Practices

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…

Sleeping until the middle of the afternoon, day after day, is usually not rest. It is closer to the body shutting down, and it tends to leave you flatter rather than restored.

The tell is how you feel on waking: real rest gives something back, while shutdown leaves the day already gone and you no better for it. Nudging the…

Attention problems often travel with anxiety or low mood, and those two eat working memory as well. Settling that layer can make everything else look quite different.

If you are anxious most of the day you will lose track of things, forget what you came into the room for and struggle to hold a plan, whether or not…

For a child having a hard time, one adult who plainly thinks well of them makes more difference than almost anything else. A coach or a teacher can be that person.

Studies of children growing up through poverty, hunger and worse keep landing on the same finding: those who did well usually had somebody who…

If talking about it has not shifted things, a body based practice is worth trying next. It is not a consolation prize.

Some of what trauma leaves behind sits underneath words: the flinch, the going blank, the pull towards hurting yourself. Practices that work through…

There is a listening programme that filters music into the range of the human voice, given in short sittings that add up to a few hours, to make speech easier for the body to take in.

It is delivered by a trained provider rather than downloaded and run at home, usually in small doses with a pause if things stir up. If you have…

This is given in small doses with pauses built in, and the pace is meant to bend around you. Ask for less if you need less.

There are shorter and longer versions, and versions without a human voice for people who find singing in a particular language hard to hear. A…

If your usual trouble is going blank, feeling unreal or watching yourself from a distance, this is the kind of work that tends to reach that.

When you are numb, techniques that ask you to notice what you feel in your body have very little to work with, because the noticing is the part that…

Some people end up fully flipped, awake until three in the morning and unable to surface until evening. That is genuinely hard to reset, and not for want of trying.

Ordinary sleep advice is not built for this. What tends to be needed is help with timing: light at the right hour, a plan to move the whole cycle in…

Trauma sleeplessness usually has two layers: night itself carries meaning, and the body's clock has moved. Both need attention.

If bad things happened at night, lying in the dark listening to every sound is not a bad habit, it is vigilance doing its job. Sleep advice alone…

When someone finally reaches somewhere safe, do not be surprised if they fall apart rather than bloom. Stay close through that part.

People who have lived on high alert often start grieving once the danger stops, and it can look like going backwards: more tears, more fear about the…