🤯#23: Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? by Dr Julie Smith - Book Summary & Key Takeaways

“When we experience low mood, it may have been influenced by several factors from our internal and external world, but when we understand what those influences are, we can use that knowledge to shift it in the direction we want it to go.” - page 10

“Sleep is bliss. Then my alarm offends my ears. It’s too loud and I hate that tune. It sends a shockwave through my body that I am not ready for. I press snooze and lie back down. My head is aching and I feel irritated. I press snooze again. If we don’t get up soon the kids will be late for school. I need to get ready for my meeting. I close my eyes and see the to-do list lying on my desk in the office. Dread. Irritation. Exhaustion. I don’t want to do today.

Is this low mood? Did it come from my brain? How did I wake up like this? Let’s trace back.

Last night I stayed up late working. By the time I got into bed I was too tired to go back downstairs to grab a glass of water. Then my baby woke up twice in the night. I haven’t slept enough and I’m dehydrated. The loud alarm woke me from a deep sleep, sending stress hormones shooting through my body as I woke up. My heart started pounding and that felt something like stress.

Each of these signals sends information to my brain. We are not OK. So my brain goes on a hunt for reasons why. It searches, it finds. So my physical discomfort, brought about by lack of sleep and dehydration, helped to create low mood.

Not all low mood is unidentified dehydration, but when dealing with mood it is essential to remember that it’s not all in your head. It’s also in your body state, your relationships, your past and present, your living conditions and lifestyle. It’s in everything you do and don’t do, in your diet and your thoughts, your movements and memories. How you feel is not simply a product of your brain.

Your brain is constantly working to make sense of what is going on. But it only has a certain number of clues to work from. It takes information from your body (e.g. heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, hormones). It takes information from each of your senses – what you can see, hear, touch, taste and smell. It takes information from your actions and thoughts. It pieces all these clues together with memories of when you have felt similar in the past and makes a suggestion, a best guess about what is happening and what you do about it. That guess can sometimes be felt as an emotion or a mood. The meaning we make of that emotion and how we respond to it, in turn, sends information back to the body and the mind about what to do next (Feldman Barrett, 2017). So when it comes to changing your mood, the ingredients that go in will determine what comes out.” - page 11-13

“As we build up the psychological toolkit with skills that help us manage through life, it’s easy to imagine that motivation is one of those tools. But motivation is not a skill.” - page 67

“Mastering motivation is building the capacity to do what matters most to you, even when a part of you does not feel like it.” - page 71

“When we’re dealing with that ‘can’t be bothered’ feeling there are two main prongs of attack:

1️⃣ “Push them away. 

Imagine you are at the beach. You walk into the sea up to your chest. The waves need to pass over you to get to the shore. If you try to hold the waves back and prevent them reaching the shore, you learn how powerful those waves are. They push you back and you quickly get engulfed and overwhelmed. But you don’t have to tumble and struggle against the waves. Those waves are coming no matter what. When you accept that, you can focus on keeping your head above the water as it passes. You still feel the effects. Might even get lifted off your feet for a moment. But you move with the water and brace yourself ready to land back on your feet.

2️⃣ Believe they are facts. 

Emotions are real and valid, but they are not facts. They are a guess. A perspective that we try on for size. An emotion is the brain’s attempt to make sense of the world so that you can meet your needs and survive. Given that what you feel is not a factual statement, neither are thoughts. That is partly why therapies like CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) can be so helpful to many people. It gives us practice at being able to step back from thoughts and feelings and see them for what they are – just one possible perspective.” - page 101-102

“The more new words you can build up to differentiate between feelings, the more options your brain has for making sense of various sensations and emotions.” - page 115

“Confidence cannot grow if we are never willing to be without it.

To build confidence, go where you have none. Repeat every day and watch your confidence develop.” - page 172

“Create an image in your mind of the perfect nurturer or coach (this could be a real or imagined person). Imagine you are sharing with them what you are currently facing, how you feel about it and what you want to work on.

