TRANSITIONING FROM STRESS

Welcome everybody to Live the 8Wise™ Way podcast with me, Kim Rutherford, psychotherapist, author, podcast host and I guess I’m a mental health survivor, I’ll go with that, but mainly mental health and wellbeing advocate for anybody and everybody, because I believe it is our responsibility to look after our own mental health and wellbeing in this world.

How are you, how are you doing? If this is the first time you are joining me, welcome. Thank you for taking the time out to come and listen to me today. It will be great if you press that subscribe button, or the like button, or the follow button, or share this podcast with as many people that you think would benefit from it, would like it or would enjoy it.

If you haven’t listened to any of the other episodes yet, I think it’s worthwhile. Have a listen to this one and then head straight back to number one and listen from the beginning. With every single episode you can listen to the episode alongside reading the book, and every episode will tell you whereabouts in the book you can follow that particular topic. You can literally create a psychotherapy program for yourself in the comfort of your own home whilst listening to me as if you were sat with me in my office.

What we are talking about today, episode 10, can you believe we’re at episode 10 already, today we are talking about transitioning from stress.

Now, ultimately people come to me and they say to me, Kim I’m suffering with my mental health and I’ll say, well tell me your symptoms and they’ll say, I’m stressed. I’m like, okay I hate to tell you this, but stress in itself is not a mental health issue. I know, you are going yeah but it is, my mental health really suffers when I’m stressed. Yes, your mental health suffers when you are stressed, because stress is ultimately a gateway to other mental health issues because the truth of it people is, ultimately, we are born to experience stress. We’re born for stress. Those of us who don’t like stress, what you mean is you don’t like being overwhelmed by stress. But the reality of it is we are all born for stress, we are born to experience stress, we’re able to cope with stress, providing that that stress only reaches where our limitations are.

For those of you who’ve done training in stress awareness or mental health awareness, you’ll be very aware of something called the stress bucket. Personally, I like the concept of a stress bath, and this is the whole point of, if you imagine a bath and you imagine that the tap is always on because the tap represents everything life throws at you every single day, you can’t switch it off because life is always throwing things at. Ultimately, what happens is the water keeps coming into the bathtub.

Now, providing that you have access to the filter that sits underneath the tap, or if you’re listening in other countries the faucet, then that allows any excess water to filter through. But if the amount of water gets too much for the filter to be able to stop the water overflowing, we get an overflowing bathtub. What then happens is the amount of water keeps flowing and flowing and flowing, not only does it overflow the bathtub, it now overflows the floor causing damage to the bathroom floor. It then goes through the floor, through the ceiling, into the rooms, in other parts of the house or in other people’s apartments and flats and things like that and ruins everything else. That’s what stress does. That is ultimately what stress is.

As long as you are implementing strategies that help filter it out, just like that filter does under the tap, or under the faucet, you are okay. We call that stress management. But if you are not implementing strategies that allow you to manage your stress effectively, then what happens is it builds up and it builds up just like that overflowing water and it becomes too overwhelming for you to cope with. Your mind can’t cope with it, your body can’t cope with it and it starts to create signs and symptoms that lead to other mental health issues, such as low mood, anxiety, burnout, and all of those symptoms that come with those things such as not being able to sleep very well, overeating, undereating, not being able to relax, all of those things that happen when you are stressed.

That’s very simply because your stress levels have exceeded where your limitations were. If they had stayed just in place the way they were supposed to you would’ve been okay and this isn’t me blaming anybody for when they’ve got a stressful life because, realistically speaking, life is stressful and the expectations for all of us is to juggle so much more than people have ever had to juggle before. Workloads are heavier, we can’t switch off from work now because of email and WhatsApp and the fact that we can still access work 24 hours a day, thank you very much the internet and technology. So, we can’t escape work, it means we also can’t escape everything outside of work because everybody who wants access to us gets access to us whenever they want to. Yes, we can choose to not answer a phone, but realistically it doesn’t stop an email coming into our inbox. It doesn’t stop a text message from pinging on our phone. It doesn’t stop us every single time we open any form of technology somebody there is wanting access to us. Even if we don’t open them, we’re aware they’re there. So that sits in our minds, just sat there, simmering away, just adding to our stress levels.

