What is the Point of Anxiety?

Image by Francesco

If you struggle with high levels of anxiety you may, understandably, wish you could never feel anxious again. If there was a big switch marked ‘Anxiety’, you would probably flick it to the OFF position and hope it stayed that way for the rest of your life. And no wonder – anxiety is a horrible feeling, especially when you experience it intensely and on a regular basis. No-one likes feeling anxious.

But when I am helping my clients with chronic anxiety, one of the first things I do is explain why humans experience anxiety, the function of this uncomfortable emotion both in terms of evolution and neurology – how it shows up in your nervous system, including your brain. The first thing to understand about anxiety is that it’s supposed to feel uncomfortable. That’s so you can’t just ignore it and carry on with your day.

To understand this properly, let’s jump into a time machine and journey back 10,000 years, to meet one of your ancestors living on the African savannah. She would be living with a small tribe of hunter-gatherers, in a village surrounded by a fence constructed from the spikiest branches they could find. Why? Because outside that fence would be very large, very hungry animals who wanted to eat them.

Anxiety is an alarm signal

Let’s say your ancestor left the village with two other women to forage for berries, roots, plants and whatever they could find to feed their families that day. As she walked across the savannah, she noticed the grass to her left start rustling. And she froze, as the threat system in her brain first detected the threat and then – in split seconds – decide how to respond. Thinking it might be one of the lions that often hunted near this spot, her brain cycled through the options of fight, flee or freeze and decided fleeing was her best chance of survival.

So her amygdala – a small structure in the brain whose primary job is mobilising the rest of the brain and body to deal with threats – gave her a massive jolt of anxiety to signal, Run! At the same time, the amygdala engaged with other parts of her brain to give your ancestor a shot of adrenaline and cortisol, quicken her breathing and heart rate to pump oxygenated blood to the major muscles in her arms and legs. And she ran, fast, until the potentially-a-lion threat was far behind her.

And this is what anxiety is for – to tell you that:

1. There is a threat.

2. And you should do something about it, urgently.

For your ancestor, this whole mind-body process might just have saved her life. And even in our 21st-century world, which is far safer than the one she lived in, anxiety will probably have saved your life, or the life of a loved one. This is why we should never try to get rid of anxiety completely, even if we could, because it can quite literally be a life-saver.

Calming your nervous system is key

I hope that gives you some idea of why you feel so anxious – and why that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The problem is, for most of us, our anxiety is not triggered by lions in the grass, but by a nasty email from your boss, warning letter from the bank or critical comment from a family member. These are all threatening, hence the spike of anxiety they trigger, but not in the life-or-death way those rather primitive parts of your brain are designed to save you from.

So rather than trying to shut down your anxiety, or get rid of it, the key is first learning to accept this normal, healthy and in fact vital emotion. Then finding tools and techniques to bring your dysregulated nervous system back into balance, calming, soothing and reassuring parts of your brain like the amygdala that are yelling ‘lion!’ when there is none.

If you are really struggling with your anxiety, I would encourage you to find a skilled therapist to help heal whatever wounds from your past are making you feel so anxious right now. And this therapy, as well as any other healing tools you employ, should focus on helping calm and soothe your overheated nervous system. You can do that right now, using this Compassionate Breathing technique I recently blogged about.

I would also recommend anything that feels calming or soothing for you, like self-help books and podcasts from therapists/other healers you trust, yoga, tai chi, hugs from your beloved pet/partner/kids/close friends or family members, relaxing massage or soothing music/TV shows/movies. Really anything that helps you feel calmer, safer and more at peace will be good for your anxious brain. Over time, this will reduce the flow of stress hormones like cortisol into your bloodstream, while increasing pleasurable, calming hormones like oxytocin and endorphins.

If you would like to know more about anxiety and how to manage it you may also find my latest Insight Timer course, Easing Worry & Anxiety with Internal Family Systems, helpful – if so, just click the button below to find out more.

And my Insight Timer collection has a wide range of meditations, breathwork techniques, guided imagery, sleep stories and much more to help with problems like stress, anxiety and depression.

I hope that helps – sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Why I Love Being a Meditation Teacher for Insight Timer

I am honoured to be a Featured Teacher on Insight Timer's home page for the upcoming week. I love this app and am so proud to be part of a global community of teachers, producing – mostly free – content for the 26 million meditators who use Insight Timer across the globe.

If you would like to try one of my breathwork practices, mindfulness, self-compassion or IFS meditations, or guided-imagery practices, check out my collection at: insighttimer.com/danrobertstherapy

Love ❤️

Dan

Announcing My New Course: Easing Worry & Anxiety with Internal Family Systems

Image by Giulia Bertelli

I am pleased to announce the launch of my second Premium Audio Course for Insight Timer – Easing Worry & Anxiety with Internal Family Systems. If you sign up to this six-day course today you will learn why you feel so anxious, starting with the evolutionary and neurological roots of anxiety, explaining why it’s a crucial emotion for us all to feel, because it alerts us to threats and helps us react to them, quickly if need be.

Understanding why you feel so anxious is a key step in learning to accept it, because anxiety is something we all feel and is an important alarm signal when things need our attention. And then helping you ease it over time – this course will help you start to feel calmer, safer, and more at peace, step by step.

Over the six days you will also learn about internal family systems therapy, which is one of the fastest growing and most popular models of therapy in the world right now. As an Internal Family Systems Therapist, I use this warm, compassionate, and highly effective treatment approach with my clients and in my teaching, because it offers a revolutionary way of understanding problems like chronic anxiety.

Meeting your young, anxious part

You will learn that this anxiety comes from an anxious young part of you, holding painful thoughts, feelings, and memories of difficult experiences in your childhood. To ease your anxiety, you need to learn how to connect with, understand and soothe this anxious little boy or girl inside.

I will also teach you that worry comes from another part of you, called the Worrier. Again, you will learn how to accept and even value this protective part, because it’s just trying to help, even if the way it does so can be stressful and exhausting at times.

I hope you join me on this transformative six-day journey, which includes theories and techniques drawn from my many years of helping clients better manage their anxiety. As well as trauma-informed teaching about the mind-body source of problematic anxiety, I will lead you through powerful calming techniques including breathwork and guided-imagery exercises, drawn from IFS and other trauma-informed therapy models.

The course is free if you become a Member Plus Supporter. This costs just $60 for 12 months of high-quality content like this on the Insight Timer app from me and thousands of other leading teachers. ⁠

Try it now by visiting my Insight Timer collection or clicking on the button below. ⁠

I hope you find it insightful and healing. ⁠

Love ❤️⁠

Dan

Try this Powerful Exercise to Manage Difficult People in Your Life

Image by Nik

One of the frustrating aspects of being human can be dealing with other humans. Not the nice, kind, reasonable ones. But the annoying, rude, disrespectful ones – I’m sure you have a few of those in your life. And managing these tricky customers is not easy, especially if they are partners, family members, close friends or colleagues. If someone says or does something hurtful or annoying, you may respond in all sorts of unhelpful ways, like firing off an angry message, giving them the silent treatment, people-pleasing or suppressing your own needs, desires and opinions to keep the peace.

Viewed through the parts-based lens of internal family systems therapy, we can take a more compassionate view, as everyone (including me!) has tricky protective parts, who might get angry, judgemental or even hostile to protect your younger, more vulnerable parts from being hurt. This may be especially important for you if you were harshly criticised, bullied or shamed as a child – that’s when those protectors came online for you and why they will fire up with great speed and ferocity if they sense something similar happening to you now.

So when you are in conflict with someone, it’s like a war between their protectors and yours. Their angry protector fires up and says something hurtful or mean. So your angry protector gets activated and fires a verbal volley at them, which comes back at you and so it goes until somebody ‘wins’ or backs down. Entirely understandable, but not usually very productive, because one or both of you could get hurt, or you might damage a relationship that’s important to you. Many marriages end in divorce precisely for this reason.

There is another way

Happily, there is a more productive, kind and effective way to resolve conflict. In order to do that, you need to approach this difficult person from your Self, asking your protectors to relax and let you (strong, confident, adult you) handle the situation. I have written a few posts about Self, but as a refresher, in IFS Self is described as you who is not a part, or who you are deep down. This is the you who is calm, sturdy, robust and resilient. When you are in Self you also feel authentic, compassionate and kind. With this energy, you can approach conflict without out-of-control anger or hostility, but a firm, steady, assertive energy that both protects you and diffuses the situation.

