopefully, we can learn to listen to our bodies more so that we can tune into our minds and feelings and understand when life is beginning to feel difficult.

For example, when we are troubled maybe we start to feel a tightness in our chest, or our stomach starts contracting, or we feel a headache coming on. It’s useful to know our body’s initial somatic signs so that we recognise when things feel amiss. Then we can choose to do something about it there and then which hopefully makes us calm down and ward off the incoming anxiety or panic.

Once we know how our bodies react, we can start to investigate the causes of it. Hopefully, there will be some patterns that emerge, and you can figure out the main reasons for your anxiety.

Our aim is to catch the anxiety before it bubbles up further and becomes unmanageable. To know what our triggers are. And to either avoid them or know of ways to calm down and regulate our emotions when they strike.

One of my favourite ways to calm down and soothe myself is to do a meditation. I prefer a guided meditation, even for only a few minutes, but just stopping and concentrating on your breathing should be enough to come back to your inner world and calm yourself down. There are many apps and videos that you can use if you wish to. Here are a few:

Headspace
3 Minute Breathing Space
Calm

In the next post I will be exploring how nature can be a fantastic way of soothing us.