So today I just want to talk about how 8Wise™ helps you to transition away from stress and move more towards a stress management approach so that you can actually look after your mental health and wellbeing, because you become preventative. Being able to manage the stress effectively prevents it from escalating into something a lot worse such as those mental health issues that we’ve talked about before, like anxiety and burnout and OCD and depression and agoraphobia, and all of the other plethora of mental health issues that people experience all the time. So that’s what I want to talk about today.

Now the interesting thing from my perspective when it comes to stress is I’m always stressed and stress definitely led to a lot of my mental health issues because I was an idiot. I look back now and I call myself an idiot, at the time I wouldn’t, I was just living life, but I look back now and I know I was silly because I was ignoring the signs and symptoms that my stress levels were telling me and therefore I never captured the stress management as quickly as I should have. They escalated into all of the different situations I had, which as I’ve said many times before, where stress led to burnout, burnout led to anxiety, health anxiety very specifically, anxiety led to depression and my depression led to agoraphobia. I also developed an eating disorder as well, most specifically binge eating disorder for me. All of that came from not managing my stress and therefore not being able to manage my mental health effectively. But different things create different levels of stress for us.

So, I want to just explain that to you and what that actually looks like and I’m going to explain it in the analogy of a gun. Now, I may have mentioned this to you before but I think it’s a really, really important thing to learn and if you ever come onto any of my training in the past or in the future, you will see me use this analogy a lot. In fact, if you ever come onto any of my training courses you might like the sound of this now, but I actually turn up with kids’ guns and we have proper foam bullets and we fire stuff. We do, we fire at stuff, so you can come in and do a little bit of gun training in a safe environment with foam bullets, acting like a kid rolling around on the floor whilst you unleash your stress. There you go. There’s an advert for any of my courses for you.

But to start with the analogy, I want you to think of a standard gun, a metal carcass gun. What I want you to think about is that gun represents your mental health. It’s a solid part of you and it’s only dangerous if it is triggered and a bullet is fired out. Okay, so that’s the truth about what a gun is when it represents your mental health. Now, I want you to move to the trigger of that gun and that trigger represents your life events, everything that happens and that you are responding to on a day-to-day basis.

Now we all have different life events. Nobody’s lucky enough to only have one or two. Every single day we’re responding to different things that are happening. All of those life events are only dangerous to us and to our mental health if how we respond to them increases our stress levels, because if it increases our stress levels, it starts to affect our mental wellness.

Now I want you to think about the bullets. Now the bullets represent our memories and our experiences. The stronger our memories are usually linked to the strong emotions we’ve had. If we’ve had experiences that have generated really strong emotions, then we are going to hold onto that memory a lot stronger. This is the good, the bad and the ugly, which is why we can usually recall memories of trauma, why we can recall memories of really unpleasant stuff like bullying at school, but also why we can recall memories linked to some of the most amazing experience in our lives like our wedding day, when we got our first bike at Christmas, childbirth, all of those kinds of things.

Now we store all of those memories and experiences from birth from the second we come into this world, our mind is starting to keep hold of all of those memories and they store them in your subconscious and your unconscious mind. Everything that you’ve learned in your life gets stored in these three different places.

If we need to use it every single minute of every single day in a way that we need to actively remember how to do it, we store it in our conscious mind. If it’s something that we don’t need to remember every day, but it is useful to be able to recall it when we do need it, we store it in our subconscious mind. If we don’t need to use it consciously or subconsciously, and it’s something that just kind of lies there and we just do it, if it’s helped us function but we don’t have to remember how to do it, then it goes into our unconscious mind.

Now, the way to think about this is, think about once upon a time when you were a baby and you came into this world and you didn’t know how to breathe, because whilst you were tucked away or warm, snug and cosy in the womb, you never had to. Then you’ve come into the world and it’s scary and there’s lots of strange people looking at you and you don’t know how to breathe. So, what tends to happen is a wonderful doctor or a nurse, or both in some cases, are going to do something to you. They’re going to prod you, in the old days they used to spank you, and what that forced you to do was take that first gulp of air.

