Daydream for just FIVE minutes to ease ANXIETY
MIND TRICKS TO BEAT STRESS
LIFe throws tough experiences at us all: bereavement, divorce, redundancy and serious illness are the kind of challenging events that create huge stress.
This manifests in our bodies and our minds. stress makes us feel miserable and unwell: it stops us from sleeping soundly and affects concentration; our confidence gets knocked and we lose the motivation required to perform even simple daily tasks; and relationships with family and friends often become strained.
Think now about those symptoms of stress. I wonder, how many of them do you recognise in yourself right now?
At least one, I would imagine. And that’s not to say you’re currently going through one of the big life events I’ve just mentioned.
The pandemic has put us all under extraordinary pressure — and that’s even if you’ve been fortunate enough to be spared any direct trauma, such as a bereavement or losing your job, as the virus has spread.
stress feeds off fear, something we’ve lived with for almost a year now. I have woken many times in the middle of the night, fretting over the health and safety of those I love. I find myself feeling desperately upset by the suffering of others, and deeply concerned about the impact lockdown might have on the economy.
Family, friends and clients alike are telling me that they have had to learn to live life against a backdrop peppered with similar worries.
Living like this, with so much background stress to contend with, is bound to take its toll on our mental health. As my therapist friends will readily tell you, rarely is it one big traumatic event alone that precedes a mental breakdown.
It’s far more likely to be a series of smaller events, happening simultaneously or in close succession, that will wreak the most havoc. And that is something we’re collectively experiencing as one pandemic-related crisis seems to follow another.
I can’t magically take all of that away. But what I can do is share with you a method that will help you to turn off the fear and panic, allowing your body and mind to recover from it on a regular basis.
That is key when it comes to pro-actively protecting your mental health through long-lasting periods of stress. By making this a regular part of life now, when this crisis ends you will find it continues to be useful whenever stressful situations arise.
Now, and into the future, this is a relaxation technique you will be able to employ quickly, easily and as often as you need.
NATURAL CYCLES OF ACTIVITY AND REST
ONe of the simplest ways to build quality recovery time from stress into your daily life is to take advantage of a naturally occurring phenomenon known as the ‘ultradian rest phase’. Research has shown that the mind and body have their own pattern of rest or alertness, with one predominant cycle that occurs approximately every 90 minutes. This is when the body stops externally oriented behaviour and takes about 15 minutes to relax and replenish its energy. These are those moments in the day when you find your mind starting to wander and a sweet, soft feeling of relaxation begins to fill you. It is as though your body is ready to drift off into a wonderful, refreshing sleep. Unfortunately, many people instantly override this message from their body by choking down a double espresso and trying even harder to concentrate on what they’re doing. After a while, they establish a pattern of overriding their body’s natural rhythm and the natural feeling of relaxation comes less and less often.
Now, I’m going to show you how to take advantage of it when it does occur. From now on, here’s what I want you to do:
At least twice a day, when you find yourself daydreaming and a feeling of comfort starting in your body, go with it and allow yourself to relax deeply for no less than five and no more than 20 minutes.
As you begin to drift into your daydream, use the time to follow the exercise on the right. It is very simple but, like anything else, the more you practise the better you get.
It simply involves thinking about a particular area of your body and then telling yourself to relax in a soothing tone of voice.
Take the time to go through each part of your body slowly, giving yourself time to really feel the tension releasing from that part of you as you go.
Please read through this exercise first before you do it. And do not attempt to do this while driving or operating machinery. Only do it when you can safely relax completely.
SYSTEMATIC RELAXATION
Use your most comfortable, tired, drowsy voice, as if telling a bedtime story. simply say each of the following to yourself as you follow your own instructions: Now I relax my eyes Now I relax my jaw Now I relax my tongue Now I relax my shoulders Now I relax my arms Now I relax my hands Now I relax my chest Now I relax my stomach Now I relax my thighs Now I relax my calves
Now I relax my feet Now I relax my mind
Pause to notice your feelings and then, if you wish, repeat the exercise. stay with this feeling as long as you wish. You will be able to return to full waking consciousness, refreshed and alert, as soon as you are ready.