Take some time to imagine in detail how that perfect nurturer or coach might respond, and write it down. This sets the tone for the words you can start using to respond to yourself as you work on building your own confidence and inevitably face vulnerability along the way.” - page 171

“Fear is a part of our survival response. It is supposed to be intensely uncomfortable, and the urges to escape and then avoid the feared situation are supposed to be strong.” - page 192

“You’re asked to speak in a meeting and your heart starts pounding. Your heart may be getting your body ready to be alert and perform. But if you interpret that as fear and make your excuses to leave the room, then avoid those meetings in the future, you never get to experience talking in meetings and having it go well.

The things that give us immediate relief from our fear tend to feed that fear in the long term. Every time we say no to something because of fear, we reconfirm our belief that it wasn’t safe or that we couldn’t handle it. Every time we cut something out of our lives because of fear, life shrinks a little. So our efforts to get rid of fear today mean that fear gets to take over our life choices in the long term.” - page 192-193

“When anxiety is triggered, you start breathing more quickly. This is your body’s way of getting in extra oxygen to fuel the survival response. You feel as though you cannot catch your breath. So you breathe faster with rapid, shallow breaths, then you have an excess of oxygen in your system. But if you can extend the outbreath so that it is longer or more vigorous than the inbreath, this helps to slow your heart rate down. When the pounding heart comes down, so does the anxiety response.

One of my favourites is square breathing.

Step 1. Focus your gaze on something square: a nearby window, door, picture frame or computer screen.

Step 2. Focus your eyes on the bottom left-hand corner and as you breathe in, count to 4 and trace your eyes up to the top corner.

Step 3. Hold your breath for 4 seconds as you trace your eyes across the top to the other corner.

Step 4. As you breathe out, trace your eyes down to the bottom corner, counting to 4 once again.

Step 5. Hold for 4 seconds as you move back to the bottom left corner to start again. So, you breathe in for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, out for 4 seconds and hold for 4 seconds.” - page 200-202

“The communication between brain and body goes both ways. This means that when your body is under stress for extended periods, the persistent messages about this make changes to your very adaptable brain that is trying to regulate your body. This is why stress is so very damaging to both physical and mental health. It affects all aspects and every part of you.

In the balancing act of managing stress and using it to our advantage while remaining healthy, we need to balance incoming demands with replenishment. The more demands on us, the more replenishment we need. The more stress pouring into the bucket, the more release valves we need to process it and make room for the ongoing demands.” - page 248-249

“Research shows that how we think about our stress affects how we perform under pressure. A shift from perceiving the stress response as a problem to viewing it as an asset that will help frees up those individuals to focus on meeting whatever demands they face.

This mindset shift can be the subtle difference between ‘Despite how stressful it is, try your best’ to ‘When you feel the signs of stress channel that energy and enhanced focus to do your best.” - page 265

“Dr Dave Alred is an elite performance coach who works with many of the world’s top athletes, helping them to perform at their highest level under extreme and very public pressure. When he puts together affirmations for his athletes he makes sure those affirmations steer away from sweeping absolutes and remain concrete and factual – something the player believes. They clearly identify the key to the necessary mindset and remind them that keeping to the process will lead to improvement.” - page 267

“Ongoing research into this suggests that choosing to shift from that tunnel vision back to a more panoramic view calms the mind. This does not mean moving your head to look all around you but just allowing your gaze to widen and take in more of your surroundings. The visual system is part of the autonomic nervous system and so dilating your gaze in this way accesses circuits in the brain associated with stress and levels of alertness.” - page 268

“In therapy when we start to shine a light on the way forward and think about what we want, it’s not uncommon to hear ‘I just want to be happy.’

But the idea of happiness has been hijacked over the years by an elusive fairytale of constant pleasure and satisfaction with life.

[..] We are given the impression that happiness is the norm and anything outside of that could be a mental health problem. We are also sold the idea that if we can achieve material wealth, happiness will arrive and stick around.” - page 277