Health, Wellbeing & Nutrition - Tony Bates

Saturday 28th November 2009
Tony's 7 secrets for surviving the times in which we live:

1. Nothing succeeds in building resilience like success
Every experience you have where you take on a task and complete builds into your personality a strand of resilience. Resilience is like a steel cable that is made up of many strands of steel.
We can build up resilience in children by giving them some role in the everyday things we do, so that they feel they are able to do something, to contribute something. It could be handing us cloths pegs when we are hanging out the washing; it could be gathering plates beside the sink, to set us up for a wash and dry.
The important thing is that we add to our resilience each time we or the person we care about walks away with the feeling, "I can do this". So that later when they are confronted with more challenging and complex problems, they can bring a confident mind-set to the problem and feel within themselves that they can do this, they can solve this problem; or at the very least they can have a damn good shot at cracking and maybe even enjoy themselves in the process and learn something new.

2. Invest yourself in something that means something to you
Being able to become engaged in something builds resilience and gives our lives meaning. The opposite to depression is not happiness, it is engagement. We need to invest ourselves in something outside ourselves that matters to us, no matter how grand or how humble it may be. This is what gives meaning to our lives. And with a sense of meaning and purpose you can persist and cope with all kinds of frustration and setbacks. When your life becomes a place that holds no meaning for you, it can feel like there is very little point in going on.
For some people what feels right what feels good is when they can be of help to another. We see great examples of this around the country in the wake of flooding and devastation to homes and lands. Sometimes the best gift we can give to another is to allow ourselves be helped is that we allow ourselves to be helped

3. Set clear goals
Set clear and achievable goals for what you can achieve in the immediate future and what you would like to achieve in the long term. Having goals helps to focus our energies and prevents us from getting caught up in worrying or speculating on what might happen in the future. A friend of mine (Jack Casey in Fanore) has a great saying about the importance of goals:
"He who aims at nothing generallly hits it with remarkable precision"

4. Listen to your body
This Christmas, people will buy sat nav systems fro their friends and loved ones. Nature has equipped our bodies with an internal system for getting through this life. We each have an internal compass but we are so out of touch with it and rarely pay attention to what it is trying to tell us.
We have a highly sensitive hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenaline axis in the brain that orchestrates our endocrine response to the world. This is a part of us that gets fired up when there is some stress that requires our attention, and makes available the energy we need to rise to whatever the occasion calls for. But just as this system gets fired up when we need it, it also needs to be allowed to wound down. Like a soldier coming off duty, we need to give our bodies the permission if not the order, to stand down.
Resilience grows when we take care of this system; when we wind down through exercise, food that is good for our body, rest and nourishment. Of course what we tend to do is that we recognise when our bodies are fired up and wanting to calm down; but instead of letting them we crank up our arousal levels another notch and keep going. This is where all our stress related illnesses come from and why we find ourselves one day feeling exhausted and burnt out. Our bodies lose their natural capacity to wind down and our endocrine orchestra starts playing way out of tune. Our natural stress response system becomes dysregulated so that we over -react to everything and live our lives as if there is a tiger outside the door the whole time.
I have teaching mindfulness for some years now and what I find is that is provides people with a way to reset their stress response system and start over.

5. Learn to work with negative as well as positive feelings
All of us would like to be happy. And there is a belief that if we just live our lives a certain way, if we press the right button on a Monday morning, that we should and will sail through the rest of the week on a crest of well being and success.
The truth is that life doesn't work this way. Life is full of violent eruptions of things that come along. One of the great lessons of life from all philosophy is that while one may have an ideal picture of how things should be, we have to accept sooner or later that rather than things being the way they should be, they are usually they way they shouldn't be. Unless you can accept this about your life, your family, your organisation, and your friends, you're going to have a really hard time.
Negative as well as positive emotions are part of our internal "Sat Nav" system. Negative emotions generally arise where a loss has occurred or when the risk of loss is high.
Negative emotions motivate us to do things that protect and advance the survival of the species, th see dangers in our environment and to take precautions to make sure that these don't keep happening, to protect our children, to keep them safe.
The importance of acknowledging we feel afraid (of listening to and facing our fears). Courage is admitting how we feel and listening to what our emotions are telling us we need to do. So open that letter from the bank, go see the bank manager before things get out of control, confront him or her and tell them what you need. And tell others your story.
It can be helpful to say something to yourself like "My bad mood is part of me, but it's not all of me". Maybe it's is a part of you that is trying to tell me something important about my life You can run from it, but it will just keep coming back.
Our bad moods are generally trying to alert us to something in our lives that isn't quite right. We cant see what exactly that is, but rather than push away the uncomfortable feelings that's niggling at us, we would do a lot better "keeping the ball in play" and looking more closely at what we are feeling. For example, your lingering sadness may be alerting you that there is some hurt that you've been avoiding and that you may need to talk about; or that you would do yourself a big favour if you could let go to some real or imagined guilt that you've been carrying far too long; or maybe that there is something or someone you need to reconnect with in your life that brings your spirit alive.

