Author: Amanda Vaughan

Maintaining Progress

by Amanda Vaughan, posted in Change, Wellness topic

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January, the time of resolutions.   Just checking out Facebook or talking to friends or coworkers you are bound to hear about new projects people are attempting.  Eating better, exercising, losing weight are big ones.  Also many people this year are de-cluttering and working on simplifying their life.  Some are doing away with bad habits like smoking or other dependencies.

Most of these resolutions are very admirable and when people first decide on them you can hear the optimism and hope in their voice.  But come March or April, how many are still focused on these resolutions.  How many in August?  December?  It’s difficult maintaining change and progress, especially if change is incremental.  So how does one maintain focus and progress?

I strongly believe that setting solid goals that are specific, measurable, realistic and with a deadline is the best place to start.  In counseling we use the acronym “SMART” to guide us in making goals with clients.  Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound.  So if the goal was to lose weight then you would want to set a deadline to lose a certain amount of pounds.  You would need to do some research to find out what is a healthy amount to lose a week (usually no more than 2 lbs is advised) and make sure your amount and deadline are realistic and attainable.  Then you would set small weekly goals and research the best options to lose weight to choose your strategy.

The next step would be incorporating supports.   Would you benefit from joining weight watchers or finding a friend to exercise with?  Do you need to track your diet in a journal or use an app like Myfitness pal..?

The third step is then identifying obstacles like donuts at work or eating leftovers from kids’ plates.  Then you develop strategies for each of these obstacles; like having alternative snacks handy at work or having kids clean up their meal themselves so you are not tempting to grab a bite..

Fourth is evaluation and noting the progress and setting fourth another goal.  This is where most people throw in the towel actually.  The idea of seeing failure is sometimes enough to call it quits.  I like to think of failure as an opportunity to really understand what didn’t work.  What obstacle do I need to prepare more for and what are my options for this obstacle?  This is where breakthroughs are made but so many times we are too fearful of feeling like a failure or we are burned out on the task at hand that we really don’t learn from it or keep the progress we really did make.

Maintaining Peace Through the Holidays

by Amanda Vaughan, posted in Breathwork, Mindfulness, Wellness topic

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I’ve scheduled a time out in the morning for to do a little breath-work and a gratitude practice.  It has been amazing to see the difference in the mornings that I skip the practice and the days I will myself out of bed for it.   I’ve noticed also how it has helped me roll with all the holiday festivities without feeling as tired or frustrated as in the past.  Actually this season has been amazingly different and I’m attributing a lot to my morning practice.

I think many times we try to only practice meditation and other coping skills when we feel stress.    Our goal may be peace but our focus is actually on the stressful event.   It is what is prompting  our practice. When you are able to make the shift and allow something else prompt your meditation or mindfulness practice then you will make more progress during the stressful times.  I think the key is practicing as much peacefulness as possible and to do that you need to also practice when you are not very stressed.  When we get well attuned and use to having a peaceful moment it’s much easier to take that feeling of peace and apply it to other situations.

What I have learned is that using breath-work and mindfulness techniques to deal with stressful situations does work  but the effects of the practice is not nearly as beneficial  if you only use them in a stressful situation.  It is like playing an instrument only a few times a year, you may be able to play a song but it won’t necessarily be pretty or easy.     However as with anything when you practice over and over; when it comes time to really perform, it will be much easier and successful.

How to Benefit from a Gratitude Practice

by Amanda Vaughan, posted in Breathwork, research, Stress Management, Wellness topic
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         I think many of us can identify the calmness and peace that comes with having the thought of thankfulness.  If any of you have read my recent client manual or seen any research on what happens to the body when we experience stress versus when we cultivate peace and calm, you would put 2 and 2 together and know that anything bringing peace is going to have the power to heal.  This is something we intuitively understand but the science is building to show this as well.
         Dr. Masaru Emoto, the Japanese scientist and water researcher, discovered that vibrations affect the molecular structure of water. In his years of water research, through high speed photography of thousands of water crystals, Dr Emoto has shown the most “beautiful” (symmetric and well organized)  crystals are those formed after the water is exposed to the words ‘love and gratitude.’   When water was exposed to words of “anger and hate”, the water crystals became asymmetric and disorganized.  The fact that the human body is made of 70% water, one would consider how  our thoughts can have profound implications on our health.
         The wonderful thing about this feeling of gratitude is that it can be cultivated quite easily.   One can do 15 minutes a day of gratitude practice and experience immediate benefits.  The long-staying results though comes like anything does…. with consistent daily practice.  That’s the kicker, right?  Many of us will start a practice for a week or so and then see it flicker out.  Here’s some steps to help build a daily “consistent” practice of gratitude that has good potential to last.
  • Start small, 5 minutes.  Success will lead to you trying again and not being overwhelmed.  Set a timer and resist doing more.
  • Link your practice to something else you already do daily, like a morning cup of coffee or brushing your teeth.
  • Do it right before or after this already daily routine.
  • During this 5 minutes jot down 3 things that make you feel gratitude.
  • Do this for a month.
  • Bump up to 10 minutes the next month.
  • Bump up to 15 minutes the third month, this time add a nice sitting posture and a minute of quiet after.
  • Continue to build as you feel so, adding other health routines like yoga or breathwork if desired.

