Areas › Your body
Your body
You cannot think your way out of a body that is braced. This area starts there: the breath, the ground under you, moving, eating, resting, and the small physical things that change how the rest of the day lands.
What works for this
Working from the body first
A body that has not slept, eaten or moved has less left over for holding itself steady. Changing the state you are in is often faster than changing the thoughts you are having, and it is more reliable when you are already worn out.
One move, today
A long slow out breath, longer than the in breath, three times. The out breath is the part that does the work.
What matches
7 practicesArrange to meet someone. A neighbour at the gate at eight, a friend expecting you, even an app counting a streak. Turning up for someone else is easier than turning up for yourself.
Benefits that arrive in six months are weak motivators. Something that pays out today works better: a person waiting, a number that goes up, a…
If a child is climbing the walls, green space helps most, a walk down a busy street helps a bit, and staying in the room helps least. Any of the three beats none.
The research on this puts them in that order rather than saying only a forest will do. A park, a scruffy playing field, the bit of grass behind the…
Bolt the movement onto something you would want to do anyway. A game with a friend, a walk to somewhere with good coffee at the end, a route past the river.
People keep up a weekly game with a mate for forty years and never once call it exercise. The friendship is what they turn up for and the moving…
Clumsy is not a description you can work with. Balance, core strength, shifting your weight, big movements, small ones, catching a ball, keeping a beat: those you can look at one at a time.
Break it down and you usually find a child is fine in four of those and struggling in two. That turns a vague sense that they are awkward into…
Not every family can get occupational therapy. Almost anyone can get outside with a skipping rope, a long rope turned by two people, or a board.
Skipping and boarding ask for much of what a therapist would be working on anyway: both sides of the body keeping time with each other, judging the…
Children need to move before school, during it and after it. Keeping a child in at break until the work is finished takes the movement away from the very child whose finishing depended on it.
Break time is not the whole of it either. A few minutes on their feet between lessons, a walk before the day starts, something physical when they…
Talk first, move second. Ending a hard conversation with something physical gives the body a route back down.
This works for a therapy group and it works for an evening at home. Say the difficult thing, then walk, stretch, wash up, anything that puts you back…