If you would like to see the human embodiment of Self-energy, watch the wonderful Netflix documentary featuring the late Bishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, Mission: Joy – Finding Happiness in Troubled Times. Both are wise, kind and deeply spiritual, in their own ways. There is a deep strength to them (one who successfully fought apartheid and the other continues to combat oppression by the Chinese government) coupled with huge-heartedness, warmth and a deep sense of playfulness and joy. Two remarkable leaders and qualities we can all aspire to, or develop, the more we live in Self and are less in thrall to well-meaning but unhelpful parts.

If you are struggling with a difficult person in your life, here is a guided-imagery practice I adapted from the classic IFS meditation, developed by the wonderful Dr Richard Schwartz, founder of IFS. You can do this alone or, ideally, with a partner – if you have help, they can read you the script while you sit with eyes closed.

The script for this practice is quite long, but I have included the whole thing so you can use it, with a friend, family member or therapist. (If you are a therapist and would like to use this with your clients, on social media or in your teaching, please credit me and link to my Insight Timer collection).

You may prefer to listen to the recording on Insight Timer, which you can do here – Fire Drill: IFS Meditation.

The practice

• Welcome to this Fire Drill Meditation. This is a short practice you can use any time you are feeling angry with someone or dealing with some conflict in your life.

• As you go through this practice, I encourage you to pause whenever you need to, if you feel you need more time. You may also want to spend some time journaling afterwards, making a note of anything you learned and want to remember.

• Now close your eyes, if that feels OK for you, or gently lower your gaze. Then find a comfortable sitting posture and start by feeling your feet, flat and grounded on the floor. Then gently roll your shoulders back and feel your chest opening up, lengthen your spine so you’re sitting in an upright but relaxed posture.

• Take some nice deep breaths – in through your nose, out through your mouth, to a slow count of four on the in-breath and four on the out-breath, for 30 seconds.

• Now I want you to think of someone who is really getting on your nerves at the moment. This could be your partner or child, a family member, a friend or colleague. Or it could even be a politician, a celebrity, or someone on social media you have never met but have a strong, negative reaction to.

• And now, in your mind’s eye, put that person in a room, so you’re outside the room and watching them through a large window. Have them do the thing they do which annoys you so much – it could be sending you a critical message, saying something unkind, ignoring or belittling you.

• It could be expressing an opinion you vehemently disagree with, or find offensive in some way. Perhaps you feel they are being selfish, or unkind to you or someone you love.

• Just stand outside the room, watching them say or do the thing that triggers you.

• Then notice the parts that are with you outside the room, wanting to protect you from this person, or the ones who feel scared or vulnerable around them and in need of protection.

• There might only be one main part involved in this conflict, or a whole group of them there with you.

• As you stand outside with your parts, know that you don’t have to go into the room. It might be best to use this time just getting to know these parts of you – both the scared ones and those trying to protect them.

• Start by asking your protective parts what they are scared would happen if they weren’t out front protecting you from this person. They may have all kinds of fears and concerns – like you being hurt, attacked, manipulated or shamed by the triggering person – so just listen to and acknowledge these fears, whatever they may be.

• And then, don’t try and force anything, but if you can send your protectors a little wave of appreciation, or gratitude, for how hard they work to protect you from this person, and others like them, that would be great.

• Once you’ve done that, speak to the scared parts, who may be quite young. Ask them why they find this person so difficult. It’s likely that the difficult person reminds these young ones of someone in the past who really did hurt them, so if that’s the case, hear them out and comfort them in any way that feels authentic and natural for you.

• That might be with reassuring words, or a hug, if that feels good for these scared parts. Just see what comes naturally and do that.

• Then, ask for permission from all your parts – both the scared ones and the protectors – to go and speak to this person while they watch through the window.

• If that’s too much for them, it’s no problem at all, just spend some time understanding that and why this person pushes so many buttons for them.

• But if it is OK for them, open the door, go inside the room and leave your parts outside.

• Sit down opposite your triggering person and spend some time talking to them. The purpose of this is not to try and change this person or win the argument in any way, just spend some time listening to and talking with them.

• What’s it like to face him or her and speak to them, just as your Self, without your protective parts reacting so strongly? How does it feel in your body? What’s your tone of voice like? What language are you using? Are you able to be calmer, more direct, more assertive? There is no right or wrong way to do this, but just notice whatever’s happening.

• As you continue speaking to this person, you may notice your protectors getting involved, especially if you become irritated, hostile or defensive in any way, or find yourself interrupting and talking more than listening. If this happens, see if that protective part is willing to go back outside and let you finish talking to this person, alone. Reassure them that you can handle this and nothing bad will happen.

• When you’re done, thank the person for speaking to you and go back outside, closing the door.

• Ask your parts, what was that like for them? How did they feel about the way you handled this challenging person? Was it OK for them, or do they have any worries about it? Just listen, whatever they have to say.

• If it felt OK for your parts, you could also ask them whether they are willing to let you do this in the real world, with this person and others you find difficult.

• When that feels complete, thank your parts for letting you go into the room, if they did, or for sharing their fears with you if they didn’t.

• Do whatever you need to make that feel complete, then let the image fade away – it’s fading, fading and then it’s gone.

• Take a deep breath and bring your focus back outside. Then come on back and open your eyes.

• I hope that was helpful for you. Try using this practice whenever you have to deal with a difficult person, or are feeling triggered or activated by someone. You may find it helps to make those tricky people in your life just a little less tricky, as well as building your muscles of confidence, strength and assertiveness.

You can also listen to a recording of this practice in my Insight Timer Collection, by clicking on the button below.

Love ❤️

Dan

Are You an Orchid, Tulip or Dandelion? Why Your Temperament Matters

Image by Zoltan Tasi

There is a Swedish term, maskrosbarn, which means ‘dandelion child’. The Swedes have long believed that a proportion of kids were like dandelions – they were hardy, resilient and could grow anywhere. Just as dandelions can grow in lawns, parks or cracks in the pavement, so these unusually robust children can manage in any family, even if from the outside they look like tough environments in which to grow up.

Psychologists Bruce J Ellis and W Thomas Boyce, when studying genetics and child development, coined a new term in 2005: orkidebarn, meaning ‘orchid child’. Unlike their hardier counterparts, orchid children are – like the flower – highly sensitive, needing just the right environment to flourish. If the parenting/family dynamic is not what they need, orchids struggle mentally and physically, and can go on to suffer from long-term mental-health problems.

In new research, Dr Francesca Lionetti and colleagues identify a third category: tulips. These are medium-sensitivity children, somewhere between dandelions and orchids. The authors write that in their study of 901 healthy adults, 31 per cent were orchids, 29 per cent dandelions and 40 per cent tulips. These numbers vary from study to study, but what is clear is that some children are born with highly sensitive temperaments (also known as Highly Sensitive Persons), with less-sensitive children at the other end of the scale, and medium-sensitive in the middle. This temperamental sensitivity, or lack of it, stays with people into adulthood.

How temperament shapes your personality

Why does this matter? As I am always telling my clients, your temperament is crucial because it shapes you from the moment of your birth (and probably before that, in the womb). It is a combination of nature and nurture – the genetic inheritance you received from your parents combined with early parenting, attachment with your primary caregivers, family dynamics, and so on. If you were born a dandelion, you would have been pretty thick-skinned as a child, managing to cope even in high-conflict, volatile or otherwise less-than-ideal family environments.

But if you were an orchid, the same families would have been far too much for you, causing you persistent stress which would, in turn, have affected your developing brain. We know, for example, that high levels of the stress hormone cortisol negatively impact brain development, starting in the womb. This can harm a tiny baby’s growing brain, affecting its shape, size and connectivity.

Put simply: if you were an orchid in a stressful, chaotic or otherwise dysfunctional family, you would have suffered. And, very sadly, that suffering might have continued throughout your life – Dr Boyce writes that orchids account for a disproportionately high percentage of every society’s physical and mental-health problems. That’s because your highly sensitive temperament made you unusually vulnerable to things going wrong at every level of your mind-body system.

Why orchids can thrive

If you – like me and most of my clients – are an orchid, this may all seem a bit depressing. You were born with a highly sensitive temperament, your family wasn’t great, so then you suffer for life, right? Wrong. In fact, research also shows that, given the right care, orchid children thrive. They do better educationally, financially and in every other way than dandelions. Just like their horticultural namesakes, these kids can bloom into the most beautiful adults, they just need a little care, the right emotional nutrients, and some time.

There are two take-home points here. First, your temperament is key, whether you are an orchid, tulip or dandelion. It plays a huge part in making you, you. It is mostly inherited, but is profoundly affected by your environment.

Second, none of this is inherently good or bad. Sensitivity is an inherited neural – and neutral – trait. Just like being short or tall, having green eyes or brown, it’s something you are born with. But unlike your eye colour, it can change because of your environment and throughout your lifetime. And the problems that high sensitivity makes you vulnerable to can be mitigated by all the usual methods of healing and change – reading mental-health blogs like this one, self-help books, podcasts, therapy, meditation, yoga, loving relationships and all the other good stuff I am always writing about.