How to Start a Breathwork Practice

by Amanda Vaughan, posted in Breathwork, Stress Management, Wellness topic, Yoga

keep calm and breath pdf

Breath is a powerful connecting force between the mind and the body.  Building and expanding on our breath not only increases vitality and energy, it can also be an amazing healing tool.  Although it is recommended to have an experienced teacher before beginning any significant breathwork practice, anyone can initiate this journey with some simple steps and create a 15 minute practice.  This practice can be added to a regular yoga asana practice or meditation practice.

  1. Identify a dry comfortable area to practice in.
  2. Limit distractions such as turning off or down your cellphone
  3. Wait a little after eating so you don’t have a full stomach. A little water before starting can be helpful.
  4. Avoid coffee before practicing.
  5. Decide on time to practice. Early morning is an ideal time to practice before your money cup of coffee/tea.
  6. Lie on your back or find a comfortable sitting position.
  7. Begin by just observing and tracking the breath as it comes in through your nose and down your windpipe into your diaphragm and track as it exits the body.
  8. Spend 5-10 minutes practicing observing.
  9. Spend the next 5-10 minutes focusing on long slow exhales.
  10. Sit in quiet for 3-5 minutes with normal breath.

At this point the work is on being the observer. Breathwork is not completed by “controlling” or forcing the breath, it is done effectively by observing and “playing” with the breath. If your goal in breathwork is increased vitality and wellness, then the safest way to begin your practice is by observing where you are first.   This takes time and cannot be determined with one breathing practice session but must be observed over time.  Variables like a new stressor or trying something for the first time can alter your baseline habits.  Overtime however one can determine the average count and length of the breath and identify a good goal to work on.  The goal is usually in lengthening both inhales and exhales comfortably without strain.  This will increase vitality.  However sometimes a person may need more help specifically with inhaling or exhaling and a trained instructor can guide the person in their practice.  There are also techniques like holds and various therapeutic practices that can target a particular healing aspect of the breath.  For more information on pranayama, a good book to reference is The Yoga of Breath: a Step-by-Step Guide to Pranayama by Richard Rosen.

Are you struggling with food addictions?

by Amanda Vaughan, posted in Nutrition, Treatment, Wellness topic

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Many of us at times develop unhealthy relationships with food.  A little while of feeling bad after maybe overeating and seeing its effects we are able to reign our behavior in and there’s not much harm.  However sometimes this unhealthy relationship can be ongoing and can start to cause other parts of our lives, relationships and recreations for example, to not function well.  When this happens, a food addiction might have formed and may call for more specific intervention.

Some signs to keep in mind:

  1. Eating more than planned when you eat certain foods.
  2. Keep eating certain foods even if you are not hungry.
  3. Eat until you feel sick.
  4. If unable to get a specific food, go out of your way to obtain that food.
  5. Eat certain foods in such large amounts that you start eating food instead of working, spending time with family or doing recreational activities.
  6. Avoid professional or social situations where certain foods are available.
  7. Have problems function effectively at your school or work because of food and eating.

If you checked a good many and have been experiencing these for over a month, it may be that it is time to seek further support.

Feel free to contact me for a free consultation if you feel this may apply to you.  I have been working for over 10 years  with people that suffer from all types of addictions and can help.

7 Ways to Begin Managing Stress

by Amanda Vaughan, posted in Exercise, Nutrition, Stress Management, Treatment, Wellness topic

Stress is something that happens to us daily.  There’s good stress.  You know the type that makes you show up for a meeting on time and also enabled you to prepare the night before.  There’s also not so good stress.  The kind that wears at you and makes you want to run and hide (or eat chocolate, drink a beer, smoke a cigarette, etc… )  It’s the kind that may start out as good stress but then added to all the other little worries morphs into something that is not helpful.

There are a few things you can do when you start to feel this negative stress come on that may help you gain control and not run and hide.  Some such as the first item may seem deceptively simple. We tend to take these for granted but often they are neglected resulting in a low threshold for negative stress and its effects.

