Dr Jim’s Blog: Mental health is not just about childhood experiences;
Or current stressors; or badly managed thoughts…
Mental health is related to diet and nutrition, inner dialogue, physical exercise, re-framing of experience, and sleep science…Etc…
Introduction
In science as well as popular culture, the body and mind have long been pulled apart, and treated as separate entities.
And when they are treated as being connected – as in the modern psychiatric theory of ‘brain chemistry imbalances’ causing negative moods and emotions, the ‘brain chemistry’ in question is taken to be unrelated to how you use your body; what you eat; how well you sleep.
It is assumed to be ‘special brain chemistry’ – separate and apart from Lifestyle Factors – which can only be fixed by consuming dangerous drugs!
In the immediate future, lifestyle counselling practice will be a novel service offering for counselling and psychotherapy clients who have realized that:
# the body and mind are intimately connected;
# that the body-mind is an open system, permeated by a whole range of lifestyle factors which can be managed well, or mismanaged,
# which results in excellent or poor mental health, physical health, and personal happiness.
In the pages of our popular book on lifestyle counselling, we have presented:
– a summary of our previous bookabout the impact of diet and exercise on mental health and emotional well-being;
– a chapter which integrates psychological theories of emotion with physical sources of distress – for the emotions of anger, anxiety and depression – and recommends treatment strategies;
– a chapter on the negative effects of sleep insufficiency on our thinking, feeling and behaviour;
– a chapter on how to re-frame any problem, using our Six Windows Model (which includes some perspectives from moderate Buddhism and moderate Stoicism) – but excludes the extreme forms of those philosophies of life!);
– a chapter on how to divine and assess the counselling client’s multiple sources of emotional disturbance, using our Holistic-SOR Model;
– and a chapter on how to set about teaching lifestyle change to counselling and therapy clients.
And/or you could also look at our current range of six books on this area of counselling and therapy theory and practice: Books about E-CENT Counselling.***
Dr Jim’s Blog: Understanding the links between anger, anxiety and depression – on the one hand – and nutrition and physical activity – on the other…
Copyright (c) Jim Byrne, September 2018
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Introduction
Renata and I did a lot of research and reflection on the subject of the impact of diet and exercise upon mental health and emotional wellbeing.
We did this work because we wanted to consolidate and expand our pre-existing level of understanding of the part that nutrition and exercise play in the emotional well-being of our coaching and counselling clients, so that we can help them as much as possible; and also to inform a wider audience of a range of helpful research studies.
Our overall aim is to put an end to the false assumption that the body and mind are separate entities, which can be treated in isolation from each other (by medicine, on the one hand, and by psychotherapy on the other).
The complexity of human body-minds
Human beings are very complex; indeed the most complex entities in the known universe. But that does not mean we cannot hope to come to understand ourselves better than we currently do.
There are, for example, some identifiable factors which contribute to the makeup of human personality; and there is now a good deal of research which needs to be added to the psychological model of the human being.
We can learn to better understand our body-brain-mind interactions with our social environments, and this can enable us to understand ourselves and our clients, and to help them, and ourselves, more effectively.
For examples:
– we are affected (emotionally and physically) by our diets;
– the amount of exercise we do;
– our self-talk (or ‘inner dialogue’);
– our sleep patterns;
– our family of origin;
– and all the patterns of behaviour we observed and experienced in our development;
– plus our current relationships, and environmental circumstances: e.g. our housing accommodation; the educational opportunities we had; our social class position; and our opportunities for employment (or earning a living).
Implications
Since expanding our understanding of this complexity of human functioning, we have developed new approaches to perceiving our clients; and assessing the complex nature of their presenting problems in the consulting room.
We have also produced a page of information on this research, and the book that resulted from it: How to Control Your Anger, Anxiety and Depression: Using nutrition and physical activity.
Dr Jim’s Counselling Blog: Lifestyle counselling resources are now being made available in low-cost eBook format via Kindle
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Resources for counsellors and psychotherapists – and for self-help enthusiasts
The following resources are now available in low-cost, Kindle eBook format:
Lifestyle Counselling and Coaching for the Whole Person: Or how to integrate nutritional insights, physical exercise and sleep coaching into talk therapy,
This book has now been updated to include a comprehensive assessment questionnaire for clients, to help you to collect all the information you need in order to help them to improve the approach to those lifestyle factors which impact their mental health and emotional wellbeing.
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How to control your anger, anxiety and depression, using nutrition and physical exercise,
This book summarizes the most important research on the question of which appraochs to diet and exercise have the most imortant effects upon the experience of anger, anxiety and/or depression.
This book provides a comprehensive approach to writing for therapeutic, self-management or creative improvement purposes.
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These three books have proved very popular with counsellors and psychologists on LinkedIn, and they are selling in significant numbers.
It seems there is an appetite for radical change abroad in the world of counselling and psychotherapy at the moment, and people are ready to explore new ideas. In particular, the relationship between the body and mind (or, more precisely, the body-mind connection); the problems of sedentary lifestyle and inadequate nutrition; plus inadequate sleep; and how to process our own experiences in a journal.
All of these developments are very encouraging for the future health of our counsellors and therapists, and for their clients!
Regarding some announcements about depression and medication
Some research results that should be known by all counsellors and psychotherapists, as well as their clients
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Copyright (c) Jim Byrne, 2018
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Context
We wanted to post a blog about the new hype about antidepressants, which has been generated by a new report, which will be mentioned below; and which has been wildly hyped in the British newspapers over the past few days.
Then the magazine, What Doctors Don’t Tell You, produced an article which we liked, and we posted a link to that article, on Facebook, as follows:
“Antidepressants are a family of drugs that are bad and dangerous to know – and now researchers have named Effexor (venlafaxine) as the baddest of the bad. Patients are much more likely to attempt suicide while taking Effexor than any of the other antidepressants, a new study has found.
“The news comes as no surprise to those who’ve already been exposed to the drug. It’s considered to be one of the most powerful antidepressants, and one of the hardest to tolerate. In fact, around 19 per cent of patients stop taking the drug early because they can’t stand the side effects, which include anxiety, sexual dysfunction, weight gain, high blood pressure and thyroid depression. One patient even reported a sudden change of hair colour.
“They are the lucky ones. Once over the initial hurdles of life-destroying side effects, withdrawal symptoms are so severe that it’s almost impossible to stop taking the drug.
Antidepressants are a family of drugs that are bad and dangerous to know – and now researchers have named Effexor (venlafaxine) as the baddest of the bad…
WDDTY.COM
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Some time later, there was a response.
A statement in defence of antidepressants!
A contact on a major social media platform posted this piece:
Unnamed Person: “…” (The statement made by Unnamed Person has been removed, at their request, and is now replaced by a simple statement of the objections they made to my post above.) This was the substance of their objection:
1. It is ridiculous to post my post, because it is based on just ONE study!.
2. It seemed to Unnamed Person that there is a rigorous 6-year study of antidepressants and talking therapy which I should have posted alongside my post, for the sake of balance. And for the sake of acting responsibly.
I (Jim Byrne) responded like this:
Jim ByrneHi Unnamed Person, Thanks for your message. So I looked up the study to which you refer, and this is what I found:
“The international study – an analysis pooling results of 522 trials covering 21 commonly-used antidepressants and almost 120,000 patients – found that all such drugs were more effective than placebos.” (Source, SBS News, Australia: https://www.sbs.com.au/…/antidepressants-really-do-work…).
What could possibly be wrong with the design of that study?
Well, look! They “…pooled the results of 522 studies…”.
What could be wrong with that?
Well, *how many* studies were *conducted* by drug companies, where they *refused* to release the results? It could be that they hide the almost half of studies which show *no benefit*, and publish the just over 50% that show *modest benefits*. (And they try very hard to *hide* the very widespread and *very serious* negative side effects of all of these ‘medicines’. (See this report in The Sydney Morning Herald – an equally well known Australian news outlet: https://www.smh.com.au/…/2008/03/02/1204402265828.html)
Here are some extracts from that Sydney Morning Herald source:
“The key issue is simple. In any situation, to make any kind of sensible decision about which treatment is best, a doctor must be able to take into account all of the available information. But drug companies have repeatedly been shown to bury unflattering data.”
“Sometimes they bury data that shows drugs to be actively harmful. This happened in the case of Vioxx and heart attacks, and SSRIs and suicidal thoughts. Such stories feel, intuitively, like cover-ups. But there are also more subtle issues at stake in the burying of results showing minimal efficacy, and these have only been revealed through the investigations of medical academics.”
“In January a paper in the New England Journal Of Medicine dug out a list of all trials on SSRIs that had ever been registered with the US Food and Drug Administration and then went to look for those same trials in the academic literature. There were 37 studies which were assessed by the regulator as positive and, with a single exception, every one of those positive trials was written up, proudly, and published in full.”
“But there were also 33 studies which had negative or iffy results and, of those, 22 were simply not published at all – they were buried – while 11 were written up and published in a way that portrayed them as having a positive outcome.”
I (Jim) then commented:
So, Unnamed Person, let me sum up. You cannot evaluate the effectiveness of drugs when the companies producing those drugs are allowed to selectively publish the results they want you to hear; and to hide the results they do not want you to hear.
And if some idiot, or charlatan, does a meta-analysis of the studies published by the drug companies, and their patsies, and says this proves those drugs are safe and effective, I have just one thing to say to them: This is not science! This is not good academic work! This is propaganda for the drug companies!
So, Unnamed Person. Who is being ridiculous? Think again about the flag you were flying under: “There is a *rigorous* 6-year study of antidepressants”. That flag is a pirate rag! There is no possibility of rigorous studies of all of the data on antidepressants so long as drug companies are allowed to hide bad data, and to publish what they choose to show us!