I hope you find these ideas eye-opening. If you would like to know more, try Dr Boyce’s book: The Orchid and the Dandelion: Why Sensitive People Struggle and How All Can Thrive. It’s a great read and has helped shaped my thinking around temperament and child development.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

What is Avoidant Attachment? And How Does it Affect Your Relationships?

Image by Beth Hope

Do you know which attachment style you have? This style, which describes the ways you think, feel and behave with current/potential romantic partners, is either secure or insecure – this is further divided into anxious or avoidant. Understanding your attachment style is profoundly important, for your mental health in general and particularly the way it impacts your closest relationships.

In a recent post, I described the impact of an Abandonment schema, which might give you a sensitivity to and fear of rejection or abandonment by your partner. This schema is often associated with an anxious attachment style, which means moving towards your partner by thinking about them all the time, messaging/calling them often, and worrying that they might be losing interest in you or having an affair. People with this attachment style can experience periods of intense worry and anxiety, until they get reassurance that everything is fine, their partner still loves them and nothing has changed.

In this post we will explore the other main type of ‘insecure attachment’, which is the avoidant attachment style. It’s thought that 25 percent of the adult population have this deeply rooted way of relating to others (with 50 percent secure, 20 percent anxious and five per cent anxious-avoidant). If you are one of them, you may find relationships – especially romantic ones – tricky in all sorts of ways.

What is avoidant attachment?

Essentially, avoidant attachment is the complete opposite of the anxious style, involving moving away from your partner, or potential partners. While anxiously attached folk constantly activate their attachment system, which helps them feel/be closer to their partner, avoidant people unconsciously suppress their attachment system all the time. They use deactivating strategies like criticising or finding fault with their partner, finding reasons not to spend time with them or have intimate conversations, avoiding physical contact and fantasising about the perfect partner – who might be just round the corner, if only they were free.

I recently read a brilliant book on attachment styles and how deeply they affect us throughout our lives – Attached: Are You Anxious, Avoidant or Secure? How the Science of Adult Attachment can Help You Find – and Keep – Love, by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller. I highly recommend it if you are interested in psychology, or just need some help in finding/maintaining a loving, supportive relationship.

One of the things that struck me was the authors’ claim that, if you are avoidant, when you hit a crisis point in your life – like a painful divorce – your avoidance can melt away and you become anxiously attached. And this made so much sense to me, when viewed through a parts-based lens. It means that people with an avoidant style have an Avoidant Protector, who keeps intimacy and (especially) vulnerability at bay.

But hidden behind that protector is a young part who craves love, support, connection, warmth, intimacy – all the normal, healthy relationship needs that every child is born with. Sadly, that protector constantly blocks these relational nutrients, so avoidant folk often feel isolated and lonely. They too want love, they just don’t know how to let people in enough to give and receive it.

Healing your attachment system

As I am often saying in these posts, the good news is that none of this is fixed or set in your brain. Your attachment style can change over the course of your lifetime. How? Well, finding an attachment-based therapist using a model like schema therapy would be one route to healing. Another is finding a securely attached partner – we know that this is often profoundly healing and transformative for insecurely attached folk. This kind of person makes relationships easy, because they are calm, confident and consistent. They just love you, no matter what, which helps your protective parts calm down enough for your hurt little boy or girl to receive all the love they have long craved.

So don’t give up. There is always hope, even if you have always avoided or struggled with relationships. Perhaps give a bit more thought to the kinds of people you typically choose, taking it slow at first so you can get a sense of your partner’s way of relating before you plunge in. Of course, if you are avoidant you will never plunge in, but you can still think before embarking on a relationship to try and find a secure person to be with. It will make a big difference, trust me.

I hope that helps – and wishing you luck on your healing journey.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Be Careful What You Think: The Power of Mind Over Body

Image by Milad Fakurian

I recently listened to a radio programme about the effectiveness of smart watches – the hi-tech gadgets many of us strap to our wrists to measure heart rate, step count, sleep quality and much more. According to the presenter, they vary wildly in accuracy, especially in measuring the depth, quality and stages of your sleep.

He also cited a study that intrigued me. In this research, participants had exactly the same amount of sleep, measured by highly accurate kit in a specialist sleep lap. But one group was shown the accurate data about their slumber, while the other was given deliberately false data, showing they had a terrible night’s sleep.

What was so fascinating was that these poor souls then felt exhausted, had poor cognitive functioning and reported feeling unpleasantly sleepy all day. Purely because they believed they had had a bad night’s sleep, so their body reacted accordingly.

Studies like this are intriguing, I think, because they illustrate the power of ‘mind-body symptoms’. These are powerful physical symptoms with no biological cause – they are created solely by our thoughts. And this may be hard to believe, but these symptoms can include full-body paralysis, blindness and seizures (known as ‘functional symptoms’, or ‘medically unexplained symptoms’).

It’s important to note a couple of things here: first, people with these conditions experience the exact same physical problems as those with biologically driven illnesses. They are really ill and need compassionate help, treatment and support. Second, no doctor thinks people with functional symptoms are making their illness up, faking it or that it’s all in their mind. This is to misunderstood the nature of our mind-body connection – and the power of your mind to influence your body.

What are Mind-body symptoms?

Let’s take a better-known case – the placebo effect. Study after study finds that patients taking sugar pills – with no medicinal content at all – experience significant benefits, including pain reduction for conditions like migraines. The exact amount is hotly debated, but most experts agree that placebo plays some part in the effectiveness of any medical treatment, including surgery!

That’s because if we receive medical treatment from someone in a white coat, who seems like an expert in their field, also caring and trustworthy, we believe that they will help us. And this makes the treatment more likely to succeed than not. The opposite of this, by the way, is called the ‘nocebo effect’ – we think something will make us ill and it does, which is also very powerful.

An example of mind-body symptoms from the realm of psychology is the research into mindfulness for management of chronic pain. Vidyamala Burch is a brilliant meditation teacher, long-term Buddhist and truly inspiring person, who sustained spinal injuries at 17 that required multiple surgeries and left her with a complex back condition, chronic pain and partial paralysis. She is now a wheelchair user.

Vidyamala is so inspiring because she learned to manage her pain through daily meditation – having experienced the power of mindfulness to help with chronic pain and illness, she developed the world’s first Mindfulness-Based Pain & Illness Management (MBPM) programme, which has helped over 100,000 people around the world. She is also one of the most positive, upbeat teachers I know! Here’s her story, if you’re interested – it really is heartwarming and inspiring.

Vidyamala (her given Buddhist name) explains that we experience primary and secondary pain. So if you cut your finger with a knife, the primary pain comes from damaged tissue, and these signals are sent to your brain via your nervous system. Your brain then interprets this data, taking into account your thoughts about it – so if you think, ‘Help! I’m a concert pianist and this could finish my career!’ your brain turns up the pain dial, making the symptoms more severe so you take action about this career-threatening problem. This is secondary pain – and it is largely due to your interpretation of the injury, not the physical damage.

The takeaway here is that your thoughts have a tremendous impact – on your emotions, your internal system of parts and the many biological systems in your body, such as your nervous system, hormonal system and musculoskeletal system. This is more proof that learning to think in a kind, helpful, compassionate way really can change your life. Just ask Vidyamala…

If you would like help in developing more positive thoughts and beliefs, try my Insight Timer practice – Taking in the Good: IFS Meditation, by clicking on the button below.

I hope you find it helpful – and if you are struggling with your health right now, for any reason, sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Is a Fear of Rejection Hurting Your Relationships?

Image by Marta Nogueira

How are you with rejection? Some people seem fairly immune to it and manage to brush it off. Others are very much affected by it, whether real or imagined, imminent or on the distant horizon. Many of my clients are in the latter camp, fearing rejection or abandonment, especially in romantic relationships.

As we try to address this problem, it’s helpful to begin thinking about it from an evolutionary perspective. Remember how humans have lived for almost our entire evolutionary history. We evolved from apes, who live in groups. And then lived as hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years, again in groups. We lived in villages with an extended network of family and others in our tribe.

These villages were well-protected, with strong fences surrounding them, because outside those fences were large, hungry animals who wanted to eat us. And neighbouring tribes, who could attack at any time. So it was very important – quite literally a matter of life and death – that you were inside that fence, especially as night fell.

And this meant that being rejected by the group in any way – shunned, banished, ejected from the village – would have been terrifying, because in that world (think the savannah, full of ravenous hyenas, lions and leopards; or forests, bristling with sharp-toothed bears, mountain lions and wolves) you would not make it for even a single day on your own.

Evolutionary psychologists think this is why the fear of rejection can be so intense, because somewhere deep in the more primitive recesses of your brain is the knowledge that rejection = death. It’s that stark.

Fear of abandonment

This is one reason why humans can be highly sensitive to the possibility of being abandoned in relationships. But there are many others, including having an Abandonment schema. This is a neural network in your brain holding ways of thinking, negative beliefs about yourself and others, powerful emotions and their resultant bodily sensations. When this schema gets triggered, you feel just awful – highly anxious and panicky, upset, angry or some other powerful emotion.

This would show up in your body as changes to your heart rate and breathing, becoming hot and sweaty, or tight, tense muscles. You might also believe things like, ‘No-one could ever love the real me,’ or ‘Everybody I love will eventually leave me.’

I have been thinking about this schema a lot recently, as I am reading Love Me Don’t Leave Me: Overcoming fear of Abandonment & Building Lasting, Loving Relationships, by Michelle Skeen. It’s a classic self-help book, drawn from the schema therapy model, so much of it chimes with my way of thinking/working. Skeen reminds us that this schema can develop for many reasons, including being abandoned as a child – for example, if your father left the family to go and start a new relationship and you barely saw him after that.

The abandonment could also have been more subtle. In this case, perhaps nobody actually left the family, but they weren’t very attuned to you or your needs as a child. They might have been good at what I call ‘practical love’. Feeding you, keeping you clean, getting you to school on time, all the important logistical stuff of parenting.

But not so good at the warm, emotional side of being a mum or dad – soothing hugs, telling you that they loved you and making you feel cherished, valued as a unique little person. In this case, you might feel abandoned, because your needs were profoundly unmet. It’s like an emotional, rather than physical abandonment.

Whatever the cause of this schema in childhood, as an adult you may struggle with relationships in various ways. You might become anxious and clingy, texting or calling your partner multiple times a day if you feel them pulling away. Or you could do the opposite, pushing them away, picking fights or even leaving them before they get the chance to leave you. If you have this schema, you might even avoid relationships altogether, because they have been so heartbreakingly painful when they fell apart.

Healing your schema

If any of this resonates with you, I am sorry – it’s such a deep and painful schema and really can make life a struggle. But remember that none of this needs to be a lifelong problem. Schemas, like so many systems and structures in your brain, are not fixed or set in any way. I often write about the concept of neuroplasticity, because I find it such a hopeful and positive idea. It means that whatever kinds of painful experiences you have had, and however they have imprinted on to your brain, they can be changed. Schemas can weaken and fade in intensity. Your attachment style (which could be either anxious or avoidant, if you have the Abandonment schema) can become more secure.

It really is all up for grabs, because your brain is shaped and moulded by experience. Think differently, over and over, and you form brand-new neural pathways. So instead of ‘No-one could ever love the real me,’ you learn to think, ‘I may not be perfect, but I am loveable and likeable just as I am.’ Over and over, until that pathway becomes wired in and the old one withers away.

Try reading Michelle Skeen’s book, for starters, because it really is very helpful and good. If this is a highly sensitive issue for you, I would recommend seeking therapy, preferably with someone who understands problems related to rejection and abandonment and can offer you a thought-through, convincing roadmap to healing.

And eventually, after doing some work on this stuff, finding a loving, supportive partner will be the most healing thing you could do. That may seem daunting right now, or even impossible, but it’s always one of my treatment goals when I’m working with abandonment-phobic people. It is doable, if you get enough help and support to make the necessary changes, trust me on that.

You could also try one of my most popular Insight Timer practices, Calming Your Parts: IFS Meditation. This will help you calm and soothe the young, abandoned part of you that gets triggered in relationships.

I very much hope that helps – sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Let Your Heart Relish the Return of Spring

Image by Aaron Burden

Looking out of my study window, it’s a beautiful sunny morning. Birds sing. A few fluffy white clouds drift across the piercing blue sky. It’s still mid-February and I know we’re not quite there yet, but you can feel spring in your bones on a day like this. After a long, chilly winter, I think we’re all ready for the warm, light, hopeful days that are just around the corner.

It feels especially poignant for me, emerging from the fog of Covid after a grim couple of weeks. I feel, mostly, human again and am relishing the small, taken-for-granted pleasures of life. A whole night without coughing. Enjoying my morning coffee without it irritating my throat, leading to, you guessed it, more coughing. A short, gentle workout. So simple, yet blissful. Like my inner spring after two long weeks of winter.

Something I often work on with my clients is how to notice and appreciate the many joys of life, as well as the tough times. My recent post on gratitude offered some evidence-based ways to do that, but this one is about balance, allowing yourself to feel and experience whatever may be true for you, moment to moment. Good and bad, light and shade, winter and spring. It’s all part of the natural flow of your life.

The rainbow of emotions

One of my favourite metaphors for this experience of mindfulness, of aliveness, is the rainbow of emotions. So think of your emotions like a rainbow, ranging from dark colours on one side (sadness, hurt, fear, anger, grief, loneliness, shame) to light on the other (joy, love, excitement, pleasure, pride, satisfaction). In order to live a rich, meaningful human life we need to feel the full rainbow, from the dark stuff that no-one likes to the lighter shades we all prefer.

And what I notice in almost everyone I work with (as well as myself) is that the experience of trauma in childhood makes us overly focused on those dark shades. We may not like these painful emotions, but we spend a disproportionate amount of time feeling them, worrying and ruminating about painful experiences, laser-focused on everything that’s bad, problematic, hurtful or threatening in some way.

And this is normal, because trauma skews our thoughts, perceptions and emotional states. It dysregulates our nervous system, making us highly prone/sensitive to threat-focused emotions like anger and anxiety. It affects our memory systems, making it much easier to remember painful, destructive experiences and harder to recall – or feel – the many good things in our lives. And a central task of healing from trauma is to be more balanced – feeling, processing and healing from the bad stuff, of course, but also enjoying, thinking about and becoming more receptive to the good.

Enjoy your inner spring

To make this concrete, I have two tasks for you. First, please start a journal, if you don’t write one already. And in your journal I want you to note every sign of spring, wherever you are in the world (if you’re in the Southern hemisphere, this won’t work so well for you, so skip this one and go for the meditation practice, below). This could be species of birds returning to your garden or local green space. It might be dear little snowdrops peeking out of the frosty soil, crocuses, daffodils and other hardy souls braving the chilly mornings.

Notice the sun rising a little earlier each day, and setting a few minutes later. Feel the increasing warmth of sunlight on your skin, as the sun regains its life-giving power. One of the most joyful sights for those in the country is the arrival of lambs, bouncing and frolicking across the fields. If that’s you, drink in every delicious, life-affirming moment.

And as you notice and focus on every sign of spring, see if you can also notice a gradual uplift in your mood. Remember that, despite our increasingly high-tech, urban lives we are still animals, creatures of this Earth, responding to subtle changes in the seasons as much as the migrating birds or dormice emerging sleepily from their winter nests. Just as our mood naturally dips in winter, so it lifts in spring. Notice, maximise and enjoy that, as much as possible.

Task two is to try my Insight Timer practice – Taking in the Good: IFS Meditation. It’s all about gradually changing a negative mindset, choosing a positive self-belief, feeling and quality to embody and bring into your life.

I hope you enjoy it – sending you hopeful love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Find Your Own Path: Choosing the Right Approach to Healing

Image by Lili Popper

Have you ever been in therapy? I’m guessing, as you are currently reading this post on a blog all about mental health, that the answer is yes. If so, did it help? I certainly hope so, but sadly many people try different therapists, as well as different flavours of therapy, and find them either minimally helpful or not much help at all.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all therapies are unhelpful. It’s just that, in my experience, people often choose therapists without really understanding the exact type of therapy they offer, why it’s better/worse than other approaches, or whether it’s the best approach for them.

Let me give you a concrete example. If you have experienced trauma in your life, you will probably need professional help to recover from that. And so you may find yourself a nice, friendly, caring counsellor, who says what you need is to talk through those traumatic events in great detail. But for many people just talking about what they have been through, in an unstructured way, will not only be unhelpful, but actually re-traumatising.

You would need a trauma-informed therapy like EMDR, sensorimotor psychotherapy, somatic experiencing, trauma-informed stabilisation treatment, schema therapy or trauma-focused CBT. All of these approaches will help you process your traumatic memories in a safe, structured and focused way. Just talking about your experiences, in this case, is not the way to heal them.

Let me be clear – I’m not knocking counselling here. There are some wonderful counsellors out there and the work they do is invaluable. It’s especially helpful to get you through a tough time, like bereavement or divorce, when a kind, empathic, non-judgemental person is exactly what you need. But mainstream counselling is not designed to help with trauma, which is why it’s not the right choice if that’s the kind of help you need.

Finding your own path

The longer I do this work and the more therapy models I study, the more I believe that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to healing, whatever kind of psychological problem you are struggling with. I often think to myself, ‘What does this person need, at this moment, in this session?’ And I then draw from a wide range of theories, techniques and strategies in my mind to find just the right one for that person, in that moment.

You might also find that you need different therapies at different times in your life – where a highly focused, time-limited approach like CBT may be perfect for one phase of your life, a longer-term, less-structured modality like IFS may be right for another phase, or set of problems.

With that in mind, if you are considering therapy, here are some suggestions for finding your own path to healing, happiness and a flourishing life:

1. The relationship is everything. Whichever of the many wonderful therapies you choose, remember that the primary healing agent in any therapy is the relationship between you and your therapist. This is especially true in longer-term approaches, like schema therapy or psychodynamic therapy. But even in short-term models like CBT, feeling safe in the room (or online) with someone, that they get you, care about you, are warm and nurturing, is crucial. I often tell people to shop around – if you have an assessment with someone and it doesn’t feel right, trust your gut and find another person.

2. Trauma-informed therapies for trauma-processing work. As I mentioned earlier, it’s so important to find a trauma-informed therapy/therapist if you have experienced trauma in your life. The bigger and more impactful the trauma, the more important this is. So ask your prospective therapist about their model, experience and plans to help you heal. If their answers seem a little off, or unconvincing, keep shopping.

3. Therapy is just one piece of the pie. As well as integrating various therapy models in my work, I am also a holistic practitioner. I talk to my clients about many things, but top of the list is how much sleep they are getting and whether they exercise regularly. We are only beginning to understand the importance of sleep for mental and physical health (spoiler alert: it’s profoundly important).

   And getting regular exercise is right up there with good-quality therapy, in my opinion. We need to move our bodies, in ways we enjoy, as often as possible. I’m talking weight-training, HIIT, spin classes, walking, swimming, yoga, dancing, running, vigorous gardening, rock climbing… Every system in your brain and body is built to work optimally when you’re moving, your heart rate is up, blood is pumping, your breaths are deep and skin is warm.

   Extensive research shows that exercise is a powerful healing agent for stress, anxiety and depression – the three main types of psychological problem people struggle with. Meditation is also key, as are warm, loving relationships, a healthy (ideally Mediterranean) diet, moderate drinking, a healthy microbiome, mind-opening books and podcasts… Therapy is an important piece of the pie, but it’s certainly not the only one.

I hope you found that thought-provoking and helpful. I also hope you find the right person/approach for you, as that can be life-changing.

And if you are struggling right now, sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Being Grateful for the Little Things Will Transform Your Mood

Image by Rosie Kerr

I thought I was one of the lucky ones. Since the start of the pandemic, I had never had Covid – not once. My wife and I had a certain smug glow, telling people, ‘Well we have never had it. Aren’t we lucky!’ And then, finally, those ingenious little microbes found a way in. We both got it, my wife a couple of days before me. And it hit us hard – last week was a write-off.

But this is not a post about Covid, or sickness. It’s about what comes next. Because as we emerge from a week of feverish coughing and spluttering, it’s like waking up after a long, dark night. And realising there was all this beauty, this wonder, right outside the whole time, we just couldn’t see it.

This skewed view of things is fundamental to being human. The Buddha taught that we walk around in a dream, seeing things not as they are, but as we imagine them to be. We think we are defective, not good enough, less than others, but none of this is true. We may think that other people are mean, or selfish, or untrustworthy, but most people are kind, decent and good.

And we may believe that the most important things in life are material – money, fancy car, big house – but none of those matter overly much, once we have enough to be comfortable. What matters is love, warm relationships, a life filled with meaning and purpose. None of those things can be bought.

How gratitude lifts your mood

Yesterday, I finally left the house and went for a walk through our neighbourhood. It was a cold, grey, windy February day. In another mood, I might have looked around and thought, ‘God, this is a grim day. Winter is just miserable – I cannot wait for spring.’ And (no-brainer question of the day) what would have happened to my mood? Of course, it would have worsened. The wonderful Aaron Beck, founder of cognitive therapy, taught us this back in the 60s – that thoughts trigger emotions, positive or negative.

But because I was emerging, blinking, from my forced confinement, instead I looked around and thought, ‘My God, how wonderful to see the world again!’ What a joy it was just to walk, putting one foot in front of the other, taking in all the sights and sounds of my beloved neighbourhood. And then to walk to my favourite coffee shop, where my brain fog had lifted sufficiently to let me read a book. And to drink coffee! My heart sang.

Again, it’s kind of obvious that where we place our attention, as well as the meaning we make of our experience, has a profound effect on our mood. The Buddha knew that. Beck knew it. Plato knew it. He said, ‘Reality is created by the mind. We can change our reality by changing our mind’.

Positive psychologists like Martin Seligman know it – which is why he taught the mood-enhancing power of using techniques like the Gratitude Letter. This doesn’t mean that you should adopt some kind of Pollyanna-ish, good-vibes-only positivity, pretending everything is fine all the time. Because it isn’t – the Buddha also taught that to live a human life is to experience inevitable pain like sickness, ageing and the loss of loved ones. But he explained that we turn pain into suffering through our thoughts, our interpretation of the world.

Instead, we need to turn towards and accept painful things (like a week-long struggle with Covid, for example!). But we can still be grateful for so much. Life is full of light, beauty, wonder, awe and delight, as much as it is sadness, pain, hurt and disappointment. Light and shade. Day and night. Joy and pain.

So do check out Seligman’s gratitude exercises. You can also try my Hardwiring Happiness Talk & Meditation on Insight Timer, which is designed to help you notice, feel and maximise positive experiences throughout your day.

I hope you enjoy it – and sending grateful love from London ❤️

Dan

If You Struggle With Climate Anxiety, this Book Will Give You Hope

Image by Margot Richard

How do you feel about climate change? I’m guessing that, like most of us who take this problem seriously, you might find it worrying but try not to think about it too much. You do what you can – eat less meat, try not to fly, sign endless petitions – but try not to let it dominate your day-to-day life.

On a good day, this is how I deal with it too – doing what I can but trying not to get too freaked out. But I have to be honest, on bad days it really scares me. We are already seeing major impacts like melting glaciers, climate change-intensified hurricanes, forest fires, droughts and flooding. And unless humanity wakes up soon, we are in big trouble.

I think one of the less-reported aspects of climate change is its impact on our mental health, especially among the young. In a YouGov survey last year, one in three young people in Britain reported feeling scared (33%), sad (34%) or pessimistic (34%) about climate change, with 28% feeling ‘overwhelmed’. This breaks my heart for those young people, but it’s not surprising, because they will be most affected by climate change throughout the course of their lifetime. If you are a parent or grandparent, you may also be deeply worried about the kind of planet we will bequeath the next generation and the one after that – this is one reason why so many eco-activists are grandparents. They get it and feel compelled to act.

Reasons to be hopeful

So far, so gloomy. Which is why I am happy to tell you about the book I am currently reading, Not the End of the World: Why We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, by Hannah Ritchie. She is a data scientist at Oxford University and tells the story of feeling so freaked out as a student studying Earth Sciences, that she almost changed career. The onslaught of anxiety-provoking lectures on her course – and especially the stories about climate disasters she obsessively read in the media – were just overwhelming.

But this is a profoundly hopeful and optimistic book, because Ritchie argues that when you look at the actual data and key trends in energy use, pollution reduction, and so on, the real story is very different from the one we see in the media.

Let me be clear: Ritchie is no climate denier. She is a scientist who understands and accepts the prevailing scientific view – that climate change is real, it’s happening now, is man-made and unless we act fast to limit rising temperatures, humanity and all life on Earth is in big trouble. It’s just that she makes a compelling case that we have already made huge strides, at unprecedented speed, for example in decarbonising our energy production. In many industrialised countries we have virtually phased out the most polluting/carbon-emitting coal-fired power stations and rapidly developed green energies like solar, wind, hydroelectric and (somewhat controversially) nuclear.

Clean energy is now cheaper than its fossil-fuel alternatives and this will accelerate the more we adopt it at scale. This change is inevitable – as is the switch to electric cars/buses/trucks. As the cost of these green energies and modes of transport plummets, there is literally no reason not to make the switch, despite the increasingly devious and desperate tactics of the fossil-fuel industry. Sorry folks, this change is inevitable, whether you want it to be or not.

We have solved global problems before

Another argument I found really powerful and persuasive is that the global community has overcome two major environmental challenges before: acid rain in the 1980s and the ozone hole in the 1990s. In both cases, these were serious problems that required the global community to work together, despite resistance from the polluting industries that were causing the problems. And what led to the changes? Intense pressure from the public.

