In my exploration of health and wellness I have discovered many researchers and specialists who develop methods of overcoming specific health challenges or improving wellbeing. I have completed trainings in all of these. Many of these sites have free information.
Many are based in mindfulness; this does not mean you need to learn to meditate to manage them. Mindfulness is awareness of the present moment. Becoming more aware of your present moment, what you are noticing, and feeling can be a starting point for finding new ways of changing and living.
Pain reprocessing Therapy.
There has been research since the 1970’s showing that acute pain and chronic pain are different, this is now confirmed by modern brain imaging. Pain can be thought of as the brain and bodies alarm system, when this system keeps creating pain longer than you would expect the body to have healed then you may have chronic pain. Increasing research over the last 40 years has suggested ways that we could help people with chronic pain. There was a landmark trial published in a leading medical journal in 2022 called pain reprocessing therapy that for the first time showed that we could successfully treat chronic pain.
Habit Change
Many of us struggle to change habits, this is partly because habits are designed to be done without having to actively think about them. Most of the time this is really helpful, for example, looking before you cross the road even if you are distracted, or brushing your teeth. We don’t have to actively think about doing them, once the habit is set, we can focus on other things and just do them automatically.
This also makes them hard to change as they are programmed in a part of the brain that we normally don’t notice. When habits are unhelpful, for example, eating in ways that we want to change or smoking, we then struggle to change them. We tend to use willpower to deliberately override them. The difficulty is that, although we can do this sometimes, when we are tired or distracted the habit continues being automatic.
Dr Judson Brewer is an addiction psychiatrist and researcher at Brown University in the USA. He has led a team that has spent the last 15 years researching ways of reprograming our habits so rather than using willpower to overcome them, we can use the brains natural learning mechanism to change them.
His team of researchers have done studies on.
- Learning to reprogram eating habits and learning to only eat until you are full.
- Learning to change your habits to stop smoking
- Learning how anxiety and worry are a habit and how to learn new ways of being.
He has developed paid app’s that you can download to learn these techniques. Each of these app’s have been tested by clinical trials.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is now rarely out of the news, it can be helpful to learn to help change the way we live our lives, cope with mental health, treat chronic pain and improve wellbeing. It can be used as a way of being more aware of the present moment and also learning to meditate.
Although there are many mindfulness teachers who brought mindfulness to the west, probably the best know is John Kabat-Zinn. He developed the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. An 8-week course to learn mindfulness. Importantly he started the research into mindfulness in the 1970/80s which is one of the reasons that so many other people started to develop programs and research.
If you are interested to learn more about mindfulness his website has lots of information. He has also produced an app with a lot of free content.
There is actually a free online course to learn the MBSR which is excellent.
https://palousemindfulness.com/
Mindfulness can also be used for a variety of mental health conditions and also to help with addictions. Much of the research has been carried out by Oxford University who developed Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy. They have written books and developed an APP.
Mindfulness is now a corner stone of addition treatments. Mindfulness Based Relapse Prevention was developed by Professor Alan Marlett one of the pioneers of research into treatments for addiction.
The most popular APP to learn mindfulness and recommended by the NHS is Headspace.
Sleep and Insomnia
The best evidence to overcome insomnia is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia. This can be taught in person. However, you can also learn this through an app recommended by the NHS developed by Professor Colin Espie a sleep researcher at Oxford University. In many locations in the UK you can use this app free from the NHS.
Focusing
Focusing is much less known than other techniques. It was developed by Eugene Gendlin a colleague of Carl Rogers (the founder of modern counselling). It is a way of ‘listening inside’ to our own unique inner wisdom. In this way it is a natural human ability, although one that is often helpful to learn and explore with guidance. I became interested in it as a way of understanding why people struggle to change and how can we heal. However, its applications for healing and wellbeing are much wider than this.