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Unnamed Person‘s response
Later, Unnamed Person, got back to me:
Unnamed Person:OK – if you batter me about what has been omitted, what ignored, what privileged by Pharma, money generally, academic status, medical ranking… then who am i to make such a foolish, academically unfounded post? Goodness, i will not use the word rigorous again. I similarly hope that your posted promulgations are way beyond the deeply adulterated processes they used. Mea culpa – and i look forward to hearing more about external academic critiquing of your claims to efficacy as well.
Jim ByrneHi Unnamed Person, I did not mean to batter your about. You came out batting for Big Pharma – without realizing that that was what you were doing. You thought you were citing irrefutable evidence of a high quality against my paltry single study. The point about my single study is that it adds a little to the body of knowledge we are building up about the effects of food on mood. People who eat junk foods, or a diet high in carbohydrate are likely to get inadequate amounts of the amino acid studied – argenine. As such, they may be vulnerable to major depression. They should be informed of that risk, and not told that they can eat any kind of diet they like – including high carbs, high sugar, and junk – and then Big Pharma will fix them up with ‘Medicine’. But most of the antidepressants being prescribed for depression should not be in use at all, because the *proportion* of patients who take them, who will develop serious side effects – like sexual dysfunction or suicidal ideation – is well above the 10% safety line – often as high as 40%, or 50% or more than 60%. It is *unethical* for physicians to cause so much predictable *harm*! But they continue to do it, and studies of the kind you cited earlier do help to keep their consciences quiet! PS: I did not mean to beat you up. But if you call my attempts to educate the public – about self-care – ‘ridiculous’, I guess I will normally come out fighting! 🙂
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Some thoughts from Mad in America
PS: Since Unnamed Person was interested in how well or how badly my position on antidepressants might be supported by scientific studies and expert support, I was pleased to see that Dr Joanna Moncrieff has published a piece on the latest hype in the Mad in America online blog – here: https://www.madinamerica.com/2018/02/challenging-new-hype-antidepressants/
Here is an extract from the opening of Dr Moncrieff’s piece:
The extraordinary media hype over the latest meta-analysis of antidepressants puts the discussion of these drugs back years. Despite the fact that 9% of the UK population are taking antidepressants,1 and rates of prescribing have doubled over the last decade,2 the authors of the analysis are calling for yet more prescribing. John Geddes suggested in The Sun newspaper that only 1 in 6 people are receiving adequate treatment for depression in high income countries. In The Guardian he estimates that 1 million more people require treatment with antidepressants in the UK, but by my maths, if 9% are already taking them and they only represent 1 in 6 of those who need them, then 54% of the population should be taking them. I make that another 27 million people!
But there is nothing ground-breaking about this latest meta-analysis. It simply repeats the errors of previous analyses. Although I have written about these many times before, I will quickly summarise relevant points.
The analysis consists of comparing ‘response’ rates between people on antidepressants and those on placebo. But ‘response’ is an artificial category that has been arbitrarily constructed out of the data actually collected, which consists of scores on depression rating scales, like the commonly used Hamilton rating Scale for Depression (HRSD). Analysing categories inflates differences.3 When the actual scores are compared, differences are trivial, amounting to around 2 points on the HRSD which has a maximum score of 54. These differences are unlikely to be clinically relevant, as I have explained before. Research comparing HRSD scores with scores on a global rating of improvement suggest that such a difference would not even be noticed, and you would need a difference of at least 8 points to register ‘mild improvement’.
Moreover, even these small differences are easily accounted for by the fact that antidepressants produce more or less subtle mental and physical alterations (e.g. nausea, dry mouth, drowsiness and emotional blunting) irrespective of whether or not they treat depression. These alterations enable participants to guess whether they have been allocated to antidepressant or placebo better than would be expected by chance.4 Participants receiving the active drugs may therefore experience amplified placebo effects by virtue of knowing they are taking an active drug rather than an inactive placebo. This may explain why antidepressants that cause the most noticeable alterations, such as amitriptyline, appeared to be the most effective in the recent analysis.
Antidepressant trials often include people who are already on antidepressants. Such people may experience withdrawal symptoms if they are randomised to placebo, which, given that almost no antidepressant trial pays the slightest attention to the problems of dependence on antidepressants, are highly likely to be classified as relapse.
The analysis only looks at data for eight weeks of treatment, whereas in real life people often take antidepressants for months or even years. Few randomised, placebo-controlled trials have investigated long-term effects, but ‘real world’ studies of people treated with antidepressants show that the proportion of people who stick to recommended treatment, recover and don’t relapse within a year is staggeringly low (108 out of the 3110 people who enrolled in the STAR-D study and satisfied inclusion criteria).5 Moreover, several studies have found that the outcomes of people treated with antidepressants are worse than the outcomes of people with depression who are not treated with antidepressants,67 even in one case after controlling for the severity of the depression (as far as possible).8 The huge increase in prescribing of antidepressants over the last three decades has been accompanied by a substantial rise in the numbers of people who are in receipt of long-term disability benefits due to depression and related disorders in the UK, and this is at a time when benefits for other disorders, like back pain, have been reducing.9
Calling for antidepressants to be more widely prescribed will do nothing to address the problem of depression and will only increase the harms these drugs produce. …
Lewer D, O’Reilly C, Mojtabai R, Evans-Lacko S. Antidepressant use in 27 European countries: associations with sociodemographic, cultural and economic factors. Br J Psychiatry 2015 Sep;207(3):221-6.
Kirsch I, Moncrieff J. Clinical trials and the response rate illusion. Contemp Clin Trials2007;28:348-51.
Fisher S, Greenberg RP. How sound is the double-blind design for evaluating psychotropic drugs? J Nerv Ment Dis1993 Jun;181(6):345-50.
Pigott HE, Leventhal AM, Alter GS, Boren JJ. Efficacy and effectiveness of antidepressants: current status of research. Psychother Psychosom 2010;79(5):267-79.
Ronalds C, Creed F, Stone K, Webb S, Tomenson B. Outcome of anxiety and depressive disorders in primary care. Br J Psychiatry1997 Nov;171:427-33.
Dewa CS, Hoch JS, Lin E, Paterson M, Goering P. Pattern of antidepressant use and duration of depression-related absence from work. Br J Psychiatry2003 Dec;183:507-13.
Brugha TS, Bebbington PE, MacCarthy B, Sturt E, Wykes T. Antidepressants may not assist recovery in practice: a naturalistic prospective survey. Acta Psychiatr Scand1992 Jul;86(1):5-11.
Viola S, Moncrieff J. Claims for sickness and disability benefits owing to mental disorders in the UK: trends from 1995 to 2014. BJPsych Open 2016;2:18-24.
Farnsworth KD, Dinsmore WW. Persistent sexual dysfunction in genitourinary medicine clinic attendees induced by selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Int J STD AIDS2009 Jan;20(1):68-9.
Sharma T, Guski LS, Freund N, Gotzsche PC. Suicidality and aggression during antidepressant treatment: systematic review and meta-analyses based on clinical study reports. BMJ2016 Jan 27;352:i65.
Fava GA, Gatti A, Belaise C, Guidi J, Offidani E. Withdrawal Symptoms after Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Discontinuation: A Systematic Review. Psychother Psychosom2015 Feb 21;84(2):72-81.
Reefhuis J, Devine O, Friedman JM, Louik C, Honein MA. Specific SSRIs and birth defects: Bayesian analysis to interpret new data in the context of previous reports. BMJ2015;351:h3190.
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Postscript
In November 2017, we (Renata Taylor-Byrne and Jim Byrne) published a book on How to Control Your Anger, Anxiety and Depression, Using nutrition and physical exercise. There is a lot of evidence, and a growing evidence base, that the major mood disorders (which Big Pharma wants to treat with hard drugs with nasty side effects) can better be managed by healthy diet and regular physical exercise (and a good night’s sleep!)
Here is a brief extract from one of the main sections that deal with diet and depression:
(ii) Treating depression
There are many different views about how to treat depression, and here is a summary of some of the most recent explanations of what is happening to us when we are depressed.
Firstly, the views of Dr Kelly Brogan will be summarised, as she has a unique explanation, which she has described in her recent book, titled ‘A Mind of Your Own’ (2016)[i]. She is a practising psychiatrist in America, with training as a medical doctor, and a degree in cognitive neuroscience, including clinical training from the NYU School of Medicine. She uses holistic methods of treating her patients and describes her work as ‘lifestyle medicine’. In this approach, she uses the techniques of meditation, nutrition and physical activity as crucial daily habits with which to treat her depressed patients (and this approach overlaps, but is not co-extensive with, the E-CENT approach [Byrne, 2016]).
Dr Brogan’s view is that depression is a symptom or sign: “…that something is off-balance or ill in the body that needs to be remedied”.
She considers that mental illness symptoms aren’t entirely psychological or solely neurochemical. And she points out in her book that there is no single study which has produced evidence that depression is caused by a lack of chemical equilibrium in the brain.
She considers depression to be a grossly misidentified state and in particular for women who, in the US, are being medicated at the rate of one in seven. Also, one in four women in their 40’s and fifties use psychiatric drugs.
She states: “We owe most of our mental illnesses – including their kissing cousins such as chronic worry, fogginess and crankiness – to lifestyle factors and undiagnosed physiological conditions that develop in places far away from the brain, such as the gut and the thyroid”, and she goes on to state that:
“You might owe your gloominess and unremitting unease to an imbalance that is only indirectly related to your brain’s internal chemistry. Indeed, what you eat for breakfast … and how you deal with that high cholesterol and afternoon headache (think Lipitor[ii] and Advil[iii]) could have everything to do with the causes and symptoms of depression.”