This led politicians to act, global treaties to be signed, industry to grudgingly change its polluting behaviour and, in both cases, drastic reductions in the harm to our environment. Now, climate change is a much bigger and more complex problem, but Ritchie argues – and I strongly believe – that if we all put enough pressure on our politicians, as well as using our consumer power to boycott the most climate-wrecking corporations/energy sources, we can solve this problem.

So if you or someone you love is struggling with climate anxiety, I strongly recommend you buy this book. It’s also packed with suggestions about how we, as individuals and communities, can make changes in the way we eat, shop and travel that can make a big difference. I am feeling hopeful about this problem for the first time in years, so I hope it will help you feel the same way too.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

What Are Your 10,000 Joys and 10,000 Sorrows?

Image by Madison Oren

There is an oft-quoted Taoist saying that every human life contains 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. Meaning, it’s human to suffer, to struggle with painful emotions like sadness, loneliness or anxiety. But it’s also inherently human to experience positive feelings like joy, pleasure, happiness, love and pride. A rich, well-lived human life involves experiencing – and allowing ourselves to truly feel – all of our feelings, both pleasant and unpleasant.

As this is my last post of 2023, I am in a reflective mood, looking back over the past year and digesting everything that has happened, both good and bad. I also spend a lot (too much, according to my loved ones!) of time thinking about my 56 years of life on this planet, all the things I have experienced, that shaped me, that made me, me. And this reflective process can be a double-edged sword, as when I’m feeling a bit down, it can easily turn into a self-critical rumination, my Inner Critic reminding me about all the things I have said or done that I feel bad about in some way. Not helpful.

But on more balanced days, I can also remember moments of great joy. I had lunch with a dear friend recently and she asked me what skydiving was like (I tried skydiving back in my journalist days, when I would go on crazy adventures and then write about them). I did a tandem skydive and remember it with crystal clarity – the sheer terror of jumping out of a plane at 12,000 feet, plummeting towards Earth at lunatic speed and every cell in my body screaming, ‘We’re going to die!’

And then, my instructor pulled the rip cord and all that plummeting terror instantly stopped as we floated slowly towards the ground, silently circling above the stunning Oxfordshire landscape of verdant hills, fields and woodland. It was the closest I have ever come to flying and it was… blissful. I can still taste the sheer joy (and relief at the knowledge I was not actually going to die!), the visceral sense of freedom and in-your-bones wonder and beauty of that experience. Magical.

The practice: Focus on your joys

So here’s a little assignment for you over the Christmas break – try journalling about the 10,000 joys and sorrows of your life. If you’re like me, and most people who struggle with their mental health at times, it’s a good idea to just bullet-point the sorrows, without going into too much depth. And definitely don’t try and think of 10,000! Just do a timeline of the big, tricky stuff in your life, with a sentence or two for each.

That’s because every human brain has a built-in negativity bias, so we focus on anything that could be threatening – painful memories, worries about the future, problems in our life – in great detail, while only giving fleeting attention to the good stuff that happens all the time. It comes and goes, without sticking in your mind and brain.

Then spend a lot more time on your 10,000 joys, even if it’s hard to think of many. As with all of the practices I recommend, there is no right or wrong way of doing this, just have a go and see what happens. And remember that the more we focus on good stuff – happy memories, moments of triumph or achievement, kind words or gestures from friends and loved ones, the birth of a child or first kiss with a beloved – the more we correct that negativity bias. We start to focus more on good, pleasant or enjoyable experiences, moment to moment and day to day, which over time rewires our brain to think about and feel those things more deeply.

And if you would like help with this rewiring process and focusing more on the joys, try my Hardwiring Happiness: Talk & Meditation practice on Insight Timer. It’s based on a brilliantly simple practice by Rick Hanson, from his book Hardwiring Happiness: How to Reshape Your Brain and Your Life. I love this practice and use it all the time with my clients, who seem to love it too. Just click on the button below to try it now.

I hope that helps. And I hope you have a wonderful, restful, restorative break over the festive season. Thank you so much for your support, connection, comments and kindness throughout 2023, in response to my teaching, to my Insight Timer practices, through my various social-media channels and via email – I am so grateful and deeply appreciate every one of you.

I have some exciting plans for 2024, including my first-ever 7-day course for Insight Timer, so stay tuned to these posts for more details about that and other upcoming events in the year ahead.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Why Every Part of You Deserves Love and Understanding

Image by Tashi Nyima

Let me ask you a question: How do you feel about yourself, in general? I hope you mostly like and approve of yourself. But the opposite may be true – you may really dislike yourself and find it hard to treat yourself with anything approaching kindness. Sadly, this is especially likely to be true if you have a trauma history, because that often scrambles our sense of ourselves.

But even if you’re lucky enough to like yourself, most of the time, I bet there are parts of you that you’re not so keen on. Your inner Critic, for example. As I often say to my clients, nobody loves their Critic! That’s because this part of us often treats us harshly, or is highly demanding, pushing us way too hard with a long lists of shoulds (‘You should be doing better than this, what’s wrong with you?’ or ‘You should be thinner/smarter/richer/more popular/harder-working…’).

We may also feel negatively towards parts that make us do stuff we find shameful, embarrassing or destructive in our lives. The part that makes us drink too much. The parts that tell us to gamble, smoke weed, work obsessively, pick the same kind of unsuitable person over and over. Nobody loves these guys.

No bad parts

But as I have written before in these posts, we need to understand that there are no bad parts (such an important idea that Dr Richard Schwartz, founder of Internal Family Systems therapy, used it as the title of one of his books). Even what are called ‘extreme’ parts in IFS, like the ones listed above, genuinely mean well. It can be hard to see that sometimes, but every part of you is either holding some kind of pain or trying to protect you from it. And the weed-smoking one, or the gambling one, are just trying to help you numb, soothe or avoid painful emotions.

It’s why people get home from an uber-stressful day and say, ‘God I need a glass of wine!’ Or why people rush out from high-pressure meetings to smoke a hasty cigarette. In both cases that’s a soother-type part, helping the person deal with painful/stressful feelings. Now this doesn’t mean that we should drink like fishes or smoke 40 a day! Of course not. We may need to help these parts change, or set limits on them, but it’s imperative that we do that collaboratively, with compassion, or it just doesn’t work.

That’s why people get sober and relapse, over and over. Or why many smokers quit again and again and again, but always end up back on the baccy. If you want to make deep, long-lasting changes in your life, you have to work with these parts, not against them. You need to understand why they are making you drink/smoke/work/gamble. There is always a reason – and that reason is usually helping you with some kind of pain.

Easier said than done

I’m well aware that it’s much easier for me to write some encouraging words in a blog post than for you to actually change. To change the way you behave, day in and day out. Or the way you interact with these parts of yourself you may dislike, or even despise. It is not easy – take it from someone who spends their whole working life trying to help people change.

But it is doable. And this is one reason I recorded a new guided meditation recently – Sending Loving-Kindness to Every Part of You: IFS Meditation. I blended the classic Buddhist metta (loving-kindness) practice with the IFS approach, to help you develop greater feelings of self-acceptance, self-kindness and self-compassion for every part of you, even the tricky parts.

I’m pleased with this one, so I very much hope it helps.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Why Your Brain and Body are Designed to Rest and Relax

Image by Aleksandar Cvetanovic

What are you doing, right now? Well, before you started reading this – what were you doing a few minutes ago? I’m guessing you were rushing around, either physically or mentally. And I’m confident about that guess because we’re all so damn busy these days, aren’t we? This is partly down to the advances in technology that enable me to write this on my computer, then send it whizzing around the world to all of you – which is wonderful – but also mean we are available, 24/7, for calls, texts, WhatsApp messages, Zoom calls, emails and countless other forms of digital communication. Those of us living in industrialised countries are never really off, in our 21st-century, high-tech world.

This can become especially tricky for us when we are stressed and overloaded at work. Something I notice a lot with my clients is that when they get stressed, they stop taking breaks, work harder and longer hours, staying chained to their desks – and some kind of screen – for longer and longer each day.

In some ways, I totally get it – if you feel stressed and like your to-do list is a mile long, you go into overdrive, pushing yourself harder and harder to get all those items on your to-do list, done. But I also have to speak to these clients about the ways in which 24/7 working is not only bad for your health, it’s bad for your performance and productivity as well.

Stone-age brains in a high-tech world

To understand why, we need to think about evolution, which works in a slow, steady, incremental way. So many parts of your brain are really old, in evolutionary terms. The whole ‘subcortical’ layer of your brain is millions of years old (not your actual brain, obviously, but those parts haven’t changed much in all that time). And these older brain regions were developed for stone-age life – hunting mammoths and gathering roots, nuts and berries.