1.Take a drink of water.  Many of us stay dehydrated and when we are dehydrated it is more difficult to reduce stress hormones and that feeling of tension.

2. Take a breathing break.   Concentrate on long slow exhales. When we are stressed we hyperventilate (longer inhales than exhales) which signals the body to go into “fight or flight”.

3.Eat well.  Eat meals with a variety of protein, whole grains, fruits and vegetables.  Attempt to eat something with protein and fiber at least every 4 hours while awake.  This will keep blood sugar from dropping low enough to signal a stress  response.

4. Walk or do some sort of exercise.  Just 15-20 minutes a day will reduce stress hormones in the blood; 30-60 minutes will optimize this.

5. Shrink your to-do list and focus on only the top 3 tasks.  If that’s too much, shrink it to the most important task you can do right now.   Looking at 20 items can be overwhelming but when you are focusing on just the next step, you feel more in control.

6. Nurture close relationships.  Contact someone positive whom you want to keep in your life.  Soak in some of their positive energy to help give you more resilience.

7. Get enough sleep.  Work on things that will help you get better sleep like cutting out caffeine after 5pm.  Getting 4-8 hours of sleep a night enables your body to clean up toxins and excess chemicals like the stress hormone cortisol.  Sleep helps to give you a “clean slate” for the next day.

*If still no relief, reach out to a support group or professional assistance through a counselor or other healthcare provider.

 

Personal Practice Challenge – Self Judgment

by Amanda Vaughan, posted in Exercise, Wellness topic, Yoga

The third sections of Judith Hanson Lasater’s book “Living Your Yoga” focuses on Self-Judgment.  She reminds at the beginning of the section of the yoga sutra that says the posture should be “steady and comfortable”.    She then goes into describing how we set certain expectations on ourselves and have certain thoughts in regards to our practice that gets in the way of our personal practice.  She discusses how we are a culture of “No pain, no gain” and how this is not necessarily the focus in yoga.

Her suggestions for this month is 1)Write down your internal dialogue right after your personal practice.  Keep notes brief and do not try to interpret. Keep track and note how the dialogue changes over time. 2) If you find yourself forcing in asana or other parts of your live ask, “is this in the spirit of yoga?” 3)If you notice that someone else is judging you, don’t be quick to agree or to internalize the judgment.  Think about what happened and agree only if his assessment aligns with yours. 4) If you are going into a situation about which you feel anxious, tense, or afraid say to yourself, “I am perfect just as I am” 5) Rather than approaching your yoga practice from an attitude of no pain, no gain, how about no pain, no pain? and 6) Do not criticize yourself, anyone else, or anything for one hour.  If this feels like too much, commit to doing it for the next 5 minutes.

These suggestions or homework feels quite freeing to me.  We spend so much of our time worrying about not meeting expectations that we forget the only real expectations are to grow and learn.  This should be interesting  lesson in letting go.

Weekly Wellness Post – Burn Out

by Amanda Vaughan, posted in depression, Treatment, Wellness topic

Burn out, I think on some level we all have experienced.  I am studying for my CCS (Certified Clinical Supervisor) and one of the areas I’m reviewing includes the identified stages of burn out by Edelwich and Brodsky.  What I have found interesting about these stages every time I have read about them in the past is that the first stage involves “Enthusiasm“.  This is described as a tendency to be overly available and to give a lot of oneself due to the motivation and excitement.  I think many people forget when they are burned out that at one time they probably had an excitement for what is burning them out currently.  A lot of time we start our work with a certain idealism or a vision of “how things could be”.

The next stages include “Stagnation“.  This is described  by stating “expectations shrink to normal proportions and person discontentment begins to surface”.  Basically this happens when we have a desire to make something happen or to do our work a certain way and we get thwarted.  Frustrations start to mount up as we realize we can’t do what we had set out to as easily as expected and we see no movement toward our goal or vision.  This can happen when a company also doesn’t encourage collaboration and has a very dictatorship culture.  Or this can happen when a person does not have a full understanding of the field they are going into and only see a small window of the bigger picture until they are actually doing the work.  Other ways this could happen is that environmental factors such as  unexpected reduction of supplies  or resources occur that could be related to a natural disaster or unusual fluctuation in the economy.

The third stage is Frustration.  This is described as “difficulties seem to multiply and the helper becomes bored, less tolerant, less sympathetic, and she or he copes by avoiding and withdrawing.”  So what happens in stage 2 worsens.  No relief or help is available or received and the goal/vision gets further and further away.  At this point feelings of hopeless sink in and people start to give up or not care as much.  This leads to the fourth stage.

Apathy.  Apathy is characterized as “depression and listlessness”.  At this point a person may have forgotten why they entered their line of work in the first place.  They may seek help or quit job.  Some may move on to a more severe form of depression/anger and become harmful to themselves or others.

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I think the main point to take away from these identified stages is that the main culprit is a feeling of lack of control. There is much different companies can do to help a person prevent burn out.  Some things include more collaborative style of decision making and planning in which you not only elicit feedback from your staff but they see you use it.    Other things include having resources like EAP for staff to use to help them personally figure out how to take back control of their lives.  Helping folks have more work/life/family balance like incorporating family events or exercise initiatives into the regular work day.  Some people feel burnout b/c they feel they lost control in another area of their life so if they feel like work is taken over and the vision they had for the family or health is not coming to fruition they can feel burn out and project it onto the work place.  Helping employees work on balancing work and home can be extremely helpful.

Individuals can also retake their lives back by indentifying their roles and what parts of their roles are not meeting their own vision and expectations.  Next step would be examining this vision and expectations to see if they are realistic.  If they are not then taking some time to develop more realistic expectations might be in order.  If they are realistic then breaking the steps toward reaching these goals into manageable and measurable pieces would be helpful.  Once we know what the next step is, how we are going to do it,  and when we are going to do it then we are back in control.  The feelings related to burnout will start to diminish as we make progress.

 

Dyslexia and Visual Talents

by Amanda Vaughan, posted in research, Treatment, Wellness topic

I have looked into this topic a great deal due to the fact that my oldest son has had much difficulty knowing left from right and letter reversal issues, for example his 4’s and 9’s look like Ps… A book that made a lot of sense to me although I had questioned how the scientific community held it as factual is the book called ‘The gift of Dyslexia” by   Ronald D. Davis  .  This book describes individuals with Dyslexia to have many talents that those of us who do not have dyslexia are not capable of having.  These talents involve the ability of seeing an object like a cube and being able to turn it around in their mind as if they are seeing it from many different view points instead of the view point of just staring down at it on the table.  The can actually pick it up in thought and turn it around to see accurately the different sides and angles of the cube.  The problem comes in when they are asked to read something on paper that to understand it you have to be looking at it from the same viewpoint as any other person reading it.  Training the brain to look at it from the same view point is the trick.

Well I just stumbled on to an article in Scientific American:Mind, Jan/Feb 2015, on “The Advantages of Dyslexia” which found scientific studies that back this theory up.  So that this ability to see everything 3 dimensional and to be able to  manipulate an object in one’s head without picking it up is quite an asset it areas where one might need to see things in this manner.  In the engineering and sciences this is an extremely helpful talent.

There are many kids that get labeled with a learning disability because of dyslexia.  I believe occupational therapy really helped my son understand how to interpret the perspectives and dimensions of what he is seeing in comparison to what he is expected to see by us 2 dimensional folk.  Also with him he also had difficulty crossing the mid line of his body and I wonder how that all fits in with the dyslexia and his visual/mental ability.  Occupational therapy also fixed that.  He spent a large amount of his occupational therapy time on a “scoot” with his hands moving him in a crawling fashion all around their offices.  He had a blast and it made him do a lot of mid line work.

I’m fascinated by how our brain, visual ability, and physical movement are so interconnected.   We all know this and are taught this but the part our past teachers emphasized was our brain controlling the movement  and not the other way around, our movement controlling/affecting the brain.  Funny how most therapies address the movement aspect last and not first, being that you only get it addressed if sent to a specialist.  It seems like it should just be common knowledge to have our kids do mid line activities and tests that measure “ability” in this spacial/visual talent and less on just sitting in a desk with a sheet of paper and measuring the disability.  It really is a paradigm shift though and that takes time.  The science is there however.

 

Weekly Wellness Post – Follow up on last post

by Amanda Vaughan, posted in depression, Exercise, research, Treatment, Wellness topic

I could not locate the research I mentioned in past post on exercising 3 days a week for 20 minutes for a month equal to that of taking antidepressant for a month but here is some similar research on exercise, mood, and antidepressants.  Looks like the overal result of these studies and research is that you can get the same final result from medications and exercise, but medications will get you there faster while exercise will keep you there longer.   I think exercise is a win-win but of course sometimes you may need help with the initial motivation to get moving and that is where medications can be very helpful.

( This article was first printed in the Special Health Report from Harvard Medical School “Understanding Depression”. For more information  go to www.health.harvard.edu/UD.)

(This one isn’t necessarily research but I like it’s explanations.)

(This one is an actual abstract of a research experiment on aging adults divided into groups of those given antidepressant and those given different exercise routines to follow.)

 

Take Care and nerd up on these studies,

Amanda