Her opinion of the foolishness of applying chemical solutions to people’s problems is very clear. In her view: “… if you think a chemical pill can save, cure or ‘correct’ you, you’re dead wrong. That is about as misguided as taking aspirin for a nail stuck in your foot.”
Her approach is to get a medical and personal history of her clients, their manner of birth (natural or section), whether breast fed or not; and she orders lab tests to ascertain the whole picture of their biological make-up.
She focusses on the information from their cellular analysis and the workings of the immune system, and points out to the reader of her book that, over the last twenty years, medical research has identified the significant part that inflammationplays in the creation of mental illness.
She also focuses on the client’s lifestyle, dietary habits e.g. sugar consumption, the condition of their guts, and microbe balance (in their guts), hormone levels – e.g. thyroid and cortisol – and genetic variations in their DNA, which could affect their susceptibility to depression. And finally, their beliefs about their own health can also play a role, she says.
So Dr Kelly Brogan shares the same conviction as Dr Perlmutter (2015): that the state of our guts is a very important determinant of our emotional well-being.
Dr Perlmutter (2015) states: “Depression can no longer be viewed as a disorder rooted solely in the brain. Some of the studies have been downright eye-opening. For example when scientists give people with no signs of depression an infusion of a substance to trigger inflammation (in the body), classic depression symptoms develop almost instantly”. (Page 76)
Perlmutter is a board-certified neurologist and Fellow of the American College of Nutrition. He is also president of the Perlmutter Health Centre in Naples, Florida. Dr Perlmutter considers that our mental health and physical wellness are totallyaffected by the internal systems of bacteria that operate in the gut.
But what exactly is going on in our guts? Apparently, we’ve all got millions of microbes in our body and most of them live in our digestive tract (10,000 species!). And each of the microbes have their own DNA, and that means that for every human gene in our body, there are at least 360 microbial genes. These organisms include fungi, bacteria and viruses. In a healthy gut, most of these microorganisms are ‘friendly’, with a few ‘bad’ bacteria which are controlled by the ‘good’ stuff.
These tiny microbes: (1) strongly influence our immune system; (2) affect absorption of nutrients; (3) signal to us whether our stomach is empty or full; (4) and determine our level of inflammation and/or detoxification (which are directly related to disease and health). They also affect our moods.
Apparently our guts contain 70-80% of our immune system, and so our gut bacteria participate in maintaining our immunity.
They can also keep cortisol and adrenaline in check. These are the two major hormones of the stress response, which can cause havoc in the body when they are continually triggered and flowing.
And our gut microbes influence whether we get any or all of the following conditions: Allergies, ADHD, asthma, dementia, cancer and diabetes, a good night’s sleep; or whether we quickly fall prey to disease-causing germs. And there is increasing evidence of a link to anxiety and depression.
Dr Perlmutter makes recommendations for changes in people’s diet which he says will:
(1) treat and prevent brain disorders;
(2) alleviate moodiness, anxiety and depression;
(3) bolster the immune system and reduce autoimmunity problems; and
(4) improve metabolic disorders, including diabetes and obesity, which are all linked to overall brain and body health.
He makes recommendations which are very practical, including…
…end of extract…
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Endnotes
[i] Brogan, K. (2016) A mind of your own: The truth about depression and how women can heal their bodies to reclaim their lives. London: Thorsons.
[ii] Lipitor is a drug commonly prescribed for reducing high cholesterol.
[iii] Advil (ibuprofen) is a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID). Ibuprofen works by reducing hormones that cause inflammation and pain in the body.
Dr Jim’s Counselling Blog: Walking the talk of the holistic self-care movement…
Managing my mind by the use of exercise, diet, meditation and self-talk…
Copyright (c) Jim Byrne, 2018
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Introduction
My wife, Renata Taylor-Byrne, sometimes reminds me of the important principle of ‘extreme self-care’.
I didn’t learn any such principle in my family of origin, where the main message was to ‘behave yourself’; and to uncritically go along with the dominant trend of social pressure!
Over the years, I have woken up to the problem of (physical and emotional) stress, and how unmanaged stress leads to all kinds of mental, emotional and physical health problems. Also, because I developed a problem with Candida Albicans overgrowth – a gut dysbiosis problem – decades ago, I had to become clear about the importance of managing my diet – especially the elimination of sugary foods and alcohol.
This morning
At a certain point this morning, I found myself exercising, and wondering if this information would be helpful in motivating some of our website readers (meaning you!) to shift to following the principle of ‘extreme self-care’. So here I am, following up on that thought, as a contribution to your health and happiness.
I got up this morning, at the same time as Renata, and got some salad ingredients out of the fridge, and put them on one side to warm up to room temperature. (While that was happening, I checked my emails and website traffic, and so on).
When the salad ingredients had warmed up enough, I chopped them up and put them into two bowls. They consisted of:
4 leaves of Romaine lettuce (chopped very small)
2 radishes
a quarter of a yellow pepper (diced)
a quarter of a red pepper (diced)
four inches of cucumber (halved and sliced)
a quarter of a red onion (diced)
8 green olives
2 black olives
2 ozs of petit poise
6 fine beans (chopped small)
2 tsps of Maca powder
2 desert spoons of flaxseed
2 desert spoons of mixed pumpkin and sunflower seeds
8 whole almonds
2 ozs of pickled beetroot
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This meal was so much more exciting and enjoyable than a bowl of cereal, or a full ‘English’ (fried) breakfast; or waffles with maple syrup! Truly enjoyable! However, it would not be a good idea to eat the same breakfast every day. Varity is important for gut bacteria and the available range of nutrients!
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On my own bowl, I also added some fermented cucumber (instead of kimchi, which I had yesterday), and some Miso (the brown rice variety).
I then ate this as my breakfast, with a mug of green tea.
(In case I am beginning to sound like Saint Selfless, I had a cafetiere of exotic coffee while I was processing my emails!)
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Meditation and physical exercise
When we had finished breakfast, I read some brief quotes – about living in the moment, in the main – to set the mood for our Zen meditation, which we did for 30 minutes. And then Renata led our Chi Kung (Chinese exercise) session, which lasted about 20 minutes. Then we did a couple of minutes of the Plank (from Pilates) – for core strength – and then I did three sets of press-ups (30 presses in each set), and three sets of sit-backs (for 30 seconds in each set), for arm and stomach strength, and for hips and lower back.
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The sun was shining in the front and back of the room in which we meditated and exercised, and we had Mozart playing in the background for the exercise session. Divine!
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At the end of this time, I was as relaxed, happy and de-stressed as a person could be, and all set for another session on the computer, working on promoting our book on diet and exercise.
The book is called: How to control your anger, anxiety and depression using nutrition and physical exercise; and it is available at amazon, at the following links:
If you want to order the book from another Amazon outlet, then please go to the webpage listed below, and order it from one of the other links (in Europe, Australia, Canada, etc.), which are listed there.
Renata has just completed a little 2-minute video introduction to this book, here:
Please take a look and see what you think.
If you would like some more information about the book (or to order it from a non-UK/US outlet), you can find a good introduction on our webpages. Just click the following link: Diet, Exercise and Mental Health.***
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That’s all for now.
I wish you a happy and healthy life, and the wisdom to engage in extreme self-care! J
Renata’s Coaching Blog: Developing resilience when you’re working on the front line in your job:
Coping with stress, anger, anxiety and depression…
Sleep, diet and exercise are critical…
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Introduction
Dealing with people is very enjoyable, and very demanding at the same time, isn’t it? Especially when you are dealing with people who are suffering from all the trials and tribulations that life has thrown at them.
How do you stay strong? You need all your energy to communicate with them and not become drained. And three of the most challenging conditions to deal with are the problems of anxiety, anger and depression, whether it’s experienced by yourself or other people.
My work is about helping others to grow in strength, creativity and happiness. I do that in several ways: face to face coaching; and writing blogs; and (more recently) writing books.
We’ve put in some significant and surprising research findings which are therapeutic, because they show how we can better manage our energies and emotions so that we are stronger in ourselves. But also these findings can be used to help others.
I’m just about to begin the final proof-reading of that book, and then it will be available to you, via Amazon.
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Moving on to sleep, relaxation and mediation
But as I mentioned in my last blog, I have now been reading Matthew Walker’s book called “Why we sleep”, which was published in September of this year. And I have been so shocked and stunned – by the many research findings that he quotes about why sleep is so important – that I have decided to write about his key findings, and to summarise them for everyone. I have also identified several other books which must be taken into account, and I have begun to do that research work and note taking.
I also intend to include research findings about the power of meditation and relaxation techniques in the book, because those three strategies are closely related; and support each other.
The benefits
Sleep, meditation and relaxation techniques can transform our experience of anger, anxiety and depression. This book will describe the ways that our resilience can be greatly enhanced by adequate sleep, daily meditation, and sound approaches to relaxation.
I’ll let you know when both books become available.
The Sleep/Meditation/Relaxation book will not be finished until I have found several ways to help you to put some new strategies into your life, to strengthen you, and to enhance the quality of your life.
Here is part of Walker’s message:
“Sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day”. (Walker 2017).
In the meantime, I strongly recommend Walker’s book, because, as he states, the importance of our sleep hasn’t been properly communicated to us by scientists. And when you look at the bare facts of the negative impact of the lack of sleep on us, it can be a real shock!
Conclusion
So if you want to live your life on a full tank of gas, then improving the quality of your sleep will make a big difference. If you have teenagers, the section of his book where he explains the needs of teenagers for more sleep than adults, is excellent and very helpful.
See what you think of his book (and I swear I haven’t got any shares in his publishing company!)
So now, I must get back to proofreading our Diet and Exercise book; and then back to the sleep research!
If you need any help or support, you know where I am!
Dr Jim’s Blog: Health and happiness are the most important goals in (a moral) life
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Introduction
It’s been quite a while since I posted a blog, because I’ve been extremely busy. I am still very busy, finishing off the writing of a new book, but I thought it was about time I shared some ideas with the world. The main theme of this blog is health and self-healing, using food and physical exercise.
Several days ago I constructed the index section on diet and nutrition, and type of diets. And, by finishing time last Friday, 20th, I had just completed a section on Essential fatty acids (EFAs). And today, Monday 23rd, I will begin to work on the index entries for the section on physical exercise.
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Self-healing
Last Thursday, I turned my body, suddenly, while leaving my feet relatively stationary, and pulled a muscle in my back. Did I run to the doctor? No! Did I get some ‘painkillers’ from the chemist? No!
Why did I not go to the doctor? Because the doctor would have simply recommended “painkillers”!
Why did I not buy my own painkillers from the chemist? Because most of the painkillers used today are what are called NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs). And the problem with NSAIDs is that they cause ‘leaky gut syndrome’, which not only allows whole molecules of food to enter the bloodstream, and trigger various forms of inflammation in the body (paradox of paradoxes!), but they also compromise the blood/brain barrier, which can precipitate mood disturbances!
So, what did I do with my terrible back pain? I got out my copy of ‘Body in Action’, by Sarah Key, and did five of her exercises for improving the functioning of the muscles and joints in the lower back. (I’ve done this several times in the past, and I know it always works).
I did the exercises on Thursday and Friday, and by Saturday the back pain had gone – completely!
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Sharpening the saw
Rest and recuperation are very important parts of my self-management of health program. So, on Saturday afternoon, and Sunday afternoon, I had a siesta (of three hours each time). I had been feeling tired because of overworking on the index of our new book on how to control anger, anxiety and depression, using diet and exercise systems.
I also had a restful evening with Renata, and I was in bed by 9.45pm.
By 5.45am today (Monday 23rd Oct) I was fully rested, and so I got up and made my breakfast. A solid bowl of chunky salad.
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Food for health and mood control
I chopped up the following ingredients into small chunks, of perhaps 3 or 4 mm at the widest point:
3 oz of red cabbage; 6 oz of cucumber; 1 spring onion; 1 organic carrot; half an organic apple; and put them into a soup bowl.
Then, I added a teaspoon of Maca powder; a dessertspoon of ground flaxseed; two dessertspoon’s of mixed seeds (sunflower, pumpkin, ???), ten almonds, three walnuts, four hazelnuts; ten blueberries; 2 ozs of cooked beetroot (diced); two small tomatoes (halved); and half a kiwi fruit (diced).
I then added some brown rice miso, and some sauerkraut.
After consuming that breakfast, I meditated for 30 minutes.
~~~
Physical exercise for health and strength and mood control
Let me now describe the exercises that I went on to do, after meditating:
Twenty minutes of Chi Kung exercises.
Followed by a couple of minutes of ‘The plank’ exercise, which is like ‘stationary press-ups’: https://youtu.be/kiA9j-dR0oM
Then I did my own press-ups and sit backs, for about 5 or 6 minutes.
I then moved on to do fifteen minutes of my old Judo Club calisthenics (or whole body warm up exercise), which combine strength training, stretching of muscles, and aerobic exercise, all in one.
Then ten minutes of Zhan Zhuang (pronounced Jam Jong, and meaning ‘Standing like a tree’). These are body poses which work on our postural muscles, affecting strength and speed and balance. They create a calm and happy mental state. And they also relax the body and establish whole-body connection.
Finally I did some strength training using the Powerspin rotator, to build arm, shoulder and upper body strength.
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Reflections
This is clearly a time-consuming start to the day, compared with a bowl of cornflakes, a cup of coffee, and a brisk scratching of the head!
So why do I do it?
Because, I value my health above all things. Without my physical health, I am unlikely to be happy. And I am unlikely to be emotionally stable.
The people who do the least exercise, and who eat the worst diets, have the worst physical and mental health outcomes. (I have not seen a general medical practitioner for more than thirty years! And I am not about to start now!)
Most people leave their health (physical and mental) to chance, and to the vague belief that there are people who can “fix them up” when they fall apart. Sadly this myth is totally misleading. Once you’ve ruined your health – from sedentary lifestyle, poor sleep, and inadequate diet (such as one based on junk food, or an unbalanced diet, or too much alcohol [over the government limit], caffeine, sugary foods, gluten, and other toxic substances) – and/or from long-term conflicted relationships – it is then ruined! And a ruined body-brain is a burden to haul through life!
It takes self-discipline to get on a good diet, and to begin to do regular physical exercise, and to go to bed and have eight hours sleep, without mobile phones or laptops or tablets, and so on. But the alternative to developing that self-discipline is a life ruined through serious illness, emotional distress, and early death.
Some people will argue with me, and insist that there are some things called “medicines” (and “surgeries”) which can be used to resuscitate their body-brain-mind once they have allowed it to fall into ill-health. The editors of What Doctors Don’t Tell You, strongly disagree with that fantasy! See the article titled ‘Don’t trust me (I’m Big Pharma).***
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POSTSCRIPT ONE: Of course, it takes time to build up expertise in ‘extreme self-care’; and it’s a good idea to do that one step at a time. Gradually, over a period of time, this will build up into significant changes, and huge improvements in health and happiness. And you don’t ever have to adopt the kind of ‘monkish’ approach that suits me. Some simple changes in what you eat, and how you exercise your body (brisk walking for 30 minutes per day is enough!), will make a huge difference over time. You can find out more about how to begin these small, easy steps in our book: How to control your anger, anxiety and depression, using nutrition and physical activity.
If you want me to help you to figure out how to live a happier, healthier, more emotionally buoyant life, then please contact me:
POSTSCRIPT TWO: If you are a coach, psychologist, counsellor or psychotherapist, and you want to begin to teach your clients about the importance of lifestyle factors in the maintenance of good mental health (or emotional wellbeing) then you might be interested in our book entitled Lifestyle Counselling and Coaching for the Whole Person, which is an expansion of the Holistic Counselling book, including the inclusion of a Lifestyle Factors Questionnaire. (This book can also be used by self-help enthusiasts!)
If you have come to this page looking for recent books by Dr Jim Byrne (with Renata Taylor-Byrne), then here is the list of the latest books: on Lifestyle Counselling; Writing Therapy; and Diet and Exercise linked to emotional functioning; plus building successful couple relationships.
In this book, you will find a very clear, brief, easy to read introduction to a novel approach to ‘counselling the whole person’. This emotive-cognitive approach does not restrict itself to mental processes. We go beyond what the client is ‘telling themselves’, or ‘signalling themselves’; or what went wrong in their family of origin. We also include how well they manage their body-brain-mind in terms of diet, exercise, sleep, and emotional self-management (including self-talk, or inner dialogue). And we propose that it is better for counsellors and therapists to operate in a primarily right-brain modality, and to use the left-brain, cognitive processes, secondarily.
The most important, and novel, chapters in this book are as follows:
Chapter 4, which summarizes our research on the impact of diet/nutrition and physical exercise on mental health and emotional well-being.
Chapter 5, which reviews the science of sleep hygiene, plus common sense insights, and presents a range of lifestyle changes to promote healthy sleep, and thus to improve mental and emotional well-being.
Chapter 9, which explains how to incorporate the learning from chapters 4 and 5 into any system of talk therapy or counselling.
There is also a chapter (8) on counselling individuals using our Emotive-Cognitive approach, in which there is a section (8.3(b)) on using the Holistic SOR model to explore many aspects of the lifestyle of the client.
In this book, we set out to show you how you can quickly and easily process your current psychological problems, and improve your emotional intelligence, by writing about your current and historic difficulties. (Chapter 8 contains a detailed introduction to the subject of how to understand and manage your emotions).
This approach to writing about your emotional difficulties in order to resolve them has a long and noble tradition. Many nineteenth century poets were seeking to heal broken hearts or resolve personal dissatisfactions by the use of their poetry writing activities; and many novels are clearly forms of catharsis (or release of pent up emotions) by the author.
But not all writing is equally helpful, therapeutically speaking. If the writing is too negative; or too pessimistic; or simply makes the reader feel raw and vulnerable, then it is not going to have a positive effect. Later we will show you how to tackle therapeutic writing, (within the two main disciplines of writing therapy – [the scientific and the humanistic]), in order to make it maximally effective.
What we eat has a very powerful effect on our bodies and minds. And knowing and understanding how our body-mind reacts to the substances we feed ourselves is a crucial part of self-care.
For instance: depression can be caused by psychological reactions to losses and failures. But it can also be caused by certain kinds of body-brain chemistry problems, some of which can begin in the guts, and be related to bad diet, and lack of physical exercise. For example:
“If you are depressed while you suffer from regular yeast infections (like Candida Albicans), or athlete’s foot, or have taken antibiotics recently, there is a connection. Our brains are inextricably tied to our gastrointestinal tract and our mental well-being is dependent on healthy intestines. Depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, and a host of other mental illnesses from autism to ADHD can be caused by an imbalance of gut microbes like fungi, and ‘bad’ bacteria”. (Source: Michael Edwards (2014))[i].
And when we take antibiotics, we kill off all of our friendly bacteria, and often what grows back first is the unfriendly stuff, like Candida Albicans, which can then cause depression, anxiety and other symptoms, as listed above.
