Allowing Yourself to Rest is an Act of Self-Compassion

Image by Austin Schmid

I must confess, I’m not very good at resting. And in some ways, that’s a good thing. I have some extremely hard-working, driven, determined parts who have helped me achieve quite a bit in my career. Building a busy therapy practice over the past 14 years, training in a number of trauma-informed models, teaching meditation, writing, supervising other therapists and all the other things I love to do – those pedal-to-the-metal parts helped bring to fruition.

As I often say to my clients, working hard, being ambitious, having high standards for what you produce: these are all good things. The problem for them – and for me – is when hard work tips into a relentless, hamster-wheel existence, when work comes to completely dominate your life. And when those standards ratchet up from merely high to perfectionistic. When you feel like nothing is ever quite good enough, that you could always do more or try harder. When it’s difficult to feel any satisfaction or sense of accomplishment, no matter how much you achieve, because you’re straight on to the next goal.

The biggest downside of all this overworking is becoming exhausted, because the parts of you that drive you so hard may not know you’re human. With an all-too-human body and mind and nervous system, which all need to just, stop, sometimes. If this sounds familiar to you, I’m guessing you might also suffer from various physical ailments, like tension headaches, IBS, skin complaints, musculoskeletal problems and chronic fatigue. These are all ways for our body to communicate to us that we need to stop, rest, recharge. Otherwise, we risk burnout – or a much more serious illness, which is, sadly, common for those who charge relentlessly ahead, oblivious to their body’s increasingly urgent warnings.

It’s not your fault

For those readers in industrialised nations like the UK or US, it’s important to remember that our inability to rest is not just a personal problem – and certainly not your fault. We live in countries with capitalist economies and co-evolved cultures that esteem hard work, rewarding long hours both financially and with approving language like ‘grinding’ or having a ‘side hustle’. The rise of online working means we can now work anywhere, any time – it’s well documented that many workers now struggle to switch off, responding to emails and other messages from early morning to late at night, as well as at weekends.

And none of this is an accident, of course. Big corporations recruit and highly value employees willing to work long hours, soak up unhealthy levels of stress and give 24/7 commitment to the corporate cause. That’s why so many of my clients have worked in sectors like banking or law, where a relentless work ethic is the minimum expectation, causing untenable levels of stress and anxiety which lead them to my door.

It’s helpful to remember that humans are not designed to live this way. As I’m often writing in these posts, millions of years of human evolution designed us for a hunter-gatherer way of life (how every human on the planet lived until the Agricultural Revolution, just 10,000 years ago), with short bursts of intense activity (hunting, climbing trees for fruit or honey, scaring off hungry predators) followed by long periods of complete rest. We are designed to be either completely on – flooded with cortisol and adrenaline, muscles pumping, pushing our bodies to their limit – or completely off – blood rich with oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins, digesting a meal, sleeping, singing and telling stories around a fire.

Rest = Self-compassion

Every system in your brain and body needs rest. You’re like an iPhone, designed to give maximum output for only so long before you need recharging. We can also think about giving yourself a much-needed rest as an act of self-compassion. Because another thing I always tell my clients is that their health and wellbeing need to move much higher up their list of priorities. If you have ever been seriously ill you will understand that if you don’t have your health, nothing else really matters. No amount of money, accolades or professional achievements can compensate for being so grindingly exhausted you can barely climb a flight of stairs. Or the vision-blurring, nausea-making suffering of severe tension headaches, day after day. Or the severe bloating and discomfort that come with IBS.

Your body and brain are the most precious, miraculous, beautiful things. Treat them with care and they will help you live a rich, meaningful, flourishing life. Take them for granted and, I’m afraid, life may be a bit more difficult, especially as you grow older – take that from a grey-bearded 56-year-old! Your health becomes a much more precious commodity as you age, because you realise both how valuable and fragile it can be.