The more you practise this technique, the more effective it becomes. It may sound like a little thing, hardly worth doing, but taking a couple of fiveminute breaks every day to allow your mind some recovery time could be the most valuable thing that you ever learn to do.
Why? Because I firmly believe that when it comes to life’s emotional woes — sleeplessness, crises of confidence, relationship troubles, anxiety and depression — all roads lead back to stress and the terrible toll it takes on our mental health.
Tomorrow, we will look again at confidence, and I will share with you another simple five-minute daily programme I firmly believe has the power to change your life for the better.
‘I have given up my last chance of having my own biological baby. Now I torture myself thinking about the day I will see my ex-fiance and his children by someone else’
online open evening at the clinic a friend recommended; a Zoom consultation with a doctor; some in-person scans and blood tests.
A fortnight of injecting myself with fertility drugs was made more lonely by doing so during a pandemic — I had to isolate ahead of the operation to collect my eggs, so as to be extra careful not to catch Covid (a positive result for my pre-op test would have seen the procedure cancelled); and I have spent around £6,000.
But I was lucky to get a good result in terms of the number of eggs collected, though I know there are no guarantees as to conceiving if or when I use them.
Immediately afterwards, I felt calmer about my situation; hopeful, even. And then the case numbers started to rise again, and it became clearer that we were nowhere near the end of lockdowns and restrictions.
My sister (married and a mother) has suggested I go it alone now — have a baby by using a sperm donor and worry about meeting a partner later. But ,while I’ve friends who have done that prior to the pandemic, that’s not a step I am ready to take yet.
I know that I am not alone: thousands of women feel caught in the same trap (and have reached the same decision as me — fertility clinics reported that inquiries jumped by 50 per cent at some centres).
Meanwhile, I am cheered by two women I know who have, against the odds, fallen in love this year. Both are already talking of starting a family — and one’s begun trying. There’s a seize the day feeling in the air — why waste time when who knows what the future could bring?
But for now, I wait — and cross my fingers that we get out of this soon.
LOCKED DOWN AT A FERTILITY CLINIC IN CRETE LAURA BARTON, 43, lives in Kent. She says:
LAsT spring was a strange time. After years of miscarriages, I’d broken up with my long-term partner of four years the previous summer. Now I decided to pursue solo IVF using a sperm donor.
This alone seemed a monumental decision, but my local NHs trust would not treat single women. (Each health authority has it’s own rules — some won’t treat women above a certain age, which can be 40 or 42; and some won’t treat single women at all.)
In the end, I chose to go to a fertility clinic abroad.
so, on March 14, I flew out of London just as the world went into Covid freefall and, for the first six weeks of the pandemic, I found myself marooned in Crete.
There, I followed the news with horror, while anxiously awaiting the arrival of donor sperm from a cryobank in Denmark, and wondered how on earth I would get home.
The treatment was unsuccessful. I was devastated. When I returned in late April, it was with the intention of starting another round of IVF.
It is rare for any woman to undertake IVF just once; with each round of fertility treatment you learn more about your body, the
treatment itself, and
Fertility test: Laura Barton the fertility industry in general. But back in the UK, fertility clinics were shuttered along with shops and pubs and restaurants.
When they did reopen, there was a backlog of patients, and strict controls to avoid the spread of the virus meant that many clinics had been forced to reduce the number of women they could treat at one time. My options seemed few and, for a week or two, I floundered.
A friend put me in touch with a consultant in London who was kind and honest in a way that struck me as deeply refreshing in the realm of fertility.
He talked to me about treatment options, but also showed a dedication to investigating the reason for my recurrent miscarriages. I joined his waiting list, began selecting a new sperm donor from another cryobank, and counted the days.
It is an unassailable fact that time dwindles our egg reserves — at birth we have some two million eggs; by the age of 37, 25,000, by our early 40s, that reserve has further diminished, as has the quality of our eggs.