Also, we can really benefit from knowing some of the latest ideas about where – (in our diets) – our depression, anxiety and anger can originate from; as provided by specialists who have devoted their lives to years of investigation into the workings of the human body and mind (or body-mind).
[i] Edwards, M. (2014) ‘The candida depression connection – How yeast leads to depression, anxiety, ADHD, and other mental disorders’. Available online at: https://www.naturalnews.com/047184_ candida_ depression_gut_microbes.html#
Volume 1 – A blueprint and toolbox for couples and counsellors: C101
By Dr Jim Byrne
With Renata Taylor-Byrne BSc (Hons) Psychol
The full paperback cover, by Charles Saul
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On this web site, you will find enough information about our new book on couple relationships to inform your decision about buying it. We have posted the full Preface; plus the full set of (revised) Contents pages; plus a brief extract from each of the main chapters (1-13).
Pre-publication review
“I have recently finished reading Dr Jim Byrne’s immensely useful book (about love and relationship skills). This book is full of cutting edge thinking and priceless wisdom about couple relationships; which inspires us to believe that we can undoubtedly shape and improve our most important relationships. The approach is comprehensive (despite being Volume 1 of 3), covering as it does: the nature of love and relationships; common myths about love and relationships (which tend to lead young people astray); some illuminating case studies of couple relationships that have gone wrong; and very helpful chapters on communication skills, conflict styles, and assertive approaches to relationship; plus a very interesting introduction to the theory that our marriage partnership is shaped, for better or worse, in our family of origin. I particularly liked the chapters on how to manage boundaries in relationships; and how to change your relationship habits. I can highly recommend this ‘must read’ book to couples and counsellors alike”.
Dr Nazir Hussain
Positive Psychology and Integrative Counselling Services, Whitby, Ontario, Canada.
September 2018
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Here’s a quick preview of part of the contents of Chapter 1:
This book has been designed to be helpful to two main audiences:
1. Anybody who is curious about how to build and maintain a happy, successful couple relationship, like a marriage or civil partnership (civil agreement), or simple cohabitation; and:
2. Any professional who works with individuals and couples who show up with problems of marital or couple conflict, breakdowns of communication, or unhappiness with the couple bond.
My main role in life, as a doctor of counselling, is to see individual clients who have ‘problems of daily living’ which they cannot resolve on their own. I help people with problems of anxiety, depression, anger, couple conflict, attachment problems, and other relationship problems. Dr Jim’s Counselling Division.***
It is far from easy being a creative writer. Frustrations abound, from conception of a new and useful writing project; doing the research; writing early drafts; then polishing, editing and publishing; and then trying to sell the end product in a world which is awash with information-overload.
~~~
In my book on REBT, I wrote about that period like this:
“As early as August 2003 (and probably earlier), I was writing about the fact that stress was a multi-causal problem. That idea contradicts the ABC theory, which asserts that all emotional distress (including the common manifestations of stress: which include anger, anxiety and depression) are caused exclusively by the client’s Beliefs (B’s). Here is an example of my writing from August 2003:
“I have developed a stress management programme consisting of fifteen strategies which help you to work on your body, your emotions, your thinking, and your stress management skills. This programme allows you to develop a stress-free life.
…
“You may also be affected by many life-change stressors, e.g. Moving house; death of your spouse or other loved one; divorce; marriage; redundancy; bullying at work; promotion; demotion; change of lifestyle; etc.
“Your stress level also depends upon such factors as your diet, exercise, what you tell yourself about your life pressures, and so on. (What you tell yourself about your pressures is called your “self-talk”).
“And a lot depends upon your sense of control. Can you control your workload, your work environment, and/or your social life? Are you confident and assertive enough to at least try to control your workload, your work environment, and/or your social life? Are you wise enough to learn how to stoically accept those things which you clearly cannot control? The more control you have, the less stress you feel, according to the Whitehall Studies, conducted by Michael Marmot, beginning in 1984.” (Original source in footnotes)[1].
However, the frustration was this: Although I had expertise about managing stress; and although I had packaged 15 different strategies for getting your stress under control, very few people bought my book!
And today, I believe, most people do not understand stress: How it destroys their happiness, damages their physical health, and causes all kinds of emotional problems.
Tough stuff! This is the lot of the creative writer. The world most often seems to notbe ready for our insights!
~~~
People love simplicity and side-tracks
While my stress book was not selling to any reasonable degree, the simple books about the ABC model of REBT, produced by Dr Albert Ellis, were selling much better. Those books presented an exaggerated claim that they could help the reader to quickly and relatively effortlessly get rid of any problem, simply by changing their beliefs about the problems they encountered.
My REBT book demonstrates that there was never any solid evidence that this claim is true. It also demonstrates that, in the process, the REBT/CBT model blames the client for their own upsets, thus excusing the harshness of current government policy in the US and the UK, where the rich are enriched and the poor are squashed! That squashing process hurts, and causes emotional distress and physical health problems.
Here is the evidence that it is not the individual’s beliefs, but the social environment that has the most impact on mental health and emotional well-being:
While psychotherapists like Albert Ellis tended to emphasize the role of the counselling client’s beliefs in the causation of anger, anxiety, depression, and so on, Oliver James, and his concept of ‘affluenza’, tends to emphasize living in a materialistic environment. As Dr James writes: “Nearly ten years ago, in my book Britain on the Couch, I pointed out that a twenty-five-year-old American is (depending on which studies you believe) between three and ten times more likely to be suffering depression today than in 1950. … In the case of British people, nearly one-quarter suffered from emotional distress … in the past twelve months, and there is strong evidence that a further one-quarter of us are on the verge thereof. … (M)uch of this increase in angst occurred after the 1970s and in English-speaking nations”. People’s beliefs have not changed so much over that time. This is evidence of the social-economic impact of the post-Thatcher/Reagan neo-liberal economic policies!
Oliver James (2007) Affluenza: How to be successful and stay sane. Page xvi-xvii. (63).
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Conclusion
If you are a creative writer, and you want to write your own autobiography, or autobiographical novel, or you need support with any aspect of your creative writing process, then I can help you.
Renata’s Coaching & Counselling blog: Daily resilience–boosters for you
Introduction
Do you want to be more resilient? To stand up to the pressures of your daily life more vigorously and powerfully and energetically?
In this blog I am going to summarise some findings from research conducted on athletes, which can help us build our resilience in the face of all the hassles and challenges we can face at work each day.
An explanation of micro-resilience at work
Bonnie St. John and Allen Haines wrote a book called ‘Micro-resilience’, and in it they summarise this research finding: Dr James Loehr (a sports psychologist) wanted to understand why there were hundreds of athletes who were on international tours, but there were only a few who regularly won the tournaments and trophies. He wanted to know what the difference was between these two sets of athletes.
Loehr put heart rate monitors on a selection of the two different sets of tennis players – the ‘winners’ and the ‘also ran’s’ – and discovered that the top tennis players were able to very speedily recover their energy and positive focus after having played shots.
As they were returning to the baseline in the tennis court, or to the side of the court, they used particular strategies to recover their energy, focus and motivation.
These top-players very quickly returned their heart rates to normal – much more quickly than their less successful competitors. Here was the crucial part of what Dr James Loehr learned:
“The further he went down the list of seeded players, the more dramatic the differences were. Those at the bottom of the list (the less successful tennis players) employed none of these rejuvenating behaviours….”
“They stayed keyed up, tense and even distracted in the sixteen to twenty seconds that normally elapse between a point scored and the following serve.”
The power of ‘mini-recoveries’
He discovered that by the final set of a 3 hour tennis match, the player who had been using small, imperceptible ‘mini-recoveries’ in-between the points, was much more likely to succeed in the tennis game than the players who did not use such strategies.
So Dr Loehr created something called the ’16 second cure’ and this consists of focusing exercises and relaxation techniques that help the players, who are under intense pressure, to do the following things:
“…shake off mistakes, release tension, and project a positive image to their opponents…”
And this strategy has now been taught by tennis coaches throughout the world.
How this research finding can help people in all types of jobs
We can all use this research insight in any field of work. Each day, any of us can experience periods of intense pressure, quiet times and a whole range of experiences in-between. We also have a constantly changing selection of people to deal with and respond to. How can we keep going so that we aren’t totally washed out by the end of the working day?
Dr James Loehr created the concept of the ‘executive athlete’after these research findings, which he wrote about in his book ‘The Power of Full Engagement’(2003) with T. Schwartz.
This very successful use of energy management strategies by athletes can be transferred to other working environments, if we adapt them appropriately.
Micro-resilience techniques to help us stay in control
If you experiment with using some of these strategies – listed below – to keep you going during the day, you will find that your energy level is higher and you won’t feel as drained.
I used these techniques during my career as a college tutor, and there are also techniques from Bonnie St. John and Allen Haines’s book. (Bear in mind that if you are working in exploitative work situations, you will need help from your union as well as these self-management strategies. The union’s specialist form of protection is necessary as it will be beyond your capacity to fully defend yourself if your energies are drained from: bullying management tactics; zero hours contracts; wages below the minimum wage, and/or unhealthy work environments).
Here is a little selection of just seven such strategies; and I teach many more to my coaching-counselling clients:
1. The Yoga ‘Death pose’
First, let us look at the ‘death pose’ from yoga practice. This is an amazingly effective way to recharge your batteries, and is very good for your back. If you have you own office or there is a vacant room, simply lie on the floor for 10 minutes with a book (of, say, two inches thickness) under your head (as a ‘hard pillow’). Put your arms down by your sides. Clear your mind of any stress or strain, worry or preoccupation. Breathe deeply into your belly, and relax. Stay still, and close your eyes if you want to. Any ideas that arise in your mind should be gently brushed away. After 10 minutes, very slowly sit up, and then stand up. This will refresh your body and mind at the same time.