So, let’s make a deal. Next month is August, when many of us take time off to rest and recharge. I have decided to take two whole weeks off this year, to see my friends and family, spend time with my lovely wife and son, journey to some wild places and breathe clean, fresh air while hiking through Nature. If this hard-working therapist can carve out that time, could you? I know for many of you that won’t be easy – you may well have family commitments, childcare worries over the summer, financial pressures or a whole host of other reasons rest is elusive.

But we can build short periods of rest into even the busiest day. Even on days I am back to back with clients, I always meditate and do some exercise before the busy-ness begins. I also try to take a walk at lunchtime and build in other short IFS or self-compassion practices throughout the day. Could you? I hope so – because you are a wondrous, unique being. There has never been anyone quite like you in millions of years of human history and there never will be. Value yourself enough to rest – let’s both give it a try and see how we get on.

The practice this week is my Sleep Meditation: Deeply Relaxing Body Scan. As the name suggests, it’s designed to help you sleep, but will also aid rest and relaxation whenever you need it. Try it now by clicking on the button below – I very much hope it helps.

Love,

Dan ❤️

Harnessing the Healing Power of Self-Energy

Image by Daniel Mirlea

How do you feel on your best day? When everything just seems to flow, you feel calm and steady, dealing with life’s stressors without getting blown off course. A day when you feel – perhaps unusually, if you struggle with your mental health – that life is good. It may not be a whole day, of course, but even a good hour. An hour where you feel calm, wise and compassionate. Where you are glad simply to be alive.

This state of calm, grounded, authentic aliveness, is one we all aspire to. It’s why you’re reading this post, right now. It may be why you engage in therapy, read self-help books or meditate. When you taste it you want more, because it just feels so good. But it’s also elusive – very few humans feel this way all the time, unless they are enlightened. The Dalai Lama seems to embody this energy every time I watch him speak, but he wakes up at 3am and meditates for two hours every day, which is perhaps too much dedication for most of us!

If you struggle with your mental health in any way, and especially if you have experienced trauma, feeling this way even fleetingly may seem even more out of reach. If so, I’m sorry – it’s incredibly hard to live that way. But I also have good news, even if this calm, grounded state feels impossible to attain right now. Internal family systems (IFS) teaches us that everyone has an inner resource they can learn to access, with a little help. In IFS this resource is called your Self, and the energy this Self generates is known as Self-energy.

The idea of Self is not a new one

Although IFS was created by Dr Richard Schwartz in the 1980s, this notion of an inner resource is not new. In fact, every religious tradition has a similar idea, even if it has different names. As an atheist, I have long struggled with that notion, but the tradition I am most drawn to is Buddhism, which calls this inner resource Buddha Nature. You could also think of a life force, both in Nature and inside all living beings, which has an innate drive to health. The same force that heals your cuts, regenerates your cells, cleanses toxins from your bloodstream and removes viruses before they make you sick could be seen as Self-energy.

The only difference is that this energy is psychological, healing your trauma, wounds from the past and, through an IFS lens, your hurt young parts, who carry all of that old, unprocessed hurt. Self-energy is the only resource in you that can heal your hurt parts, or the ones who sometimes go to extreme lengths to protect them from further hurt. This is the arc of IFS therapy – and in fact of all therapies, whether that’s the overt goal or not.

The thing is that, as Dr Schwartz says, until you experience this for yourself it’s all just words. So I would encourage you to try the meditation below, or one of my other IFS practices on Insight Timer. You will also find meditations by Dr Schwartz there, as well as other leading IFS practitioners. Give them a try and see what you think. I hope you will enjoy them – and that you will be able to start accessing more and more Self-energy in your day-to-day life.

And if you would like a taste of Self-energy right now, try my Insight Timer practice, Accessing Healing Self-Energy, by clicking on the button below.

