Blog Post
How to be Happy, Healthy, Successful and Wealthy!
Reflections upon my approach to self-monitoring and self-management
By Jim Byrne, Doctor of Counselling
Tuesday 12th January 2021
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Introduction
It has been said that if you do not have goals for yourself and your life, you will get used by people who have goals in which they can use you to their own ends.
An illustration of this could be that if you do not have goals for your own physical and mental health, you will get used by individuals and institutions which have goals to “process you” in their surgical theatres, or with their side-affecting drugs.
My A1 goal in life is this: “To be happy, healthy, successful and wealthy”.
The point about this goal is that many readers will insist that they also have their goals – which may actually be nothing more than wishes. To quote Antoine de Saint-Exupery:
“A goal without a plan is just a wish”.
So what is my plan? Or, more generally, how do I set out to plan to achieve that goal, and my other goals (such as my A2, which is “To have a really powerful relationship with my wife”.)
In this blog I can only mention one of several actions that I take to function intelligently towards my goal of being healthy! This is it:
Writing ‘Morning Pages’ as a form of self-management
At least three or four mornings per week – (it should be six or seven, but I am busy, and also distracted at times!) – I sit down and try to follow Julia Cameron’s advice to write three A4 pages of “stream of consciousness”. That means, whatever pops up in my mind gets written on the page, including “I don’t know what to write”; “I have slight pain in my leg”; or whatever comes up.
For example, this morning I wrote these lines, at the start of my pages:
“I had a dreadful sinus headache during the night, which disrupted my sleep. And my Candida Albicans symptoms[1] were painfully overgrown and intensely itchy”.
“Theoretical cause of both conditions: Milk/Dairy. I have been having cottage cheese for a few days, to try to gain weight; and I had a glass of full fat milk last night before bed.
“I am also eating other foods (that I would not normally have, or only in moderation) to try to gain weight. (I am determined to combat any tendency towards sarcopenia, which would certainly thwart my desire to be healthy!) These unusual foods (for me to be consuming) include: dried fruits (high GI), pineapple chunks (ditto), prunes, (ditto), gluten-free cereal (mostly buckwheat – not really a cereal) with dried fruit (ditto), plus gluten-free bread (as opposed to my more usual rice cakes).
“I will eliminate all dairy products at once. Stick to rice milk.
“I will continue to monitor the effects of the other (high-GI) ‘dietary indiscretions” on my Candida symptoms”.
…end of extract…
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Reflections upon my Morning Pages extract, above
1. What can we learn from my pages above?
(a) Firstly:
Jim had a dreadful headache during the night which disrupted his sleep – three times. Why did he not take a painkiller?
Painkillers are a very bad idea. Whoever came up with the idea of painkillers is probably the same person who came up with the advice to “snip the wires on your burglar alarm, when it rings at an awkward time!” That will switch off the “problem”!
Have you spotted the obvious mistake here? The headache is intended to tell you something very important. Something is wrong in your body, and you need to fix the problem, not the symptom of the problem!
If you switch off the alarm, the disease burglars can run amok in your bodily home!
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Secondly:
Although Jim treated the Candida symptoms topically, he also has a plan to monitor the link between those symptoms and his high GI deviations from his usual diet. If the Candida problem persists, he will reduce those high GI foods, and find some other way to gain weight!
(If you do not understand the link between food and mood, you need to read our book in Footnote 1 below).
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Thirdly:
Sleep disruption is a significant disturbance to normal mood states. See Renata’s book, Safeguard Your Sleep and Reap the Rewards.***
People who experience significant sleep disturbance often feel irritable and depressed. But Jim did not feel irritable or depressed, because he accepted ownership of the problem; and responsibility for solving the problem, using his years of research on how to be healthy! (In an unhealthy world which does not, to any significant degree, address the questions: How should each of us strive to be healthy? What would a healthy lifestyle look like?)[2]
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2. What is my advice in this blog?
My advice to the readers of this blog is this:
If you want to have a long, happy, healthy and productive life, then you have to take back responsibility for managing your own physical and mental health.
And one way to begin to do that is to begin to write your Morning Pages.
Your physical and mental health are too important, and too complex, to be delegated to somebody who cannot ever come to care as much about you as you should care about yourself!
