Emotional Health and Wellbeing
Whether you are having a challenging time (life change, burn out, anxiety, depression, overload), or facing loss (loss of someone you love, loss by ill health) or supporting others through a difficult time (mental health, chronic condition, terminal illness) there are some steps that you can take to help with challenging emotions or trauma.
Emotional awareness through emotional literacy or emotional labelling, helps regulate the central nervous system.
The Feeling Wheel is designed to help people in learning to recognise and communicate their feelings. Developed by Gloria Wilcox, the wheel has proven useful in assisting clients to learn how to identify, to express, to generate, and to change feelings.
If your facing a difficult situation or feeling stressed or agitated, look at the wheel and identify all the emotions that describe what lies under the agitations.
I also recommend reading Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown.
Our retreats are also designed to support your emotional health and wellbeing and will help you work through your emotions. It’s important to take some time out and look after yourself.
Meditation
Meditation has been shown to increase focus, reduce stress, and promote calmness. It can also help people recognise and accept challenging emotions and thoughts.
It is a practice – something you need to do regularly to experience the benefits. At the same time, basic meditation techniques are simple to learn, and that’s the place to start.
One of the key benefits of meditation is that it allows us to listen to our body and senses without judging our experience. This is why we often begin a meditation with what is called a ‘body scan’.
Mindfulness of body and breath have become well known and the positive effects are now clearly evidence based. What is less well known, but is also supported by evidence, are mindfulness practices that are relational, in other words about ourselves in relation to other people. These practices can support anyone whose work is relational, especially to help re-regulate the nervous system and to help us experience a positive sense of shared humanity, even with those we find difficult. The most important of these practices is called ‘Metta Bhavana’ or loving-kindness meditation.
Metta Bhavana
Relaxing Meditation (9mn)
Anxiety
Most of us will feel anxiety at some point in our lives.
We feel fear when our brain switches on our “fight or flight” response. This is a normal and healthy way for our brain to try and keep us safe. But we can switch on that fear response ourselves through our thoughts, ie through worrying. This is anxiety. Anxious worrying is a way of trying to protect ourselves from the uncertainties of the future; we try and resolve those uncertainties in our head, but this rarely succeeds and just makes us feel worse. Finding ways of reducing the amount of worrying you do will help with your anxiety, for example:
- Distraction – break up patterns of worry by listening to music, podcasts or audio books, watching TV or movies, talking to a friend, knitting or doing a puzzle.
- Meditation. Guided meditation or just focusing on breathing or on nature. Listen to our recorded meditations [link]
- Use a “Worry window” – set aside a half hour of the day when you will allow yourself to worry (a “worry window”), and then if you find yourself worrying at any other time of the day, tell yourself that you’re going to postpone that worry into the “worry window” and worry about it only at that time.
- Keep a worry diary – write down your worry predictions (e.g. “I’ll be unable to cope when I go out tomorrow”), and then re-visit them a while later and check whether your predictions were accurate. See how often you’re right – you’ll usually find you’re not!
You may also find these measures helpful:
- Breathing – when we breathe out, we reduce the body’s “fight or flight” response. Practice spending 15 minutes or more slowly breathing in and out to the count of ten, making the outbreaths last longer than the inbreaths, (e.g. count of 3 for inbreath, count of 7 for outbreath).
- “Progressive Muscle Relaxation” – a simple technique with demonstration videos on YouTube.
Bereavement Support
Mireille Herbert Hayden, Founder and Director of Gentle Dusk interviewed best-selling author and psychotherapist Julia Samuel about how we can heal after loss. Julia’s shares knowledge and wisdom into the many strands of grief.
Best-selling author Julia Samuel MBE on coping with grief – YouTube
Facing loss can be a very painful experience. Whether you are supporting someone who is bereaved or have lost someone yourself, there is help available out there.
Understanding bereavement contributes to the healing process. Mireille Herbert Hayden, Founding Director of Gentle Dusk, has partnered up with North Bristol NHS Trust and Bristol Memorial Woodland Trust, to create a booklet to help those facing the emotional and practical difficulties of loosing someone they love:
Reaching out for support is very important for you and those around you, for both physical and mental health, and wellbeing on this emotional journey.
Meditation is a technique that can support you in your grief. We have compiled a series of Bereavement meditations to support your wellbeing.
We also recommend contacting the following organisation for support:
The Good Grief Trust has a choice of 1000 + charities and tailored local and national support services under one umbrella.
Cruse Bereavement Care. Call the Cruse Helpline on 0808 808 1677 for grief support right now.
Gentle Dusk also offers training in bereavement, to find out more go to our Training page:
End of Life Plans
Planning ahead does not speed up the present. Quite the opposite, really: it ensures you and your loved ones are aware of your wishes, and that you are aware of theirs.
It can be hard to know where to begin, and so Gentle Dusk offers free resources you can download and get started with at home now. Below, you will also find information about organisations and services we trust, which may further support your needs.
We are also here to support you through our workshops, events and one-to-one services. Contact us today.
Future Planning
Sometimes called advance care planning, this is the process of documenting both your future health care wishes and ensuring you have put your financial affairs in order.
Some decisions might feel very big; for instance do you want to be resuscitated if you lose capacity? Other decisions might feel very small, like the favourite foods or music you want around you. All of them matter.
Gentle Dusk Advance Care Plan
The Gentle Dusk Advance Care Plan can help you prepare for the future. It gives you an opportunity to think about, talk about and write down your wishes and preferences for care in the future and at the end of your life.
Along with documenting important information about you, which you are encouraged to keep with you and share with anyone involved in your care for example, your GP and other health and social care staff as well as your family and/or those close to you.
It’s even more difficult if you’re faced with somebody that you love with a diagnosis. Then you have to start this conversation, you don’t have the language because you’ve never talked about it, you don’t have the familiarity, you don’t know how to open, the question.
Mireille Herbert Hayden
Founder and Director of Gentle Dusk
Lasting Powers of Attorney (LPA)
LPAs are legal documents that allow you to choose one or more people to help make decisions in your best interest, should you be unable to do so physically and/or lose mental capacity.
There are two types of LPA: one for your property and financial affairs and one for your health and welfare. Without an LPA in place, your carer – even if they are a spouse or close family member – may not have permission to make decisions in your best interests.
Gentle Dusk LPA Key Information
For more information from the UK government on how to make, register or end a lasting power of attorney, click here.
Will Planner
More than half of UK adults do not have a Will, a legal document which allows you to be the decision maker of what happens to your possessions and money. It also makes the process of sorting out your affairs a lot easier for those you have left behind.
You can write your own Will yourself or you can seek professional advice.
It’s even more difficult if you’re faced with somebody that you love with a diagnosis. Then you have to start this conversation, you don’t have the language because you’ve never talked about it, you don’t have the familiarity, you don’t know how to open, the question.
Mireille Herbert Hayden
Founder and Director of Gentle Dusk
Record your Funeral Wishes
Do you want to be buried or cremated? Do you want a funeral service? A religious or non-religious ceremony? A social gathering afterwards? If so, what form would you like it to take?
These are just some of the questions you might find you have answers to, or wish to record so that loved ones know what is important to you.
Organ Donation
Organ donation in England is an ‘opt out’ system. This means that all adults in England are considered to have agreed to be an organ donor when they die unless they have recorded their wish not to be on the NHS Organ Donor Register or are in one of the excluded groups.
Learn more about organ donation from the NHS here.
Learn more about donating your body after death in the UK here.
When Someone Dies
When a close one dies, there are many administrative and legal tasks to carry out. This is at a time when grief impacts the ay we feel, the way we think and the way we are able to process information. Together with North Bristol NHS Trust and Memorial Woodland Trust, we have written a booklet to help. We hope it provides you with practical and emotional support. Written for Bristol and the South West, it contains also general information applicable to the whole of England. The booklet is available in Arabic, Polish, Romanian and Somali – When Someone Dies – Bristol Memorial Woodland Trust