2.The seated Tin Soldier/Rag Doll Relaxation Exercise
Whilst sitting at your desk, after about 30 or 40 minutes of intense concentration, you will need a break. Sometimes you will need to get up and move around (as sedentary activity is very bad for you, physically and mentally!). But sometimes you can relax while you are sitting down. One way to do that is to use the ‘Tin soldier/Rag doll’ exercise. This is how it goes:
Tense your body, arms, and face as much as possible for a couple of minutes. Really feel the tension in your body. Imagine you are made of tin, and are very stiff and unbending. (The ‘tin soldier’ phase).
Then slowly, slowly let all the tension drain out of your body, and change yourself into a rag doll. Feel yourself melt into the chair. Relax all your muscles – your thigh muscles, feet, arms, hands and fingers, stomach and jaw, and facial muscles. Let your arms hang down by your sides. Let your head fall, and your shoulder slump. (The ‘rag doll’ phase).
Sit with the feeling of complete relaxation for a few minutes (say, five or six). This will be really good for your body and mind – to say nothing of your productivity, creativity and focus. In the process, you will be switching on your ‘relaxation response’ which is (to get a bit technical) the parasympathetic branch of your nervous system.
3. Have a quick, healthy snack to boost your blood sugar level.
By eating a small amount of nuts and seeds (for example) you boost your blood sugar level which helps with willpower, and energy during late morning or late afternoon meetings or other challenges.
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4. Have a short walk
Get out of the building, to change your environment. Just a ten minute walk will put you in a different space (mentally), but in particular, it’s really valuable to get out at dinnertime (lunchtime). You will feel mentally refreshed and have more energy for your work in the afternoon. Seeing trees and experiencing fresh air will boost your energy. Recent research shows that taking a stroll through a natural setting can boost performance on “tasks calling for sustained focus”: “Taking in the sights and sounds of nature appears to be especially beneficial for our minds.”
5. Write it Out!
If you’ve had a draining, difficult interaction with someone in work, and you are still reverberating from it, then when you are at your desk (or workstation), write down what happened and how you felt about it. Writing it down will get it out of your head and give you a chance to cool down. Later you can then reflect on what happened.
(If you are unable to write anything down, simply name the emotions that you are going through, in your mind.) This is a technique that is called “labelling” and there is a New England head teacher (whom St John and Haines describe in their book) who uses this technique when she has confrontations with parents and teachers.
“When she tried labelling, Kathleen noticed that it increased her sense of control. Now, unbeknownst to her guests, Kathleen’s notes during confrontational meetings not only cover action steps and follow-up items but also descriptions of her emotions during each encounter.”
Dr Daniel Amen, who is an expert on brain-scanning techniques, says: “Often, just naming a thought takes away its power”.
Or as Dr Daniel Siegel says: “You have to name it to tame it!”
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6. Using your sense of smell
Scents are very powerful. Dr Joan Borysenko, who was one of the pioneers of integrative medicine and worked at Harvard medical school, stated: “Certain scents can cut rightthrough an emotional hijack. For example, cinnamon, vanilla and nutmeg.” These scents affect our limbic system and relax us very quickly. This finding was confirmed by Dr Daniel Amen, in his book ‘Change your brain, change your life’:
“Because your sense of smell goes directly to the deep limbic system, it is easy to see why smells can have such a powerful impact on our feeling states. The right smells likely cool the limbic system. Pleasing fragrances are like an anti-inflammatory”.
So, having small samples of spices, perfumes or sweets, in your work environment, which have really comforting associations for you, can give you a quick boost of energy.
7. Images from nature can calm us down
Finally, having pictures of scenes from nature around us will have a beneficial effect on us, even if they are just on our screensaver or on a poster on the wall. Or in a frame on our desk or workstation. Just looking at photos of nature in a quiet room can give us a greater mental boost than walking down a busy urban street.
Dr Marc Berman and researchers at the University of Michigan had participants take a break for 10 minutes in a quiet room to look at pictures of a nature scene or city street. They found that mental performance improved after the nature break, even though the images were only on paper. Although the boost wasn’t as great as when participants actually took a walk among the trees, it was more effective than an actual city walk.
Conclusion
Balancing our stressful working days with micro-resilience techniques- like the seven outlined above – will make us happier, increase our energy, and improve the quality of our lives.
Why not experiment with them, and see if any of them work for you!
If I had more time and space I could teach lots more of this stuff to you.
15th February 2016: Updated on … 2nd February and 3rd May 2020
Dr Jim’s Counselling Blog: Understanding depression; how to accurately rate your problems; and the myth of ‘awfulizing’…
Copyright (c) Jim Byrne, 2016
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Introduction
The Lifestyle Counselling Book
A few days ago, I finishing Appendix F of my new book on E-CENT Counselling. Appendix F is about how to define, understand and reduce depression. I thought you might like to see a quick preview of the first couple of pages; so I have appended them below.
The next thing I did was to write Appendix G, which looks at how to evaluate the degree of badness of your problematical situations in life. This is important because an exaggerated evaluation of the degree of badness of a problem in your life will result in a more painful emotional state than a more accurate evaluation.
Chapter 1 begins with a basic description of Emotive-Cognitive Embodied-Narrative Therapy (E-CENT). This if followed by a brief outline of the basic theory of E-CENT.
The chapter then goes on to explore some of the models (of the social individual) that were integrated to produce Emotive-Cognitive Embodied-Narrative Therapy (E-CENT), plus those that have been added since 2010. But the main presentation of the core models of E-CENT theory can be found in Chapter 6.
E-CENT counselling theory sees humans as essentially socialized-physical-cultural-emotional-story-tellers. We tell stories to ourselves and others, and we live in a world of narratives and scripts, which include reasonable and unreason-able elements, logical and illogical elements, and more defensible and less defensible elements. We tend to delete elements of our storied experiences; to distort some other elements; and to generalize from particular experiences. And we also have lots of early experiences which are non-narrativized, but still operational in the basement of our emotional lives.
~~~
Humans often tend to push away (or repress) unpleasant experiences; to fail to process them; and to then become the (unconscious) victims of those repressed, and/or undigested experiences. E-CENT theory also sees adult relationships as being the non-conscious acting out of childhood experiences (which occurred with parents and siblings), because some part of those earlier relationships have not been properly digested and completed.
Furthermore, there are significant disruptions that can occur at various stages in the early childhood experience of the individual which can produce specific forms of relationship dysfunction in later life.
In a broader sense than that outlined above, E-CENT was developed by this author over many years of study and application, in private practice with more than 800 clients.
Here are just two of the key principles of E-CENT:
# Firstly, it takes into account that we are bodies as well as minds, and so diet, exercise, sleep, relaxation/meditation, drugs and other physical inputs and stimuli are seen as important factors in determining the emotional state of the individual client.
# Secondly, it starts from the assumption that we are primarily social animals, and not solitary individuals. We are social to our very roots, especially from the moment of parturition, when we are handed into the arms of our mothers. Everything that happens from that point onwards – and also including the original birth trauma – is significant for the development of the so-called ‘individual’ (who is really an amalgam of significant other ‘individuals’ with whom we are related from birth onwards, and who we ‘internalize’ as ‘models’).
Chapter 2 outlines twenty such core beliefs of E-CENT philosophy.
Chapter 3 explores the structure and application of the Six Windows Model.
Holistic Counselling in Practice:
An introduction to the theory and practice of Emotive-Cognitive Embodied-Narrative Therapy
Cover design by Will Sutton
By Jim Byrne DCoun FISPC
With Renata Taylor-Byrne BSc (Hons) Psychol
This book was the original introduction to Emotive-Cognitive Embodied Narrative Therapy (E-CENT), which was created by Dr Jim Byrne in the period 2009-2014, building upon earlier work from 2003. It is of historic importance, but it has been superseded by Lifestyle Counselling and Coaching for the Whole Person, above.
Prices from: £5.83p GBP (Kindle) and £15.18p (Paperback)
According to E-CENT theory, we do not see with our eyes so much as with our brains. Eyes are part of the machinery of perception, but the decisions about ‘what it is’ that we see are not made by our eyes. Those decisions are made by our ‘stored experiences’ driving our ‘judgements’. We do not see ‘external events’ so much with our eyes then as we see them through ‘frames of reference and interpretation’ which were created in the past, and which we now implement as habit-based stimulus-response pairings. Or we could call these responses ‘pattern matching’ processes. If this pattern matching process was conscious and linguistic (which it is not!) then this is the sense it would make of an incoming stimulus: “I’ve seen this stimulus (or ‘external event’) before. This (particular interpretation) is the sense I made of it last time. So that is how I will relate to it this time”.
…End of extract.
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Appendix F: How to control your depressive tendencies
by Dr Jim Byrne
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Copyright (c) Jim Byrne, 2016
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Introduction
This appendix to Chapter 5 will focus on the emotion of depression, as it is found in counselling and therapy sessions. And we will address the questions of:
(1) how to understand depression; (and some of the differences between ‘depression’ and ‘grief’); and:
(2) how to control or reduce depressive tendencies.
This appendix is written in the form of a self-help manual, but it can be used by counsellors and therapists to learn how to apply the E-CENT approach to depression in counselling sessions.
One of the systems from which E-CENT theory was derived is Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT).