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3. What is the general approach to self-management that I teach to my clients?
My general approach to self-management is described in detail in my book about How to Write a New Life for Yourself.***
As follows:
1. Monitor your moods and emotions, as they are your basic (functional or dysfunctional) guides to action in the world. (See Chapter 8 for guidance on this; plus Strategy No.17A [both in ‘How to Write…’[3]). In E-CENT theory, we argue that human beings are primarily emotional beings, who learn to ‘think’, after a fashion, in the course of their socialization, at home and in school.
But we are not ‘thinking beings’, because thinking and feeling and perception cannot be separated from each other. When we try to think, we are actually perceiving-feeling-thinking, all in one grasp of the mind. (For shorthand, we call this process ‘perfinking’: perceiving-feeling-thinking). So, because you are a perfinking being, who wants to perfink better, you need to learn how to manage your emotions[4], so they will not undermine the quality of your perfinking. (If your response is: “To hell with this. I’m just going to keep on thinking”; then you will tend to perfink very dysfunctionally, inefficiently and with disappointing results in the real world!)
2. Monitor your inner dialogue. In E-CENT counselling and coaching, we say that each person is split between two potentials, which we call the Good Wolf and the Bad Wolf. These can also be thought of as the Inner Critic (or Bad Wolf; which is negative and judgemental, and self-frustrating and self-downing); and the Internal Mentor (or Good Wolf; which is positive and praising and supportive, and promotion of self-care). (See Strategies Nos. 17B and 17C below, for help with the monitoring of your inner dialogues). (Each of the two Wolf states is further subdivided into Parent, Adult and Child sub-states – See Stewart and Joines, 1987 – but, for simplicity, we will not be breaking the Wolf states down in this book!)32. Monitor your approach to diet/nutrition, physical exercise, and sleep. (See Byrne, 2018; plus elements of Chapter 8, ‘How to Write…’[5]).
3. Monitor your goals, and your goal-directed actions, and the feedback you get from the world. (See section 7.2 of my “How to Write…” book).
4. Monitor the problems that arise in your life, at home and in work, and engage in problem-solving behaviours. (See section 7.6 of my “How to Write…” book).
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4. Summing up and signing off…
In this blog post, I have tried to draw attention to the importance of conscious self-management, if you want to be happy, healthy, successful and wealthy. (Having lots of money is not wealth, if you do not have your physical and mental health, and emotional wellbeing!)
Do you want to optimize the possibilities of your life?
Are you willing to take responsibility for your goals and actions in the world?
Or are you willing to be ‘processed’ by others?
Wakey-wakey!
Best wishes,
Jim
Jim Byrne
Doctor of Counselling
ABC Coaching and Counselling Services
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Email: Dr Jim’s Email Address***
Telephone: 01422 843 629 (from inside the UK)
Or: 44 1422 843 629 (from outside the UK)
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[1] Jim has suffered with Candida Albicans overgrowth (a common form of gut dysbiosis [SIBO]) – as many of his depressed clients similarly suffered! – and he has been managing this condition himself throughout that time, using alternative health strategies. See How to Control Your Anger, Anxiety and Depression, Using Nutrition and Physical Activity.*** This book contains a detailed description of his Candida problem, and how he has managed it.
[2] We have produced a book on how to establish a Healthy Lifestyle. This is the title: Lifestyle Counselling and Coaching for the Whole Person.***
[3] How to Write a New Life for Yourself.***
[4] See Chapter 7 of Lifestyle Counselling and Coaching for the Whole Person, above.
[5] How to Write a New Life for Yourself.***
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By Dr Jim Byrne with Renata Taylor-Byrne.
by Renata Taylor-Byrne and 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.
So how, in such a demanding environment, do we manage our energy successfully? So that we optimise our productivity, but conserve our energy and protect our physical and mental health.
Each day, at the end of the final teaching session, I would wipe the whiteboard clean of all the information that was on it, and I would remember all the outstanding events of the day, good and bad, and wipe them away in my mind at the same time.
The other aspect of this approach was this: I was asserting my boundaries with my job. In other words, I was taking responsibility for managing upwards. I was not allowing myself to develop ‘leaky boundaries’ through which outside forces could use up my precious reserves of energy!