6. Let the "Force" be with you
"We need the 'force to be with us'. The force was once a benevolent god who people looked to and counted on. Religion has historically been a very powerful force in this country. Now we feel betrayed. In some ways this has been a sharp awakening to the fact that its up to ourselves to take responsibility for the mess we are in and to start looking out for each other. The key "force" now in our lives is relationship, our bonds with each other.
Star Wars - what is it saying to us about resilience?
Peig - resilience comes from feeling connected to one another - "Meitheal - But I have this to say, that I had good neighbours. We helped each other and lived in the shelter of each other. Everything that was coming dark upon us, we would disclose it to each other, and that would give us consolation of mind. Friendship was the fastest root in our hearts."
Make sure there is someone there for you and commit yourself to being there for someone in your life. It may be inconvenient, you may not feel like you want to. Just make up your mind and do it!
The notion that there is one person in my life that would not only go to reasonable but to unreasonable lengths to help me, builds within me a confidence that I can make it

7. Believe in your Self
The resilience that is nurtured through relationships is tested at some point when we are called upon to stand alone, face down some challenge, and trust the decisions we make.
We will never discover just how resilient we are or could potentially be if we always stay within our comfort zone, if we keep things too safe.
The lesson from the research literature is that you would do well to begin to identify and encourage resilience in your own life and in those you care about. You need to make resilience part of your self-image.
Acknowledge the many positive features of your personality that have got you to where you are today: Your refusal to give in, your sense of humour, your willingness to learn from others. Look at all you've been through, and consider the resilience it has required to keep going and not give up.
Think also about the people who have gotten you this far and their random words of kindness that burned their way into your heart and echoed there when needed them most.
Above all we need to believe and to communicate to our young that the pain and heartache that comes our way does not in itself have the power to destroy us; that we have within us far greater power to heal and be made whole. And that it is precisely those times when we confront suffering that we discover an unbelievable resilience in ourselves. And we need to know that we are not alone and that there is no reason to feel ashamed when darkness falls.

Saturday 4th April 2009
Dr Tony Bates and Emma Farrell, Keith Doherty and Marianne Larkin spoke about their own experiences and some of the ways young people have of coping with emotional problems

You'll find full details of the latest report from Headstrong - "Somewhere To Turn To, Someone To Talk To" on their website at http://www.headstrong.ie/

Saturday 12th January 2008
Tony Bates' tips for coping with depression:

* feeling bad doesn't mean there is something wrong with you
All lives have highs and lows and just because you want things to be a certain way, it doesn't mean they will (or can) be. We must accept that in life things go wrong and we will feel bad at times. What is important is how we cope with the chaos.

* what turns a bad mood into a black depression?
We often feel guilty about feeling down, so attack ourselves for being 'weak' - a form of self-blame that actually digs you deeper into the black hole of depression rather than lifting your spirits.

* basic steps for getting through a bad mood
Forgive yourself for feeling down. It isn't important what has prompted it, what matters is that you think about it with kindness and accept this as being 'part of me, but not all of me'. It may be trying to tell you about what needs to be healed in your life and from there you can free yourself from whatever is stopping you living your life fully.

* reach out to others
Support is crucial in times of confusion and stress. Opening up to even one person can keep you grounded and keep you afloat. Choose somebody who knows and cares about you - they won't write you off and will see that there is really a problem for you.

* try to keep the ball in play, rather than push it away
Don't be frightened if anxiety/sadness engulfs you. Often this is a way of alerting us to something in our lives that isn't quite right. Rather than run from it, 'keep the ball in play' and look closely at what you are feeling - perhaps you've been trying to avoid a hurt or maybe there is something you need to talk about.
The following quote from Rainer Maria Rilke's 'Letters To A Young Poet' may be useful - "so you must not be frightened if a sadness rises before you larger than any you've ever seen, if an anxiety like light and cloud shadows moves over your hands and everything that you do. You must realize that something has happened to you; that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hands and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries or any depressions? For, after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you".

* adjust your expectations of yourself
At a time of year when you feel cold and miserable, you may have decided to radically do without a range of comforts that you blame for your sluggishness. Don't. Sometimes your angst is telling you that you need rest and sleep - why not postpone your ascetic regimen until Lent.

* activity is important
Action can do wonders to break up a bad mood. The poet and naturalist Thomas A Clark recommends taking a 10-minute walk every day, to connect with nature and notice the impact the changing seasons has on our lives. Take your bad mood for a walk, talk to it, reason it out and point out to it the beauty that is all around. In short, open your mind to the ways in which life in all its beauty still exists, live for the moment.

* remember that this too shall pass
Take time to relate to our feelings instead of reacting to them. Notice how they change and are impermanent. They arise at certain times and then they pass away. You've been here before and made it through to better times.

* write yourself into a larger story
The story of your life is a hugely textured drama and takes you along many paths. Don't replay the life story you have believed until now - this will only keep you stuck in one place. Getting in touch with the hero inside of you will empower you to engage with your distress and move forward to the next stage in your life.

Tony also recommended some books which might be helpful -

"Depression: A Common Sense Approach" by Tony Bates
"Stillness" by Sr Stan Kennedy
"A Mindful Way Through Depression" by William Teasdale & Kabat Zinn
"Distance & Proximity", poems (about walking) by Thomas A Clark