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
14 practicesThe pull towards bread, pasta and biscuits when you are low is not simply greed. Carbohydrate makes it easier for the brain to get hold of the raw material it needs for serotonin, so it gives a real if short lived lift.
Calling it self medication instead of a failure of character changes what you do next. You stop trying to out-discipline the craving and start asking…
Allergies turn up more often alongside ADHD than chance would predict. Worth mentioning your allergy history at an assessment even when nobody asks, since the two seem to travel together.
The likeliest explanation is not that one causes the other. It is that some of the same underlying wiring makes both more likely in the same person.…
Some foods are formulated to be hard to stop eating. That is a design brief rather than a flaw in you, and it goes some way to explaining why one particular snack is the one you think about at eleven at night.
Knowing this moves the fight somewhere you can win it. Willpower at the moment of craving is a poor bet, and a decision made in the shop is a much…
Here is a question that costs nothing: has anyone in your family been told their vitamin D was low? It runs in families through genes, skin tone, where you live and how much time anyone spends outside.
The clinician telling this story found out only afterwards that his mother, father and brother had all been low. Nobody had mentioned it, because it…
Around seven in ten people who use herbal products never mention it to their doctor. Not out of secrecy, mostly because a tea or a gummy does not feel like it belongs on a list of medications.
The useful move is to answer a wider question than the one you were asked. When someone asks what medication you take, tell them what else you take…
Put a rubber band round your water bottle for each refill you want to get through today, and slide one off each time you finish it. Nothing to remember, nothing to buy, and you can see where you are at a glance.
Tracking anything in your head is hard when your head is already full, and harder still when concentration is one of the things that has taken a hit.…
If the word exercise makes you flinch, drop it. Say moving about, or getting out, and see whether a plan turns up.
For a lot of people that word carries school changing rooms and years of not keeping things up. Swap it and the list of things that count grows:…
Missing a day is not the end of the programme. You missed a day. Tomorrow you carry on.
The dangerous part is not the missed session, it is the story that follows it, the one where you have blown it so you may as well stop altogether.…
When you reach a goal, stop and let yourself register it before moving on to the next one. Otherwise you collect achievements and never feel any of them.
The pause can be tiny. Say out loud what you did, tell someone, sit with it for a minute, thank God for it. Racing straight on to the next target…
When you need to correct one person, say it to the room. Everyone gets the instruction and nobody gets the sting.
Good instructors do this without thinking: they see one child dropping their guard and say that everybody needs to keep their hands up. The teaching…
Use a timer you can see rather than a warning you have to remember. A dial that shrinks, or a light that goes from green to red, does the work that five more minutes never quite does.
Time is not something everyone feels passing. Turning it into something you can look at moves the job from guessing to seeing, which is much easier.…
One minute of moving between tasks. Star jumps, a lap of the corridor, anything that gets the blood going before you sit down to the next thing.
Classrooms that do this report smoother changeovers and better recall of whatever was just taught. The same trick works at a desk: end one job, move…
A silent room is not restful for everybody. If every cough and creaking knee pulls at you, ask for music or bring headphones with something plain in them.
Too little going on can be as unsettling as too much. A low steady sound covers the sudden little noises that keep snagging your attention. Some…
When someone describes a day like that, do not answer with a lecture on living better. Say that this is hard, and that you find parts of it hard too.
They have heard the virtue speech many times already and it has never once helped. Admitting that you also struggle to exercise, or to keep up with…