Love,

Dan ❤️

Find Your Own Path: Choosing the Right Approach to Healing

Image by Lili Popper

Have you ever been in therapy? I’m guessing, as you are currently reading this post on a blog all about mental health, that the answer is yes. If so, did it help? I certainly hope so, but sadly many people try different therapists, as well as different flavours of therapy, and find them either minimally helpful or not much help at all.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all therapies are unhelpful. It’s just that, in my experience, people often choose therapists without really understanding the exact type of therapy they offer, why it’s better/worse than other approaches, or whether it’s the best approach for them.

Let me give you a concrete example. If you have experienced trauma in your life, you will probably need professional help to recover from that. And so you may find yourself a nice, friendly, caring counsellor, who says what you need is to talk through those traumatic events in great detail. But for many people just talking about what they have been through, in an unstructured way, will not only be unhelpful, but actually re-traumatising.

You would need a trauma-informed therapy like EMDR, sensorimotor psychotherapy, somatic experiencing, trauma-informed stabilisation treatment, schema therapy or trauma-focused CBT. All of these approaches will help you process your traumatic memories in a safe, structured and focused way. Just talking about your experiences, in this case, is not the way to heal them.

Let me be clear – I’m not knocking counselling here. There are some wonderful counsellors out there and the work they do is invaluable. It’s especially helpful to get you through a tough time, like bereavement or divorce, when a kind, empathic, non-judgemental person is exactly what you need. But mainstream counselling is not designed to help with trauma, which is why it’s not the right choice if that’s the kind of help you need.

Finding your own path

The longer I do this work and the more therapy models I study, the more I believe that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to healing, whatever kind of psychological problem you are struggling with. I often think to myself, ‘What does this person need, at this moment, in this session?’ And I then draw from a wide range of theories, techniques and strategies in my mind to find just the right one for that person, in that moment.

You might also find that you need different therapies at different times in your life – where a highly focused, time-limited approach like CBT may be perfect for one phase of your life, a longer-term, less-structured modality like IFS may be right for another phase, or set of problems.

With that in mind, if you are considering therapy, here are some suggestions for finding your own path to healing, happiness and a flourishing life:

1. The relationship is everything. Whichever of the many wonderful therapies you choose, remember that the primary healing agent in any therapy is the relationship between you and your therapist. This is especially true in longer-term approaches, like schema therapy or psychodynamic therapy. But even in short-term models like CBT, feeling safe in the room (or online) with someone, that they get you, care about you, are warm and nurturing, is crucial. I often tell people to shop around – if you have an assessment with someone and it doesn’t feel right, trust your gut and find another person.

2. Trauma-informed therapies for trauma-processing work. As I mentioned earlier, it’s so important to find a trauma-informed therapy/therapist if you have experienced trauma in your life. The bigger and more impactful the trauma, the more important this is. So ask your prospective therapist about their model, experience and plans to help you heal. If their answers seem a little off, or unconvincing, keep shopping.

3. Therapy is just one piece of the pie. As well as integrating various therapy models in my work, I am also a holistic practitioner. I talk to my clients about many things, but top of the list is how much sleep they are getting and whether they exercise regularly. We are only beginning to understand the importance of sleep for mental and physical health (spoiler alert: it’s profoundly important).

   And getting regular exercise is right up there with good-quality therapy, in my opinion. We need to move our bodies, in ways we enjoy, as often as possible. I’m talking weight-training, HIIT, spin classes, walking, swimming, yoga, dancing, running, vigorous gardening, rock climbing… Every system in your brain and body is built to work optimally when you’re moving, your heart rate is up, blood is pumping, your breaths are deep and skin is warm.

   Extensive research shows that exercise is a powerful healing agent for stress, anxiety and depression – the three main types of psychological problem people struggle with. Meditation is also key, as are warm, loving relationships, a healthy (ideally Mediterranean) diet, moderate drinking, a healthy microbiome, mind-opening books and podcasts… Therapy is an important piece of the pie, but it’s certainly not the only one.

I hope you found that thought-provoking and helpful. I also hope you find the right person/approach for you, as that can be life-changing.

And if you are struggling right now, sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan