Life Coaching in Edinburgh - Enlighten Holistic Health

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• Benefits of Coaching

Self-talk and Stress

One of the major areas that life coaching helps you to become even more aware of is your self talk. Self–talk refers to the dialogue that goes on inside your head when faced with conflict or life challenges or even simple day-to-day concerns. This aspect of yourself has a running commentary about everything you do. It never lets anything go by with out some comment, remark or evaluation.  Self-talk can be positive or negative.  More often than not, it is negative, causing unnecessary stress and making life a misery.

Becoming aware of this process is the first step in taking charge of this self-sabotaging part of yourself. The automatic reactions you have to this constant barrage of negative thoughts, judgments and evaluations can keep you feeling stressed and less able to meet life’s challenges.  It can also compromise your immune system, leading to a host of minor symptoms and ultimately, if left unchecked, to serious health problems of one sort or another.

You’ll recognize these thoughts because you have heard them all your life; “I'm not smart enough, something is wrong, I can't do it, I never finish anything, this is too hard, change takes too long, etc”. You may initially have formed these negative ideas and beliefs about yourself from things you heard from a parent, teacher, family member or someone else who was in authority over you, or they may have been decisions that you made in reaction to some distressing event. Now, as an adult, you have incorporated them into your own personality. In effect you don't need those people in authority telling you what to do any more, they are living inside your own head!

These thoughts surface when you are faced with doing something that is counter to what your mind thinks you can do, or has a negative opinion about. Think back over some times when your own ideas or thoughts about what you could or could not accomplish got in the way of something you really wanted.

This internal monologue is present in everyone. The bad news is that there is no getting rid of it. The good news is that you can learn how to manage your mind so that it is your servant and you are the master, not the other way around.

What is needed first is awareness. You must become aware of the inner dialogue. Your coach will ask you to begin to notice when it shows up, what it is telling you. You will have to be vigilant to begin with. You think that voice is you. It isn't. The fact that you can discuss it means that it is something that you do, not who you are. Your coach will encourage you to begin to pay attention to what you think. Observe it without buying into what your mind is telling you. See if you can start to recognize the repetitive nature of the thoughts.

As your awareness develops, you begin to realise that you don't have to react to the thoughts your mind presents to you. It is a habit you can break with that newly acquired awareness. The moment you notice that it is just a thought and not a command you have a choice. You are in touch with your "observing self". That gap or moment of awareness allows you to notice the thought and either choose to do what you have always done, or choose to do something different.

Start with observing how often you listen to “your mind”. Remember, change takes time, effort and persistent practice.

Stress Management

Stress is Unavoidable.  No one can live a completely stress-free life. Nor would that be desirable. "Good" stress or to put it another way, "optimum" stress, is necessary for healthy growth and development. On the other hand, ongoing, relentless, frustrating, unresolved events and, even more importantly, your responses to them, wreak havoc on your physical and emotional well-being. Since you do not have absolute control over your universe, the only thing you can truly master is how you respond to it. 

On a physiological level, your reaction to stressful events, whether you judge them to be positive or negative, is basically the same. This is an aspect of the “fight or flight” response - your body preparing you for action. Your body gears up to be able to do what is required to ensure your survival. This "gearing up" is not a cause for alarm if it occurs on a temporary and infrequent basis. But, if your response keeps you in a hyper-aroused state for very long, body systems start to show wear and tear and can result in symptoms such as chronic headaches, anxiety, insomnia, depression, irritable bowel syndrome, Raynaud's Syndrome, hypertension, panic attacks, adrenal fatigue, exhaustion and a whole host of other chronic, resistant ailments.

The psychological factors related to stress can also take a toll on your emotional health. Consider, for example, the stress of getting fired from your job. Not only do you experience a physiological response to such a highly stressful event, but you may further incapacitate yourself with such self-talk as "I am worthless", “I am a failure”, "I can't do anything right", “I’ll never get such a good job again”, or "What will my friends/family think of me?" The good news is that you can learn ways of managing your responses to challenging events to minimize their negative impact.

Two Approaches to Successfully Managing Stress.  a) Learn how to recognize your body's stress response and learn how to relax.  b) Take stock of your environment and your lifestyle and make changes to counteract the ongoing stress.  Which do you think is the hardest to do?  