And in our pre-industrial, hunter-gatherer lives, we were either very much on (hunting, fighting, climbing tall trees for honey) or off (lazing around after a large mammoth burger, playing, dancing, sleeping). If you want to know what off looks like, check out that photo – unlike modern humans, cats have no problem switching off!

So your brain, nervous system, body, hormonal system, organs – all are adapted for these intense bursts of activity, followed by lots of rest. And what do most of us do, today? Sit hunched over a screen, with stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol coursing through our bloodstream, very much on in terms of stress and focus, but immobile/off physically. So a weird sort of grey area for your brain, which finds it all very sub-optimal and confusing.

This is why longer and longer hours don’t really work, for work, because your brain needs periods of downtime to process all the information you are cramming into it, sort data into different forms of memory storage (boring – delete; important but not crucial – file in long-term storage; absolutely vital – save in short-term memory for easy access and retrieval). The more hours you do, the poorer become your memory, concentration, cognitive function, creativity, collaboration, decision-making and a whole host of other skills and abilities most of us need to perform and produce at work.

Helping your body relax

I often write in these posts about the importance of exercise for your physical and mental health. I am evangelical about moving your body, because it was designed to move, which is why it feels so good. But it’s also vital to get enough rest, downtime and relaxation. If you’re a high-stress, high-octane, highly-caffeinated sort of person, you may not find that easy.

If so, as well as the higher-intensity exercise, try yoga, tai chi, meditation, gentle swimming, walking, gardening – slower, more meditative forms of movement. Getting enough good-quality sleep is, of course, crucial, so the experts recommend creating an eight-hour ‘sleep window’, in which you are in bed, ready to sleep (following all the usual sleep-hygiene advice about no electronic devices in the bedroom, keeping that room cool and dark, and so on) for eight hours a night. You may get eight hours, you may not, but you are creating the optimal conditions for that to happen.

You may also find my Body Scan Meditation helpful – this is designed to help you completely relax, either to wind down from a stressful day or drift off to sleep. Just click the button below to listen on Insight Timer.

I very much hope that helps – sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

A More Compassionate Way to Think About Addiction

Image by Benjamin DeYoung

Do you struggle with addiction or compulsive behaviour? Many of us do, whether that’s drinking a bit too much wine, too often, eating more chocolate than we would like, or impulsively buying stuff we don’t really need. Our use of substances and activities can range from mild and fairly benign, like a bit too much chocolate, to severe and potentially dangerous, like using heroin.

Whether you are at the mild or severe end of this spectrum, addiction is probably something you have heard a lot about, either through your own research, from a health professional or in the media. And much of the information we get about addiction can, in my opinion, be both unhelpful and stigmatising. It can also be a bit old-fashioned, based on 20th-century ideas about the mind and brain that don’t stand up well to the latest research/insights from neuroscience and psychology.

But there is another, newer way to think about addiction. This approach is kind, compassionate and understanding of the reasons why we might misuse substances or activities, whether it’s smoking, over-eating, gambling, taking recreational drugs, drinking heavily or compulsively shopping. I have found this approach a game-changer in terms of helping my clients and understanding my own behaviour, especially when I was younger and, let’s say, not as sober and sensible as I am now!

Addiction = pain-relief

In order to understand why we become addicted to things, you first need to understand that our mind is made up of many subpersonalities or parts, with different functions for us, internally. I won’t go into detail about that here, as I have written about it extensively elsewhere, but my favourite parts-based model is internal family systems (IFS). In IFS, there are two main types of parts. You have young ones who hold painful memories, thoughts and feelings from that time in your life (so a four-year-old part, an eight-year-old part, and so on). And protectors, whose job it is to make sure those young parts never get hurt again.

These protectors are then divided into managers, who are hard-working, proactive and strategic – your Worrier is a typical manager, trying to anticipate bad things and help you avoid them. And firefighters, who are the opposite – they are reactive and want to get rid of the pain as quickly as possible, with no thought given to the consequences.

In IFS, addiction – or more accurately, addictive processes – is primarily about the firefighters. So a young part of you is in some kind of pain, feeling overwhelming emotions like stress, anxiety, loneliness, shame or anger. And the firefighter wants to put out the fire of painful feelings, by any means necessary. So firefighters might make you smoke weed, drink whiskey, use pornography, zone out with games on your phone, help you detach/dissociate from your feelings, or use a virtually limitless range of strategies to numb, distract or soothe the anguished young part.

And it works, right? That is why we have a glass of wine or two when we are stressed after a long day. Or go for a cigarette/vape break at work when we’re buckling under the weight of our workload. And it’s why people get addicted to heroin and other opioids, because they are so damn (and dangerously) effective at numbing physical and emotional pain.

Compassion for the firefighters

If you want to change your own addictive processes, understanding that any kind of addictive process is essentially the same, inside, and that they just vary in terms of severity, is step one. Then understanding that it’s all about getting rid of/distracting yourself from pain, is step two. And the admittedly tricky final step is having compassion for the parts of you that make you do things that can be harmful or downright dangerous.

As I often say to my clients, it’s helpful to separate the intention (soothing your pain) from the method or behaviour (drinking alcohol, etc). Because however damaging the method, the intention is always good. And when we speak to these firefighter parts, we get how desperate they to help – and the fact that they use the only tools they have available to them.

Learning to speak to them with compassion – rather than judgement and frustration, as we typically do – helps them soften and eventually change. And this change is long-term, because we have buy-in from every part of you, rather than the yo-yo dieting or swinging between sobriety and relapse we see so often with more traditional treatment approaches.

If you would like to find out more about this approach to healing your parts, try my Fire Drill: IFS Meditation. This will help you enter into a more compassionate and helpful dialogue with any part of you, even the more extreme and ‘difficult’ ones.

I hope it helps – sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Change is Hard, But You Can Learn to Embrace it

Image by Chris Lawton

How are you with change? Do you love it, hate it, or somewhere in between? I must be honest – I’m not the biggest fan. My friends and family often tease me about my strong liking for things that are comfortable and familiar. Change can be unsettling for me – or rather, parts of me.

And I’m going through a somewhat turbulent period of change at the moment. Having decided to move out of my office and take my therapy practice online, I am having to negotiate a lot of logistical and other changes around that. We are also using the opportunity to do some much-needed work on our flat, so the builders arrived today – cue huge amounts of dust, noise and general chaos for a while!

As if to rub salt into the wound, my beloved gym did a big refurb last week – not very well, in my opinion – and has become a much less inviting space for me. So I’m looking to change gym too – which may not sound like much, but that place has been my haven for years. It’s a key resource for self-care and stress relief, so it’s a bit of a wrench to find somewhere else.

Although parts of me are excited about all of this, other parts are freaking out! And that’s how it is for most of us, no? I am always intrigued by the fact that lists of top-10 stressors feature a number of apparently positive events, like moving house, retiring or getting married. Although in many ways we enjoy change, finding it exciting, stimulating or rejuvenating, it can also be disorientating, uncomfortable and downright stressful.

The Buddha’s great insight

One of the Buddha’s profound insights was that humans naturally resist change. We don’t like it, fight against it and want things to stay the same. And we cling on to the idea that things can be permanent, unchanging and settled, especially if that helps us feel comfortable – like my gym. But the Buddha taught us that this idea of permanence is an illusion. In fact, everything is impermanent – constantly changing, evolving, breaking down and being reconfigured.

Take my body, for example. It’s made up of atoms, up to half of which were formed when giant stars reached the end of their lifetime and exploded in unimaginably vast supernovae, millions of light years from Earth. When I die, those atoms will become parts of other life forms, like a tree or snail shell. This is the way of life, constantly shifting, changing, evolving – because everything is impermanent, as the Buddha so brilliantly understood, over 2,000 years before modern science proved his theory to be true.

So I may not love change, or find it entirely comfortable, but I cannot resist it. That is futile – and a bit silly, really, because the Buddha also taught that this is how we create much of our suffering. We want things to be different, all the time. We’re all getting older, but want to stay young. We don’t like our job, but think we will be happy with that job, or this much money, or that pretty/handsome new partner.

Instead of this constant yearning for something else, the key to happiness lies in accepting that all we really have is this moment of existence. Everything else is like trying to grab smoke with our fingers, because the future is unknowable.

Learning to embrace change

So your challenge is to help the (young, anxious) parts of you that struggle with change. They need understanding and validation, as well as teaching that change can be tough, but it’s a core part of life. Change will happen whether we want it to or not, so we need to accept and embrace it, as much as possible. If you would like some concrete help with this, try this practice I developed for Insight Timer, Calming Your Parts: IFS Meditation.