Now, you learn in those moments to consciously learn how to breathe in those first initial seconds, that spank taught you how to take in air and, for those moments that followed it, you were consciously remembering to keep that process of breathing in and breathing out. Then eventually you were doing that so regularly within the same few moments you were doing it so regularly that that memory of how to do that moved through your subconscious and right the way into your unconscious mind. Which means that sat there right now, listening to this, you are breathing and until the moment that I’ve talked about breathing, your breath was normal, it was regulated, it was calm. Now you are thinking about your breathing, and you’ll find that it’s become a little bit uncomfortable. It’s harder to regulate and that’s because we’ve pulled the memory up from the unconscious mind, right the way up to the conscious mind, which makes it a little bit more difficult to function naturally.

So, this is what’s happening in our mind all the time. We have these memories linked to these emotions and we store them in different parts of our mind in order to use them when we need to use them. They also create what is called our conditioned mindset, which is the mind that we use to respond to all of these life events that happen. Now, these are the foundation of who we are. Our thoughts, our emotions, our values, our beliefs, our behaviours, and our habits and they’re only dangerous to our mental health if they are triggered through stress inducing life events and create more stress leading to overwhelming stress. As you can see, there’s a very common theme here linked to our mental health. Everything is about leading to stress and when we have too much stress, it links to creating mental health issues, so stress management helps us with mental health management and 8Wise™ helps us to do both.

A little bit of sciencey stuff for you, and just showing off my knowledge of some parts of the brain now really to be honest, but the part of your brain that does that conscious thinking is called the prefrontal cortex and it sits right at the front of your brain just at the top behind your eyes, behind your forehead there and in the middle of your brain sits something called the hippocampus. I like to think of the hippocampus as a giant database where there’s lots of people buzzing around with lots of filing cabinets and in every one of those filing cabinets, there’s millions of different memories with lots of images.

What happens is, when you have to navigate through life every second, every minute, every hour for example, your prefrontal cortex pulls in all of the external stimulus through your senses and your prefrontal cortex goes right I’ve got all of this stimulus, but I don’t know what to do with it, what do I do. It sends a message directly to your hippocampus, your hippocampus and all those little people working in it, go to all the filing cabinets and they bring out the memory and they force that back to the prefrontal cortex, so now the prefrontal cortex knows what to do, and it knows how to navigate the process.

So to give you an example of that, I’m just going to say elephant and your prefrontal cortex has heard the word elephant. It sent a message to your hippocampus. All of those little people, they’ve just flooded through all of your filing cabinets to find the most recent or dominant memory visually of an elephant, and in your mind right now you have a picture of an elephant. I don’t know how many listen, or three people listening to this possibly, but in all of the people that are listening to this right now, every one of you will have a different visual of an elephant because all of you will have had a different experience with elephants. The visual you’ve got is unique to the experiences you’ve got, or with regards to the gun analogy, it is relevant to the bullets that you have. Now this process works absolutely fine on a normal day to day basis until if you experience any form of life event and what happens is the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus start talking.

If those lovely people in your hippocampus find a memory that implies that you might be in danger, what it does is set off, what I like to call Amy G, Amy G is the amygdala, the part of the brain that I think acts like the bat phone pre-warning you that you are in danger and it sends off all of these communications around your body, letting you know that you are in danger.

What it’s done is triggered your fear, fight, flight response system. All of a sudden now you’re in heightened stress level. Now stress is important during this process of being in danger because what it does is it changes the way your body functions and the way your mind functions in order to get you out of that danger.

For some of you, you are going to suddenly feel your muscles tense up dramatically as if you’re just going to fight off a big tiger. The muscles become tense, your heart rate is going to go up so you’re going to feel those palpitations, your blood pressure’s going to go sky high so you’re going to feel really, really hot. The brain changes cause the fluids and the oxygen from around your brain gets pushed to different parts of your body and so suddenly you can become a little bit lightheaded. Because the muscles have spasmed almost and they go tightly around your chest, it can affect your breathing, which feels like we’ve got something heavy on our chest. Because it affects our breathing, we’re not getting as much oxygen to our brain anymore so now we feel more lightheaded, more dizzy, can’t function properly. We get that blurry eyed situation or fuzzy brain situation.

Now, for other people it might just hit to the second brain, which is the gut area. Suddenly you might feel that you’ve got really bad stomach cramps, diarrhoea, want to vomit, nausea, sweating a lot more and these two elements, really that’s your fight and your flight process. Your fight is all about getting you pumped up, ready to aggressively get yourself out of the situation and your flight process is almost like releasing anything that makes you heavy so you can be light and get out the situations. That’s why in my book, I talk about the meaning of life for one of the meanings of life I talk about is the meaning of life of personal survival, individual survival, me surviving, you surviving, as individuals because our stress response system helps us to do that. We have an inbuilt biological process that allows us to get ourselves out of danger.