Being able to take your body to a state of deep relaxation is the key to success. If done consistently, your body can recuperate from chronic stress. Since you are in control of your behaviour, this is usually the easiest place to start.

The problem with relaxation is that most people think they already know what it is. Unfortunately, stressed individuals have often lost the ability to recognise what a really relaxed state feels like in their body. When people under chronic stress think of relaxation, they often think of recreation, or the release created by exercise, alcohol, cigarettes or recreational drugs, rather than true physiological relaxation.

Begin with Awareness Training.  To effectively manage stress you must pay attention to the signals your body is giving you that tell you whether you are stressed or relaxed. This may sound simple, but in many people, those signals have been ignored for so long that they either a) don't know what to look for and/or b) would not even recognize the signs if they did.

Paying attention to your body’s signals is a major step in reducing stress. In our fast-paced society, people often override symptoms of stress in order to be more productive.  Over time, this causes an increase in stress levels, eventually leading to symptoms that can no longer be ignored as the “fight or flight” response is triggered: 

• Increased heart rate

• Fast, shallow breathing/hyperventilating

• Chest pains, tightness in the chest, and/or a feeling of suffocation/shortness of breath

• Dry mouth

• Feeling increasingly hot/sweating palms

• Tight, tensed muscles

• Feeling of panic/shock/extreme anxiety

• Overwhelming frustration/anger

• General numbness and/or feeling of unreality and detachment

• Tingling hands/”pins and needles”

• Dizziness/light-headedness/feeling faint

• Difficulty in concentrating/shortened attention span

• Indigestion/nausea/vomiting/diarrhoea

• Difficulty in sleeping

To reduce the damaging effects on the body of ongoing stressors, the body needs to be allowed to relax and recharge after getting geared up for a challenge.  

Practice Relaxation Techniques.  One of the best relaxation exercises is the practice of abdominal breathing. Yoga, meditation, T'ai Chi and other meditative disciplines often use abdominal respiration to promote relaxation. When you practice relaxation consistently, over time the body develops a baseline level of relaxation that provides a 'buffer' against the negative effects of stress. In other words, because you take your body to a relaxed state often, the cumulative effects of this relaxation training provide you with protection from the daily effects of stress. Regular relaxation training is useful as part of a programme of disease prevention and maintenance of a happy, healthy lifestyle.

Daily relaxation practice is different from the physical exercise you do to stay in shape. It helps you stay 'in shape' in another way, through helping you maintain optimum functioning. In order to obtain the greatest benefits from relaxation, you must be present and attuned to how your body feels. This is quite different from going to the gym and reading a book or listening to music while exercising on the cross trainer, treadmill or stationary bicycle, where your body is being worked, but your attention is somewhere else.

If you develop some skill in reducing the physical symptoms of stress and still have a nervous system that usually operates in the 'red zone', you will need to investigate how your current coping strategies and your activities contribute to the level of tension or anxiety in your body. If you feel pushed, exhausted, too busy, irritable and at your wits end much of the time, then you are probably in the 'red zone' too often. And if there are ongoing, unresolved issues in your relationships at home and at work that you feel you are just 'putting up with' but never seem to change, you are also flirting with the 'red zone'.

Another way to look at this is to use the analogy of a car. You can view the sympathetic (heightened) nervous system activity as an accelerator pedal and the parasympathetic (relaxation) nervous system activity as a brake pedal. In order to remain healthy, you have to apply the brake pedal regularly in order to bring the 'rpms' of your body engine down to normal. This is what regular breathing/relaxation practice helps you to do. By regularly resetting the nervous system back down to normal, you stay out of the red zone.

No Pain, No Gain.  Change is probably the hardest thing for human beings to do. This is especially true with conscious change, like a new exercise or diet programme, or changing how you react to things. We like familiarity; it gives us a feeling of comfort and certainty. We have the same routines in the morning, relate to our spouse or boss in the same way. And we often stay the same even when faced with the fact that our lives not working the way we would like them to. While useful alternatives like reading a book on relationships, taking a class or seeing a counsellor are available, we say “no”, preferring the familiar simply because change is uncomfortable. Sustained effort is required in order to achieve results, and this is where the support of a coach can make all the difference.