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Your body
You cannot think your way out of a body that is braced. This area starts there: the breath, the ground under you, moving, eating, resting, and the small physical things that change how the rest of the day lands.
Narrowed down
12 practicesTheme · Your nervous system
How long you have
Approach · Medical and treatment
A useful picture: the parts of your brain are sections of an orchestra. In dysregulation they are playing different tunes at different speeds. The aim is timing, not repair.
This is a kinder frame than damage, and a more accurate one. Nothing is broken or missing. What has gone is the coordination between parts that used…
Neurofeedback usually starts with an assessment, then a block of sessions, then a review, and it is mostly paid for privately. Ask about all of that before you begin.
It is a referral rather than something your therapist adds to a session, so you are taking on a second appointment, a second bill and a second…
Neurofeedback has its strongest support in attention difficulties, decent support in depression and anxiety, and for trauma it is promising rather than proven.
Reported gains include better sleep and attention, less irritability and fewer trauma symptoms. The honest caveats are cost, wide variation in how…
Long stress does not have one look. Some people end up permanently switched on. Others end up flat, heavy and hopeless. The two need opposite things.
If you are the switched on kind, the work is coming down: a longer breath out, less caffeine, a real end to the working day. If you are the flattened…
The stress hormone that carries you through a hard month also quietens your immune system while it is high. When it drops, the immune side comes back up.
That is the plain version of a relationship usually summed up as stress making you ill, which is too blunt to be much use. Running high and running…
Getting ill the week after the exams, the deadline or the funeral is not bad luck. It is the pattern.
You hold together through the push, and the moment it stops you are in bed with something. Often it was already brewing while you were still going.…
Wanting sugar, salt and something sharp at the end of a punishing week is physiology talking, not a defect in your character.
Long stretches of high stress come with real bodily consequences, and a shifted appetite is one of the visible ones. Fighting the craving head on…
Long histories of unresolved stress show up in bodies: inflammation, gut trouble, broken sleep, conditions that end up labelled unexplained. Being told it is all in your head is both wrong and useless.
There is a well known overlap between hard early lives and diagnoses such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue and several autoimmune conditions. Overlap…
An immune system that stays switched on with nothing to fight can begin turning on healthy tissue. It is doing its job with the wrong target.
That is a kinder account than the ones people are usually handed, which tend to imply they brought it on themselves by not coping. None of this is…
Digestion runs on the resting side of your nervous system, which is one reason long stress and gut trouble travel together so often.
People with reflux, irritable bowels or years of unexplained stomach pain are often told the two things are unrelated, or that it is stress in the…
Neurofeedback reads your brain's electrical activity through sensors on your scalp and turns it into a game. Nothing goes into your head.
You might watch a plane that flies smoothly when your brain produces the pattern being encouraged and wobbles when it does not. Nobody tells you how…
The screen tells you nothing and asks you nothing. The plane simply flies better or worse, and the adjusting happens on its own.
That suits people who cannot easily put what they feel into words, which includes a great many children and a great many adults after trauma. There…