Some years ago I found this idea was used by Olympic athletes. After they had been working on the skills they wanted to develop, then they needed time to rest and recover. The human body needs proper recovery for sustained and improved performance, for development, and even for preventing injuries.
I am currently (2nd December 2016) working my way through a three month course in ‘creative recovery’, based on Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way.
“I must not skip my pages. I must not skip my pages. I must not skip my pages”.
My job as a coach/counsellor is to help my clients become strong, confident and healthy. And if I find information that will help people achieve that goal, then it’s my job to spread the good news.
A blog post by Dr Jim Byrne, 22nd June 2016
By Jim Byrne DCoun FISPC
In these pages you will find a detailed introduction to the theory and practice of one of the most recent, and most comprehensive forms of holistic counselling and psychotherapy. This new system (for helping people to optimize their positive experiences of life, and to process their negative experiences), necessarily deals with emotions, thinking, stories and narratives, plus bodily states; and thus is called Emotive-Cognitive Embodied Narrative Therapy (E-CENT).
The content of this book has been a long time incubating, at the very least since 2001 when I first tried to defend the ABC model of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT)/ Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) by relating it to the three core components of Freud’s model of the mind (or psyche): (1) the Id (or It [or baby-at-birth]); the Ego (or sense of self, or personality); and the Superego (or internalized other, including social and moral rules). The more I tried to defend REBT, the more its core models fell apart in my hands!
Into this mix, at some point, Attachment theory arrived, and that helped to make more sense of the mix. Attachment theory and Object relations theory eventually formed the core of my model of the mother-baby dyad, and the way in which the mind of the baby was born out of the interpenetration (or overlapping interactions) of the physical baby and the cultural mother.
But even beyond those developments, I also became increasingly aware that, because we are body-minds, our experience of sleep, diet, exercise, alcohol, water consumption, and socio-economic circumstances – (in addition to current and historic relationships) – have as much to do with our emotional disturbances (very often) as do our psychological habits of mind.
Counselling and therapy systems have normally ignored the convincing evidence that exercise and diet can change our emotional states. For example, in Woolfe, Dryden and Strawbridge’s (2003) book on counselling psychology, there are no references in the index to diet or physical exercise
In this blog I am going to explain why meditation is really good for you. It’s the mental equivalent of being on a very nutritious and healthy diet.
In our daily lives, here are some examples of the mental demands we face:
Our poor brains are deluged with information overload, and the messages don’t stop until we crawl, tired out, into bed, hoping for a decent night’s sleep.
The stress response is a natural, human response to all the daily challenges you’ve been facing. You’ve probably heard it referred to as the ‘fight or flight response’. Your heart rate and breathing increase; your big muscles tense up to fight or run; your digestive system closes down, to conserve energy; your body/brain fills with cortisol and adrenaline, so it becomes difficult to think straight.
In this blog I’m going to review some of the key elements of this book on brain-mind-body health. In the process, I will explain to you why I think this is such a useful and surprising book, and how it can help all of us to be happier and healthier, and to enjoy our life more. Then I’ll outline a few of Dr Perlmutter’s dietary guidelines – from which we could all benefit – and then explain why it can be very tough to make changes to your diet on our own.
Perlmutter considers that our mental health and physical wellness are totally affected by the internal systems of bacteria that operate in the gut.
And our gut microbes influence whether we get: 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.
What happens is that the blood-brain barrier (which has been thought of as a “highly protective, fortified portal keeping bad things out of the brain”) is weakened if the gut is leaky, and this lets in molecules that could be really bad for the body, including bacteria, viruses and proteins that would normally have been prevented from crossing the blood/brain barrier.
By the way, if you suffer from insomnia, then, on page 85 of his book is a section entitled, “Gut bacteria and a good night’s sleep”. What he says is this: “Balance the gut, break through the insomnia”.
“New, leading-edge science coming from the most well-respected institutions around the world, is discovering that, to an extraordinary degree, brain health, and on the flipside, brain diseases, are dictated by what goes on in the gut.” 
ABC Counselling and Psychotherapy, Hebden Bridge 