REBT theory has a straightforward binary distinction between:
(1) ‘sadness’ – (which is a less intense level of negative mood than depression; and is also said to be ‘appropriate’) – and
(2) ‘depression’ (which is a high level of negative feeling, which is both distressing and ‘inappropriate’).
In E-CENT theory, we do not consider all depression to be inappropriate.
Just as we see anger and anxiety as innate aspects of our biological survival equipment, so also do we begin with depression (or rather grief) as an innate element of our emotional repertoire which has served, and to some extent still serves, to enhance our survival goals and capabilities – especially in relation to our attachment systems.
Understanding grief and depression
As usual, if we begin our attempt to understand an emotion by examining a modern adult in a counselling room, we are going to miss many important, concealed elements of that emotion.
But if we think of a baby on the plains of the Serengeti, about one hundred thousand years ago, we can well imagine that it was the infants who screamed and wailed with grief whenever they were parted from their mothers (even for a short time), who had the best chance of survival, and passing on their genes to their descendants; and that those babies who lay quietly while mother ignored and abandoned them, would have been quickly found and devoured by hungry predators.
John Bowlby has described the grief process in four stages: the first of which was shock; secondly, anger and wailing; then resignation; and finally detachment from the lost attachment figure (which would facilitate re-attachment to a new care-giver in the case of a lost or abandoned child – or a ‘divorced’ adult).
The anger and wailing stage is helpful because it draws attention to the plight of the grieving one, and calls for sympathy and rescue.
It was in the context of this kind of evolutionary perspective on the value of grief that I originally wrote this statement:
“Grief is appropriate depression about a significant loss or failure; while depression is inappropriate grief about some apparently significant loss or failure. And theinappropriate quality comes out of our unrealistic demands about life and experience, and our tendency to catastrophize”. Dr Jim Byrne
~~~
Focusing on depression
Let us assume that you are a counselling client who is currently feeling strong feelings of depression (though you could, of course be a counsellor or a self-help enthusiast, looking for ways to help others rather than yourself!)
Your symptoms might be as follows:
Common symptoms of depression: Feeling extremely sad and lethargic; Mentally pained and miserable; Crying a lot; Sleep disturbance; Reduced sex urge; Feeling helpless; Pessimism about the future; Primarily negative memories of the past; Perhaps feeling suicidal, or seeing little value in living.
My job here is to present you with a useful model of grief/depression; and also a brief, effective solution to the problem of depression, in terms of how to manage it and reduce it. (But my overall aim is to illustrate the E-CENT theory of depression, and how we set about helping clients to reduce their feelings of depression).
The first thing we need to do is to check how depressed you are at the moment, so you can monitor your progress as you learn how to eliminate your negative feelings.
Human disturbance is not too difficult to understand. There is one key distinction that you must be able to make, if you are going to optimize the management of your emotions. This is it:
Sometimes you have a really big problem in your life; and:
Sometimes you have a small problem, but, because of your tendency to exaggerate, it feels like a huge problem.
Let’s take a closer look at that this distinction:
Sometimes you have a big problem in your life, and that is why you are (predictably and necessarily) upset. (An example would be the time when Albert Ellis – the founding father of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy [REBT] was unfairly {in his judgement} removed from his professional duties, and removed from the board of his own institute – after more than fifty years of successful practice. He was extremely upset, as was shown by the fact that he wanted his main adversary “dead, dead, dead”. And also by the fact that he sued his opponents for ‘unfair dismissal’ – even though he had spent a lifetime denying his clients the right to raise ‘unfairness issues’ with him! [This is an example of the disparity between the thoughts and actions of an extreme Stoic. They talk a great story of indifference to harm, but if you harm them, they will squeal!])
So if you have a real, actual, major problem, don’t let any CBTers or REBTers talk you out of your right to be realistically and reasonably upset about it!
However:
Sometimes you think you have a bigger problem than you actually have, and that is why you are (unnecessarily) upset – or much more upset than you should (realistically) be. I will give you an example of such a situation later, below (involving a traffic jam while driving); and also show you how to produce a more realistic assessment of the degree of badness of any situation.
Really big problems, and apparently big problems
Here are two examples of the first kind of situation, where the problem is realistically appraised by you as being a major problem:
(a) You are predictably (and appropriately – and unavoidably) upset whenever things orevents or people in your environment exert more pressure upon you than you can handle at that time. The solution in those situations is to try to reduce the pressures (to the degree that any of them can be controlled), while building up your coping capacities – (through improved diet; getting plenty of sleep; doing some physical exercise; setting social support (or professional help and advice); seeing a counsellor or therapist who can help with your thinking/feeling/behaviour; self-managing your thinking about your problems [for example, with the Six Windows Model, from Chapter 3]; and so on).
(b) You’re predictably (and appropriately – and unavoidably) upset when early childhood experiences are re-stimulated in the present moment. The solution in these kinds of situations is to work at resolving your childhood traumas, with a suitable counsellor or therapist; and/or through writing your autobiography of the traumatic period, in order to re-frame and process the trauma.
So much for the real, major problems.
As suggested above, you can also create problems for yourself by exaggerating the degree of badness of a challenging or frustrating or insulting experience.
Exaggerating the extent of your problems
When something relatively minor happens in your life – something that you would like to have avoided – you may have a knee-jerk reaction of trying to push that event or experience away. But if it cannot be eliminated, and you are rating it (consciously or non-consciously) as very, very bad, then you will feel a really uncomfortable emotion – like anger, anxiety or depression, hurt, etc. – as a result of the exaggerated intensity of the badness of the problem.
An example of this kind of problem would be the driver who gets out on the motorway, (or highway, autobahn, etc.) with the expectation that it will take a certain amount of time to get to work, only to find a huge traffic jam which will make him or her very late for work. If this individual makes the mistake of ‘perfinking’ (or perceiving/feeling/thinking [consciously or non-consciously]) that this is the worst imaginable situation to be in – or that this is totally bad – then they will feel intense frustration, leading to angry and/or anxious feelings, and high blood pressure, at the very least.
But this situation has a history, which has to be understood. It is not a pure product of the present moment!
The historical aspects
If this person had previously been to see me, I would have advised him or her to always ‘pad’ (or overestimate) his or her travel time requirement, and to use any surplus time they ‘inherit’ (by arriving too early for work) to meditate or do some physical exercise (or to write some Daily Pages,[1]) somewhere quiet in their work premises. And I would also have trained him or her to spot when they are exaggerating the degree of badness of mildly bad problems.
But this person, stuck in a traffic jam on the motorway, has not been to see me. And they are panicking about being late for work, because they did not allow time for such a (fairly predictable) traffic jam. And they are feeling so frustrated and angry, about this delay, that we can infer that their perfinking (perceiving/ feeling/ thinking [probably mainly non-consciously]) could be translated as something like this: “This is a totally bad situation, which I refuse to accept. It’s not fair that I’m going to be late for work, which will count against me with my boss. I can’t stand this kind of situation. And the world’s a rotten place for doing this to me!”
I am not saying “this is what they are thinking”, which some CBT or REBT therapists would say. I am saying, their (conscious and non-conscious) thinking/feeling/perceiving (which I call their perfinking) could be interpreted as being very roughly equivalent to the statements presented above.
My next priority is to write Appendix J, on two of Albert Ellis’s major errors: the role of ‘beliefs’ and the word ‘awful’.
While I was doing some earlier work, Al’s theory of ‘awfulizing’ – the idea that people are upset by describing their problems as awful – began to unravel in my head[2]. I remembered that Al claimed the “We’re the only people (meaning REBTers) who define the word awful accurately”.
He went on to say that “awful means more than bad; badder than bad; and badder than it should be; and normally at least 100% bad; and sometimes more than 100% bad, which nothing can be”.
A bell rang in my head, and I found myself wondering how my dictionary defines the word “awful”. When I checked, I was surprised to find that it describes awful as “very bad or unpleasant”.
If we use Ellis’s definition of ‘awful’, then clearly nothing is ever ‘awful’ – it’s just a gross exaggeration of the degree of badness of a situation.
But if we use the Paperback Oxford English Dictionary (Soanes, 2002), then many, many aspects of our daily lives are clearly awful!
Ellis’s damaged past
How did Al Ellis come to define the word ‘awful’ so badly – so far from the established meanings in society? I would suggest that this habit of his stems from his childhood, when he was hospitalised for almost ten months on his own, at the age of six years, with just one or two visits from his mother, over that entire period![3]
According to John Bowlby’s theory of attachment, little Albert Ellis would have begun by becoming angry and whining; moved on to grieving; and then detached from his parents. He might also have found his negative feelings of aloneness and isolation to be too painful to look at, and so he began to repress out of conscious awareness any negative feelings that came into his mind. Because he would not allow himself to look at any degree of badness in the world – abandonment, loneliness, isolation, insecurity – he could not allow anybody else to draw his attention to anything that was awful about their own lives.
Then, when he was a teenager, he found a philosophy of life that helped him to respectabilise aversion to looking at anything bad. He found Stoicism, in the form of the writings of Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. And what I have discovered about Epictetus and Marcus in particular is this: They have evolved both:
(1) moderate ways of helping people to detract themselves from their suffering; or to reframe it so it feels better. And:
(2) extreme ways of denying that they have been harmed!
I have presented examples of (1) and (2), in Appendix J.
Counsellors should not deny their clients the right to describe some of their experiences as awful, terrible and horrible; since many of life’s difficulties are actually awful, according to my dictionary.
~~~
A Major Critique of REBT:
Revealing the many errors in the foundations of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy
This book is a devastating critique of the foundations of REBT. There was a need to clarify the bottom line of Dr Byrne’s 500 page critique of REBT, and that has been done in a 22 page preface to this reissued, 2019 edition. (This has now also been released as a low-cost, Kindle eBook, on 31st January 2020).
Also, we have added a reference to the research which shows that emotional pain and physical pain are both mediated and processed through significantly overlapping neural networks, which contradicts Dr Ellis’s claim that nobody could hurt you, except by hitting you with a baseball bat or a brick.
This is a comprehensive, scientific and philosophical critique of the foundations of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, as developed by Dr Albert Ellis; including the dismantling of the philosophical foundations of the ABC model; and a decimating critique of the concept of unconditional self-acceptance. Almost nothing is left of REBT when the dust settles, apart from the system called Rational Emotive Imagery, which Dr Ellis borrowed from Maxi Maultsby.
Price: £23.58 GBP (Paperback) and £6.99 GBP (Kindle eBook).
~~~
Conclusion
Some of my latest thinking in this new book moves E-CENT theory another little bit further away from … REBT.
This book has proved to be a mammoth undertaking, and used up much more of my time and energy than I had expected.
I hope you … buy the paperback or Kindle versions at Amazon, and that you enjoy it as much as I am enjoying the writing of it.
A Major Critique of REBT:
Revealing the many errors in the foundations of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy
This book is a devastating critique of the foundations of REBT. There was a need to clarify the bottom line of Dr Byrne’s 500 page critique of REBT, and that has been done in a 22 page preface to this reissued, 2019 edition. (This has now also been released as a low-cost, Kindle eBook, on 31st January 2020).
Also, we have added a reference to the research which shows that emotional pain and physical pain are both mediated and processed through significantly overlapping neural networks, which contradicts Dr Ellis’s claim that nobody could hurt you, except by hitting you with a baseball bat or a brick.
This is a comprehensive, scientific and philosophical critique of the foundations of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, as developed by Dr Albert Ellis; including the dismantling of the philosophical foundations of the ABC model; and a decimating critique of the concept of unconditional self-acceptance. Almost nothing is left of REBT when the dust settles, apart from the system called Rational Emotive Imagery, which Dr Ellis borrowed from Maxi Maultsby.
[1] Cameron, J. (1992) The Artist’s Way: a spiritual path to higher creativity. London: Souvenir Books.
[2] In E-CENT counselling theory, we say that people are upset for all kinds of reasons, only some of which are related to their thinking. But we disagree with the idea that the word ‘awful’ is part of what upsets them. You can define a problem of yours as ‘awful’ and not feel particularly upset about it. And you can focus your bare (conscious) attention upon another of your problems and feel dreadfully upset. Much of the mentalizing that upsets us is non-conscious and habit based. It involves our ‘perfinking’ (or perceiving, feeling and thinking). And the real experiences that we have (in the present and in the past) are strongly implicated in our disturbances.
[3] Byrne, J. (2013) A Wounded Psychotherapist: Albert Ellis’s Childhood, and the strengths and limitations of REBT/CBT. Hebden Bridge: the Institute for Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (E-CENT) Publications.
In science as well as popular culture, the body and mind have long been pulled apart, and treated as separate entities.
If you are interested in the impact of lifestyle practices on mental health and emotional states, then you will enjoy our page of information about how all of the ideas above are presented in our book about Lifestyle Counselling. We see this as the core of most holistic healing practices of the future.
– a summary of our previous book about the impact of diet and exercise on mental health and emotional well-being;
That’s all for now.
Renata and I did a lot of research and reflection on the subject of the impact of diet and exercise upon mental health and emotional wellbeing. 
Since expanding our understanding of this complexity of human functioning, we have developed new approaches to perceiving our clients; and assessing the complex nature of their presenting problems in the consulting room.
PS: If you want to see the kind of range of ideas that I write about, please go to 
By Dr Jim Byrne with Renata Taylor-Byrne.
by Renata Taylor-Byrne and Jim Byrne.
by Dr Jim Byrne
It seems there is an appetite for radical change abroad in the world of counselling and psychotherapy at the moment, and people are ready to explore new ideas. In particular, the relationship between the body and mind (or, more precisely, the body-mind connection); the problems of sedentary lifestyle and inadequate nutrition; plus inadequate sleep; and how to process our own experiences in a journal.
We wanted to post a blog about the new hype about antidepressants, which has been generated by a new report, which will be mentioned below; and which has been wildly hyped in the British newspapers over the past few days.
Thanks for your message. So I looked up the study to which you refer, and this is what I found:
The extraordinary media hype over the latest meta-analysis of antidepressants puts the discussion of these drugs back years. Despite the fact that 9% of the UK population are taking antidepressants,
Postscript
My wife, Renata Taylor-Byrne, sometimes reminds me of the important principle of ‘extreme self-care’.
At a certain point this morning, I found myself exercising, and wondering if this information would be helpful in motivating some of our website readers (meaning you!) to shift to following the principle of ‘extreme self-care’. So here I am, following up on that thought, as a contribution to your health and happiness.
4 leaves of Romaine lettuce (chopped very small)
When we had finished breakfast, I read some brief quotes – about living in the moment, in the main – to set the mood for our Zen meditation, which we did for 30 minutes. And then Renata led our Chi Kung (Chinese exercise) session, which lasted about 20 minutes. Then we did a couple of minutes of the Plank (from Pilates) – for core strength – and then I did three sets of press-ups (30 presses in each set), and three sets of sit-backs (for 30 seconds in each set), for arm and stomach strength, and for hips and lower back.
The book is called: How to control your anger, anxiety and depression using nutrition and physical exercise; and it is available at amazon, at the following links:
If you would like some more information about the book (or to order it from a non-UK/US outlet), you can find a good introduction on our webpages. Just click the following link: 
Dealing with people is very enjoyable, and very demanding at the same time, isn’t it? Especially when you are dealing with people who are suffering from all the trials and tribulations that life has thrown at them.
But as I mentioned in my last blog, I have now been reading Matthew Walker’s book called “Why we sleep”, which was published in September of this year. And I have been so shocked and stunned – by the many research findings that he quotes about why sleep is so important – that I have decided to write about his key findings, and to summarise them for everyone. I have also identified several other books which must be taken into account, and I have begun to do that research work and note taking.
If you need any help or support, you know where I am!
Why did I not buy my own painkillers from the chemist? Because most of the painkillers used today are what are called NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs). And the problem with NSAIDs is that they cause ‘leaky gut syndrome’, which not only allows whole molecules of food to enter the bloodstream, and trigger various forms of inflammation in the body (paradox of paradoxes!), but they also compromise the blood/brain barrier, which can precipitate mood disturbances!
Let me now describe the exercises that I went on to do, after meditating:
Finally I did some strength training using the Powerspin rotator, to build arm, shoulder and upper body strength.
If you want me to help you to figure out how to live a happier, healthier, more emotionally buoyant life, then please contact me:
It is now more than three months since my previous blog post was published. The delay was down to how busy I’ve been, largely because of writing my latest book, which is now available at Amazon: 
However, I also write 
In this blog I am going to summarise some findings from research conducted on athletes, which can help us build our resilience in the face of all the hassles and challenges we can face at work each day.
Bonnie St. John and Allen Haines wrote a book called ‘Micro-resilience’, and in it they summarise this research finding: Dr James Loehr (a sports psychologist) wanted to understand why there were hundreds of athletes who were on international tours, but there were only a few who regularly won the tournaments and trophies. He wanted to know what the difference was between these two sets of athletes.
Dr James Loehr created the concept of the ‘executive athlete’ after these research findings, which he wrote about in his book ‘The Power of Full Engagement’ (2003) with T. Schwartz.
First, let us look at the ‘death pose’ from yoga practice. This is an amazingly effective way to recharge your batteries, and is very good for your back. If you have you own office or there is a vacant room, simply lie on the floor for 10 minutes with a book (of, say, two inches thickness) under your head (as a ‘hard pillow’). Put your arms down by your sides. Clear your mind of any stress or strain, worry or preoccupation. Breathe deeply into your belly, and relax. Stay still, and close your eyes if you want to. Any ideas that arise in your mind should be gently brushed away. After 10 minutes, very slowly sit up, and then stand up. This will refresh your body and mind at the same time.
Chapter 1 begins with a basic description of Emotive-Cognitive Embodied-Narrative Therapy (E-CENT). This if followed by a brief outline of the basic theory of E-CENT.
Humans often tend to push away (or repress) unpleasant experiences; to fail to process them; and to then become the (unconscious) victims of those repressed, and/or undigested experiences. E-CENT theory also sees adult relationships as being the non-conscious acting out of childhood experiences (which occurred with parents and siblings), because some part of those earlier relationships have not been properly digested and completed.
In a broader sense than that outlined above, E-CENT was developed by this author over many years of study and application, in private practice with more than 800 clients.
Appendix F: How to control your depressive tendencies
But if we think of a baby on the plains of the Serengeti, about one hundred thousand years ago, we can well imagine that it was the infants who screamed and wailed with grief whenever they were parted from their mothers (even for a short time), who had the best chance of survival, and passing on their genes to their descendants; and that those babies who lay quietly while mother ignored and abandoned them, would have been quickly found and devoured by hungry predators.
My job here is to present you with a useful model of grief/depression; and also a brief, effective solution to the problem of depression, in terms of how to manage it and reduce it. (But my overall aim is to illustrate the E-CENT theory of depression, and how we set about helping clients to reduce their feelings of depression).
However:
Then, when he was a teenager, he found a philosophy of life that helped him to respectabilise aversion to looking at anything bad. He found Stoicism, in the form of the writings of Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. And what I have discovered about Epictetus and Marcus in particular is this: They have evolved both:
ABC Counselling and Psychotherapy, Hebden Bridge 