Practices

Stress unsettles the gut and an unsettled gut drags on mood, so the two keep each other going. The good news buried in that is you can step in from either end.

You do not have to establish which came first. Easing the pressure on your nervous system helps digestion, steadying what you eat helps mood, and…

Before settling on a purely psychological account of months of anxiety or broken sleep, it is worth having the ordinary bloods done. Low iron, low vitamin D or low magnesium can produce symptoms that look exactly like a mental health problem.

This is not about swapping therapy for supplements. It is about not spending a year working on something a blood test could have partly explained. If…

A child struggling with attention, anxiety and daily reflux at once may be dealing with one problem wearing three coats. Undiagnosed coeliac disease and other food reactions can produce all of it, and the gut symptom is the clue worth following.

Symptoms that arrive together are worth asking about together. If reading, mood and stomach all went wrong over the same period, that pattern is…

If you are testing whether a food affects you or your child, the test has to be complete. Among children with suspected sensitivity to artificial colouring, most reacted to as little as 100 mg, so a bit left in is enough to blur the answer.

What usually happens is that a family removes the obvious sources, misses the ones hidden in medicines, sauces and cereals, sees no change, and…

Cutting artificial preservatives out can genuinely help a child who reacts to them, because a child who feels unwell behaves worse. What it does not do is treat the ADHD underneath, which will still be there once they feel better.

Worth being clear with yourself about what you are hoping for, because these diets are expensive and hard to keep up. If your child does have…

Gluten free and dairy free eating is essential in coeliac disease and in a genuine milk allergy. Neither one treats ADHD, and putting a child on them without a reason carries costs of its own.

The cost is not only money and nutrition. It is the birthday party where they cannot have the cake and the lunch table where their food is different…

If you are going to test whether a food matters, work out in advance where the plan will leak. School lunch swaps, a grandparent's biscuit tin, your own memory on a hard week: all of it decides whether the answer means anything.

Change one thing at a time and keep everything else steady, otherwise you cannot tell which change did what. Then be honest about who is running the…

If your body has something going on as well, try to get both looked after at the same time rather than in a queue. Therapy for what happened to you does not have to wait for your gut to settle, and it often goes better when the two run side by side.

Plenty of people park the physical thing while they do the psychological work, or the other way round, then wonder why progress keeps sliding back. A…

Low mood that arrives with bloating, fatigue and a foggy head is worth looking at from the food side too. An immune reaction to something you eat regularly can produce all three, and it gets labelled depression far more often than it gets tested.

The point is not to start cutting foods out on a hunch. It is to say the possibility out loud to a doctor, particularly if the gut symptoms and the…

When something has gone wrong across several systems, expecting one treatment to fix it is usually the mistake. Movement, processing what happened, changes to food and work on calming the body tend to add up in a way that none of them manages alone.

This is not an argument for doing everything at once until you are exhausted. It is an argument against giving up on the whole idea when the first…

Every feeling comes with something it wants you to do. Catching the move before you make it is most of the skill.

Anger wants to push, fear wants to get out of the room, sadness wants to curl up, shame wants to disappear. None of that is wrong, and the trouble is…

You do not need a long list of feeling words. Half a dozen you can actually reach for under pressure will do more than forty you have to look up.

Angry, sad, afraid, ashamed, surprised, glad is enough to start with, and most hard moments are some mixture of the first four. The aim is not to…

If someone is saying so much that you have lost the thread, stop them kindly and check. Sorry, that is a lot and it matters, can I say back what I have got so far.

It feels rude and it is usually received as the opposite, because it says the words were worth keeping. Listening while quietly drowning helps…

Point at the body. 'Your hands went up just then', or 'you put your head in your hands', gives a feeling something solid to stand on.

Feelings argued about in the abstract go round and round. A gesture you both just watched is much harder to dispute, and it opens a door: what was…

When someone goes quiet and you can see they have gone inside, that is not your moment to help. Stay still and let the silence run.

You will feel the pull to summarise, to check they are alright, to bring the other person back in. All of it lands as an interruption. Give it a few…

You cannot ask for something you cannot feel the want of. Before working out how to say it, spend a minute finding what you actually need.

This is why advice to communicate better so often goes nowhere. The words come out tidy and land as nothing, because there was no felt need inside…

Ask what the feeling is trying to do for you. Anger clears an obstacle, fear gets you out, sadness calls for comfort, shame hides you from being seen.

Once a feeling has a job it stops being a defect you have to apologise for. That matters, because the ones we treat as shameful are precisely the…

There is a kind of anger that floods a room and a kind that arrives with a request inside it. The second one gets answered.

The difference is audible before it is anything else: the voice steadier, the sentence shorter, an actual ask at the end of it. I am angry, and what…

Nobody ever came for help because they were too happy. What arrives as irritation or flatness on the surface is usually fear, grief or shame underneath.

So when someone snaps at you, or when you go cold and clipped yourself, treat that as the top layer rather than the whole story. The useful question…

Say the frightened thing rather than the sharp thing. It is far more exposing and it is the only version that tends to get a kind reply.

Under most rows sits something like I think there is something wrong with me, or I have already lost you and I am pretending I have not. Sharp words…