That’s how wonderful stress is when it is used appropriately and when it’s working well and the reality of it is, in those moments if we are able to bring those stress symptoms down, change our thinking in that moment by stress management techniques, we are then able to switch off the amygdala and eventually that prefrontal cortex and hippocampus partnership goes back into full swing and we start functioning brilliantly all over again. But, sadly that doesn’t always happen for everybody and so stress starts to really affect us.

So if you’re not really sure what stress is, it’s the feeling of being overwhelmed or unable to cope with mental or emotional pressure. Nice and simple. Many different situations or life events can cause stress but mainly, definitely, when we are trying to experience something new, something unexpected, or we feel threatened in some way, or we feel out of control with the situation, we all deal with stress really differently. Our ability to cope can depend on our genetics, our early life events so nature/nurture personality, and also our social and economic situation as well.

When we encounter stress, basically our body just produces all of these stress hormones that trigger that fight or flight response I’ve just been talking about and it affects our immune system where it starts to activate all these different parts of us. It helps us to respond quickly to dangerous situations but, if that overwhelm becomes too much, what it actually does is prevents our body and our mind from functioning the way we want it to, therefore it causes negative effects and can be a gateway to basically other mental health problems as well. This is all nice to know all of these facts, but how do you know if you’re stressed?

Well, there’s a lot of signs and symptoms, but, and they’re all different and they all last for different periods of time and there’s different approaches for all of them, but it’s important to know the three different types of stress so that you can start to gauge where your stress levels are at and also then implement the most effective strategies to be able to manage it.

So, number one. Number one is acute stress. Now, acute stress is the most common type of stress and it’s usually caused by imagining or thinking about the pressures of past events or up and coming demands in the future, which is why work creates a lot of stress because a lot of our stress in work comes from  I’ve got to do this tomorrow, I’ve got to do this tomorrow and tomorrow never stops because it’s always coming at us. So that’s acute stress, very normal, what most of us experience.

Then we have episodic acute stress. Now this type of stress occurs when we get regular bouts of acute stress. When that acute stress starts to build up and it becomes much more regular, it then develops into episodic, acute stress. So that’s something we need to be aware of. This is when it’s starting to spiral out of control.

Then we’ve got chronic stress. Now this type of stress occurs when we start to feel trapped or in a bad situation. When we have acute stress and it escalates into episodic, acute stress, and then if we start to feel like we can’t get out of this, we feel caged and we feel trapped with it all, then it’s turned into chronic stress and that’s when, obviously it’s at its most dangerous. It’s when it’s having such an effect on our mind and our body, it can then lead to lots of other issues as well. We have this amazing way of managing stress, but actually if we start to manage stress in a dysfunctional way, what it does is create something called the dysfunctional stress cycle.

So let me take you through that quickly, just give you some idea what that means. For example, say you’ve had a bad day at work, that’s your life event, your life event triggers a bad day at work, and that bad day at work might lead to negative thinking such as imposter syndrome, for example, or I’m rubbish, or I’m going to end up losing my job. That negative thinking then leads to negative feelings, those negative feelings might be that low self-esteem starts to kick in, that anxiety starts to kick in. Those negative feelings then lead to a set of symptoms linked to that feeling. So, with things like anxiety, for example, it might cause you to have zero sleep. You might see there’s a fluctuation in how you’re eating, you might get those pains in your chest, you might get that stomach issue, you might just be feeling shaky all the time. We don’t like the physical symptoms, they feel really uncomfortable so we might then lead to something that we would call a self-defeating behaviour.

In my life, my self-defeating behaviour was food and overeating. This would be when I started to binge eat and then with that binge eating you feel good after a while because obviously certain foods trigger all of these wonderful chemicals in your brain that make you feel better. Suddenly my anxiety switched off and I’m feeling good, the chocolate’s done its job and life’s great. I go to bed, and I wake up the next day. Now the next day, something similar happens, might be different, might have been some idiots cut me up on the road on the way to work, which has got me thinking, oh my God I’m a really bad driver, which makes me feel really crappy about myself.