But it’s important to note that each woman is different. I was profoundly lucky to have heartening fertility test results.
And, while I know better than anyone the possibility of miscarriage, the chances of me conceiving remain high. still, in November, as I shuffled up the waiting list, I turned 43.
The months since March have felt like an increasingly desperate holding-pattern. I do not see anyone, do not have a bubble, for fear that catching Covid might jeopardise my treatment. I have taken more prenatal vitamins each day than seen friends this year.
Meanwhile, underlying everything is a deep, unresting grief — for the babies I have lost, for the failed IVF, for the inescapable sense of a world in mourning.
It is hard not to feel that fertility treatment is an indulgence at such a time. As lockdown has returned, the clinics are closing once again; doctors, nurses, anaesthetists, embryologists are being redirected urgently to Covid wards; life-saving cancer surgery is being delayed; thousands are dying.
For those of us awaiting IVF, hope now seems a fine and fragile thing. But still a hope remains.
I LEFT THE MAN I DREAMT OF HAVING A FAMILY WITH LUCY HOLDEN, 30, lives in Bath. She says:
IN APRIL, two weeks into our first lockdown, I left my future, as I’d seen it, in London.
My ex-boyfriend and I, despite only being together since the previous summer, had decided we wanted to get married, have kids and had chosen their names.
Margot, we hoped, would come first, then maybe Olive, then perhaps a boy. We’d bring them up by the sea, we agreed.
When I left him it was therefore a complete picture of our dreamtof future that I had to wrench myself away from, too. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I had no choice.
The person I’d wanted to have children with was now someone I didn’t want to be anywhere near: jealousy had turned love to hate near Christmas and a spiral of despair stayed for months.
The sense of loss that hung over me in the silence that followed my move back to my parents’ house in Bath was absolute.
Loneliness swelled in pandemic isolation. Looking for love was on-and-off illegal, but I was too heartbroken to start.
By the end of the summer, two friends and a cousin had announced lockdown pregnancies and, while I felt only excitement for them, it was hard not to feel — as we all do when our contemporaries progress to the next milestone of life — that I was being left behind.
I will soon be 31, so my fertility is not yet a huge concern, but I mourned what might have been and what has seemed increasingly impossible.
By the time lockdown eased last summer, I’d started to see dating as an answer to the void I felt in my life. But soon dating only exacerbated the depression that meeting someone great on an app was less than likely.
None of the people I met had half the charm, intelligence or wit of my ex-boyfriend. While they probably had none of the negative qualities, either, I didn’t want to settle any more.
Maybe it was the mood of the pandemic, but I saw dates with strangers as so vacuous compared to time on Zoom with my real friends and family. Plus meeting anyone in person raised the risks for my parents, both aged around 70. It was better for all of us if I just didn’t try.
To start with, bleak doesn’t cover how I felt about the freedom to try to meet someone being taken away from me.
One night I dreamt I was stamping on two dozen egg boxes. ‘You know what that means, don’t you?’ my therapist asked.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Fertility. And that I think I’ll never meet someone in time to have kids, and live at home for ever, and have to have children alone, if I ever do.’
Yet my attitude changed, with time. Before the end of the year, I found I’d come to like being alone, seeing that being single wasn’t ‘less’ and realising again that the wrong relationships only take away from you, rather than add.
The rose-tinted glasses I’d glued to my face as my relationship worsened had smashed. I felt strong for leaving. I knew I’d rather have Margot alone than with him.
I have a fourth friend expecting around March and she’s different in that she’s in her early 40s. she just hadn’t met the right man — then finally she did, at 40, amid the increasing frustration that more time was passing and that she might never meet anyone.
suddenly, it all seemed worth waiting for, and she made me wonder whether many of us imagine we’ll have children with a man we meet in our youth, but end up having them later with another partner who’s actually a wiser choice. * Name has been changed
‘Underlying everything is a deep unresting grief — for the babies I have lost, for the failed IVF. But hope remains’