It gives you a step-by-step guide to understanding and gently speaking to any parts of you that might be anxious, stressed or worried about change (or anything else you might be struggling with). I hope you find it helpful – and that you, like me, can learn to embrace change, bit by bit.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Why You May Have Experienced Trauma, Even if You Had a ‘Normal’ Childhood

Image by Jessica Voong

‘He didn’t see his childhood as unusual – it was the only one he had ever had.’ I read this line in a coffee shop earlier and it has really stayed with me. It was in a brilliant book, Why Therapy Works: Using Our Minds to Change Our Brains, by Louis Cozolino. It’s a bit dense, so probably more for the mental-health professionals reading this (or anyone else who enjoys dense psychology books!). But that line is so good – and speaks to something I see with my clients over and over again.

Because it doesn’t matter how bad your childhood was, what kinds of terrible things were happening – to you it’s normal, because that is all you know. Especially when you are young, before you have attended school, your house and family is your whole world. You might go to the park, or to other kids’ houses to play, but basically everything important that ever happens to you happens inside your family.

So even if your dad is drinking heavily, then shouting aggressively at your mum every night, that’s normal. Or if you grow up in poverty, feeling scared and hungry every day, that’s normal. If your parents clearly favour your sister over you and you know, in your bones, that they love her more than you, well that’s normal too.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that any of those things are OK, or right, or even normal by the standards of many other families. But it is normal for you, because that was all you knew then – and may still be normal for you now, until we work to reframe that story and help you realise it was neither good nor normal to grow up in that environment.

What children need to flourish

One of the central ideas in schema therapy is that of core needs. These are the developmental needs that all children have, whatever the culture or country they grow up in. These five needs are:

1. Love and a secure atachment

2. Safety and protection

3. Being valued as a unique human being

4. The ability to be spontaneous, play and express your emotions

5. Having boundaries and being taught right from wrong

It’s easy to see that the kids who are unlucky enough to grow up in traumatic, neglectful or abusive families are not getting these fundamental needs met. They probably don’t feel loved, safe or valued. Their emotions might be seen as ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’. And – a problem I see in many families today – they might have what we see as too much of a good thing. Meaning they are spoilt, allowed to say and do whatever they like without consequences. This is also a kind of neglect, because it produces unhappy children who will struggle to fit into society when they are older.

So, however ‘normal’ your childhood was, if these basic needs were not being met, it will have caused you problems as you became an adult. And it may well have been traumatic, even if it seemed normal on the outside, because being shouted at, bullied, devalued or ignored can all be traumatic for kids.

If any of this resonates for you, I’m very sorry you had a tough time growing up. But you may find this talk helpful, which I recorded for Insight Timer to help people tell a different, more compassionate story about their lives: The Story of You: How to Build Self-Compassion.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Why I am Moving My Therapy Practice Online

Image by Andrew Neel

After eight-and-a-half happy years, I have decided to move out of my office in north London and see all of my clients online. This decision has been a few years in the making, as after the pandemic I realised I could easily run my practice exclusively via Zoom. And the vast majority of my sessions are now online anyway, so it should be a smooth transition.

Of course, I didn’t start working online during the pandemic – I have offered online sessions for well over a decade. But during the lockdowns I realised that the kind of therapy I offer – integrating schema therapy, internal family systems and other trauma-informed models – worked really well online. I also have clients all over the UK and have worked with people across the globe, so switching fully to online work opens the world up even more, for me and my clients/supervisees.

I am also increasingly focusing on other areas of work, such as supervision (which has always been online), writing my blog and an upcoming self-help book, and being a meditation teacher for Insight Timer and elsewhere.

If you would like to see me for therapy, our sessions will be via Zoom, which works very well for most people. My only request is that you have a fast and stable wifi connection, as the only drawback to meeting online is when people don’t have good wifi and the Zoom video/audio keeps breaking up. This can usually be solved by sitting as close to your router as possible, but please do bear this in mind before getting in touch.

If you would like to see me for online therapy or supervision, email me at dan@danroberts.com or use my contact form to get in touch.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Warm, Loving, Calm… What Self-Energy Feels Like

Image by Zain Bhatti

Internal Family Systems therapy is definitely having a moment. If you have tried to find an IFS therapist or supervisor recently, you will know exactly what I mean. And if you want to train in IFS, you will actually need to enter a lottery, as the courses are so popular right now! So what is IFS – and why is it surging from a little-known, slightly out-there model to the mainstream of psychotherapy?

IFS was founded by Dr Richard Schwartz (who prefers to be called Dick) in the 80s. Dick says that he learned the model from his clients, because they kept saying ‘A part of me thinks this, but another part thinks that…’ or ‘One part wants me to binge on cake, but another part really doesn’t want me to and is berating me about it.’

As a systemic family therapist, Dick was trained to think systemically, because rather than working with an individual client his sessions featured their whole family. And he began to see these families existing not just in his clients’ external worlds but inside their heads, too. This, for me, is probably the biggest revolution to have occurred in the therapy world for decades – the idea that we are not just one, unified self (Dan) but we have a brain that creates what we think of as ‘us’ in a system of parts (the many parts of Dan).

What is the Self in IFS?

I won’t go into detail about these parts here, as I have explained them in many other posts, webinars and talks for Insight Timer. Instead, I would like to focus on what Dick calls, ‘Who you really are, deep down’. Because all of these parts, as lovable and well-intentioned as they are, often develop to help us deal with trauma or other painful incidents in our lives. So they are stuck in somewhat rigid roles, either holding painful memories or helping us cope with them. And the way they do that can, unintentionally, be deeply unhelpful – like the bingeing or berating in the example above.

One of the many lovely ideas in the IFS model is that there is another you, at your core, which isn’t a part. That you is warm, loving, kind, compassionate, strong, calm and deeply healing, if we can access its nourishing energy. And this is your Self.

Again, if this sounds a bit out there, just think about it from a biological perspective. Every second of every day of your life, your body is healing, repairing and replenishing itself. This happens on a cellular level constantly, without you having any awareness of it. We know this is true, because you’re alive to read this post!

If this constant cycle of repair was not happening, you wouldn’t be here. For example, if you broke your leg playing football, the doctors would set the bone and put a cast on your leg, but all the healing would come from within. Your body would heal itself.

The same is true of your mind, brain and nervous system – where all the wounds from childhood, or other painful parts of your life, need to be healed – and in IFS, it’s the Self that does that healing, especially for the wounded parts who live inside you. As a critical thinker, whose initial training was in evidence-based therapy models like CBT, this explanation helps me understand what Self is and why it is real. It’s just the psychological version of the same forces that heal your broken leg.

What does Self-energy feel like?

If you have never experienced IFS, this may still seem a bit weird or hard to grasp, which is fine. Dick says that until you experience this stuff, it’s all just words. But one metaphor that is often used for Self is that of the Sun. So if you imagine you are on that plane in the photo, when you took off and before you flew through the clouds, you would know the Sun was above them, intellectually, but you wouldn’t be able to feel it.

And then that magical moment would happen where you burst through the clouds and there, in all its glory, was the beautiful, life-giving Sun. You could see it, feel its warmth through the plane window – even if you shut your eyes its bright, powerful light would shine through your eyelids. There would be no doubting or questioning it, because you were experiencing this delicious energy, not just imagining it.

Here are some other times you may have felt Self-energy, without being aware of it:

• When you looked at your partner’s face, thought of all the years you had spent together, all the times they had helped you when you were sick, or down, or struggling and your heart just filled with love

• Sitting with a friend as they tearfully told you a sad story from their life and you just listened, calmly and patiently, before giving them a big hug and they collapsed in your arms, sobbing until the anguish left their body and they felt soothed and restored

• Holding your newborn baby in your arms for the first time and feeling the kind of overwhelming, all-consuming love you didn’t know until that moment was even possible

• Being in such a deep flow state while doing something utterly engrossing that time slipped away, your mind went quiet and all that existed was you, the moment and the task

• Holding your ground with a rude co-worker when they crossed a line and feeling completely calm, strong and sturdy – unshakeable in your conviction

• Seeing a photo of an impoverished child in your newspaper and feeling such sadness, such compassion for that little person that you immediately made a big donation to a charity working in their part of the world, which helped you feel hopeful and determined to relieve suffering in your human family

I hope that gives you a little taste of Self-energy, especially if you are struggling right now. Remember that, whatever you have been through in your life, it’s never too much and never too late to heal. And the magic ingredient in that healing is, of course, Self-energy.

And here is a practice I recorded for Insight Timer – Accessing Healing Self-Energy – which you might enjoy.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan