Well that’s where all the problems are!

Listen to this podcast to discover the benefits of being outside.

People with problems spend too much time inside.

I don’t mean that they don’t get enough fresh air (though that will hardly do any harm.) I mean inside their own heads.

People who worry are inside their heads all the time. They are having a chat with themselves about all the things that might go horribly wrong. Inside, they say to themselves, “But what if THIS happened?! Oh my, that would be just terrible.” Then they imagine how terrible it would be and they feel rotten about it.

People who are jealous are inside too. They are inside making up conversations of lust that their partners are having with everyone other than themselves. They hear the adultery happening and see scenes of cheating. They are inside their heads having the argument they are expecting to have the day they catch their partner with their best friends significant other.

Those who are stressed are inside. They are inside reminding themselves of everything they need to remember to be stressed about and all of the unfinished business that they still haven’t finished. They are inside telling themselves “My head is aching, I’m tired and my body is tight.” Stressed people have to remember to be stressed, otherwise they might forget about it and it may go away. That wouldn’t work as then they’d have to worry about what they’d forgotten about (see worry above.)

Ill people are inside. They are inside wondering “What is wrong with my body?” Then the body freaks out and might really make them ill. If Ill people come outside, sometimes their pain goes away. This is not useful to them as then they would no longer be ill. All that poor-me-self-love would have to stop and they’d need to find another way to meet that need.

Those that do not get to sleep at night are inside too much. This is probably the worse kind of inside to be because going to sleep is quite frankly none of your business. It’s something that likes to sneak up on you when you are not looking for it. If you lay there looking for wee Willy Winky all night, he won’t come and you’ll be there until the small hours until you finally admit defeat and stop trying to find him.

Why won’t people come outside more?

Being outside means facing up to what’s outside. Sometimes outside is nice, but sometimes it is not. It can be boring or honest or sad outside. There is no control outside (there is only an illusion of it inside) and no order of the others who are outside too. At least inside you know what to expect from the rest of the world but on the outside the world is unpredictable.

Outside can be cold or thundery with high pressures. It can be grey and dark and lonely.

It can also be bright, sunny and warm, though you might have to make the effort to go elsewhere for warmer climates.

The most important thing about outside though, is the spectrum that you can experience.  There is so much more outside than there is inside. It’s interesting too how when you’ve spent a lot of time outside, it has a positive impact on the inside.

Being outside means you can really listen and engage with others, you can let your body run itself and your unconscious solve the problems you have without your ego getting in the way.

So if I knocked and said “It’s a beautiful day, would you like to come out and play?” Would you come outside?

A life without any stress whatsoever would be dull! Stress is our natural way to respond to challenges in life. However, a lot of the stress in our lives is unnecessary and can easily be eliminated by taking a few simple steps…

The first step is to identify what causes you stress. Take 10 minutes to think about what happens in your day-to-day life that stresses you out. Can it be eliminated? For example if you are always late for work, could you get up earlier so you are not stressed about being late? If it is something you can’t eliminate is there a way of making it less stressful? Just by being aware of what causes you stress you can begin to develop strategies to make things less stressful, or eliminate the stress altogether.

Secondly, don’t procrastinate!! It is always easier to think “I’ll do it tomorrow” but mysteriously tomorrow never comes and before you know it the project you were supposed to hand in to your boss is due and you have an hour to do it in!! Wouldn’t life be so much less stressful if you didn’t leave things until the last minute? Think of something that motivates you… Maybe having a less stressful life is a goal you would like to achieve. By getting things done on time you will find that you are not so stressed out about work projects, as your workload will seem smaller and more easy to manage.

Another step is to get organised. Clutter can cause stress, do you find that your work desk is always covered with various bits of paper, half of which you probably don’t even need? If this resonates with you, then you should definitely follow this step. Start by removing all of the items on your desk, put it all in neat piles on the floor. Clean your desk… isn’t it amazing how big and shiny it is! Wouldn’t it be nice to see it like that more often? File the papers away; make the top of your desk as minimalistic as you can. A clear desk and home creates a clear and stress free mind.

Adapt the stressor, by looking at the stressor in a more positive way you can change how you feel about it. For example, instead of being stuck in a traffic jam and focusing on how annoying it is. Think of it as an opportunity to regroup, listen to music or enjoy some alone time.

Lastly and most importantly, exercise. Some of you may think you don’t have the time to exercise, but it is so easy to incorporate into your daily life. Go for a walk in your lunch break; take the stairs instead of the lift. Not only is exercise great for relieving stress; it also helps to eliminate stress build up in the first place. The endorphins released during exercise will make you feel more relaxed, just by having a more upright, relaxed posture you will start to feel less stressed, as your body will not be so tense.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this and of course any other ideas on how to relieve stress…

By Gemma Bailey
www.nlp4kids.org

I have around 5 patients at the moment who are all coming to see me because of the anxious state they are in. For 2 of those patients, the anxiety affects them when driving, one has anxiety related to work, another has anxiety related to a medical condition and another has anxiety about travelling.

Often people get confused between the difference between anxiety and panic. I would describe anxiety as a feeling that is bubbling under the surface, a feeling of general unease or worry, usually causing a fluttery feeling in the stomach and an increase in the speed of the heart.

Panic is anxiety accelerated, although it would tend to last for a shorter period of time. During panic, the heart rate increases, the breathing changes and the whole body feels tense. The stomach may become unsettled and the body may become sweaty, cold and clammy.

Sometimes those who experience anxiety will also experience panic and those who experience panic may also experience anxiety. At times the anxiety only exists because of the worry that a panic attack may arrive. This can be particularly troublesome if the panic or worry has been associated to a specific trigger- which may happen consciously or unconsciously (so the patient may be aware that there is a trigger to their panic, or they may not be consciously aware of the trigger.) This can happen when an intense state, such as panic or anxiety is experienced and an association is formed between the bad state and something that is seen, heard, felt, smelt or touched. The feeling and the “trigger” need not have any relationship to each other in order for a correlation to be formed. In NLP we would call this process negative anchoring.

I remember once experiencing a period of anxiety (I wouldn’t ever call it panic attacks- not because it wasn’t, more out of principal. I knew as soon as I labeled it up that way that it would start to cause me real trouble.)

Surprisingly the anxiety issue occurred long after I had learned the power of NLP and hypnosis. So I was a little disappointed to find myself in a situation where I was laying in bed at night wondering when my heart would stop beating so loudly. It was an issue that only affected me at night, after the break up of a relationship. Sometimes it would creep up on me during the day but I was generally too busy during the day to care for it so much. It was in the still and quiet of the night that my mind would become alert and active and as a result my heart would speed up and sound as if it was booming out of my chest.

It was tricky to “NLP” myself in the wee small hours and so I found that the key to overcoming the issue was firstly in adjusting my thinking. When I really looked at my thoughts, I realized I was torturing myself with painful thoughts about the broken relationship. When I began to change my thoughts (and what has always worked for me is to think about becoming brilliant. I think about achieving more and being better than I am now, so that in the future, those that doubted or wronged me in some way will be feeling as if they are really missing out by no longer being around me.) Perhaps I was NLPing myself anyway!

The thing that really sticks in my mind with dealing with the anxiety I was experiencing, is that I just kept telling myself “It’s a phase and this phase will pass.” I didn’t mean the in the moment feeling of being anxious, though the phrasing could apply to that too. I mean more the overall issue of having anxiety in my life at that time. I very much thought, wholeheartedly, of it as something that wouldn’t stick around too long. I told myself it’s a bit like grieving, you feel bad for a while, but after a while, life carries on and you forget to keep feeling bad all the time.

For me, making anxiety temporary was what made the real difference, because it told my mind what my expectations were and that I was always expecting that one day I would get into bed at night and forget completely to worry- which I did. When it cropped back up again a few nights later, I didn’t tell myself “Damn it’s back again.” Instead I told myself that I’d gone without it a few nights already, and therefore had evidence I could go to bed without getting anxious. I also told myself that the anxiety that had returned that night was just a blip, that everyone has blips sometimes and that any day now I’d be missing out on the opportunity to lay here in bed at night, looking at the minutes ticking by on my clock, because I’d soon be getting into bed and nodding straight off to sleep instead.

Perhaps it just naturally disappeared on it’s own, or perhaps I really did manage to convince myself to react differently. What do you think?

The findings, published in Nature, seemed to show for the first time that the conditions for developing the disease can be affected by your emotional environment including every day work and family stress.

Professor Tian Xu, a geneticist at Yale University who led the study, said: “A lot of different conditions can trigger stress signaling – physical stress, emotional stress, infections, inflammation – all these things. “Reducing stress or avoiding stress conditions is always good advice.” He and colleagues at Yale University, working with fruit flies, showed mutations can promote cancer even when they are located in different cells. This is because stress opens up “pathways” between them. Read the rest of this article:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6981222/Stress-could-cause-cancer-claim-scientists.html