So suddenly all those physical symptoms kick back in and I go, oh my God what am I going to do about it and my brain, those wonderful people sat there working in my hippocampus go yeah but Kim, last time you felt really crappy you had some chocolate and it made you feel fantastic so go out and get yourself another bar of chocolate. So, I do and so I’m overeating now and then the next life event happens and when the next life event might happen you might go, oh my God I stood on the scales and I feel really bad or I can’t fit into clothes or whatever it was that leads to more negative thinking, more negative feelings, more physical symptoms and guess what, my self-defeating behaviour was again. Well, the thing that makes me feel better is to eat again, no logic to it, but there’s a part of my brain now tells me that when I eat chocolate, I feel good. So now I do it again. That is an example of dysfunctional stress, a dysfunctional stress cycle and that’s when we’ve started to implement strategies that we think are good for us in the moment, but actually end up working out really bad for us in the long term. We all create different ones, some are a lot worse than others, some are drinking, some are smoking, some are drugs, some are exercise, some are chatting to a friend. We have all these different ways of coping, but some of them are dysfunctional and sometimes we have to be really honest with ourselves and say, am I really managing my stress with these dysfunctional ways or am I actually creating bigger issues for myself further down the line.

It’s really important to be aware if you have a dysfunctional stress cycle and learn to do something about it and this is where 8Wise™ comes in, because what I would want you to be able to do is understand what is triggering your stress because I guarantee whatever is triggering your stress is also having a huge impact on the different elements of your wellness spectrum as well. So again, if you don’t understand what those core eight elements of the 8Wise™ wellness spectrum are, head back from episode one right the way through to episode nine and that explains in a lot more detail for you rather than me rushing through it all now. It’s important to be able to implement strategies, to change your dysfunctional stress cycle or manage your stress if you can and 8Wise™ can do that really well for you. The reason 8Wise™ does that for you is because when we look at the top 10 major life events that cause stress, we understand that they trigger all eight elements of 8Wise™ too.

Let’s just have a look at one. Let’s have a look at, well we’ve got a major finance issue happening in the modern world at this moment in time, so let’s have a look at financial problems. Financial problems are, from a top 10 they are number six, and they trigger us emotionally so our emotional wellness is affected. They trigger our physical wellness because we’re in a situation, obviously anxiety kicks in when our emotional wellness is triggered so anxiety, high levels of dysfunctional stress that then triggers physical responses, so our physical wellness suddenly becomes affected. This then affects our spiritual wellness, it starts to affect our self-esteem, how we’re going to cope with things, how we’re going to manage things, that then sorts us out with regards to our intellectual wellness because then what happens is we suddenly have to go, I’ve got to learn all of this new stuff, or I’m going to retract right into my comfort zone, hide under a blanket and pretend it’s not happening. Then that starts to cause problems environmentally, because when we’re in a situation of we’ve got financial problems, do I sell my home, do I move from my home, do I have to move someone into my home, do I have to relocate, this can have a major effect also on our social wellness because suddenly we can’t afford to do things. We can’t go out and spend time with people or we forced to spend more time with people who are closer to us, which is not always a great thing for us at the time as well. Then that leads to occupational wellness. If our job doesn’t pay us enough, we can get really frustrated. What if the job suddenly, is there redundancies, are they cutting back on overtime hours, are they reducing pay, are they not offering any form of pay increase. All very common things with regards to financial situations or economic situations we’re all facing at the moment.

Then on top of that it hurts our financial wellness. All of a sudden, we’ve got to start thinking about money in a different way. So financial problems are number six on the life events that trigger stress and financial problem as one life event triggers all eight elements of 8Wise™.

So rather than try and resolve everything all at once, what we have to do is go okay, from these elements, which ones can I focus on to start making me physically and mentally feel better. Do I have to focus on my emotional wellness and physical wellness first or are there other elements I can focus on. But by doing that, what we then naturally do is start to reduce the stress, leaving our brain functioning better with that prefrontal cortex and that hippocampus communication working brilliantly, which makes us stronger cognitively and then we can manage life in a slightly better way. So that’s how 8Wise™ ultimately helps you to manage stress.

Now what I want to do in the next few episodes coming up, we’re going to be talking about where a lot of our stress comes from, which is major life changes and major transitions and we’re going to go into that in quite a lot of detail so I’m not going to cover it too much today. But if you are interested in knowing what is triggering your stress levels and causing you problems with regards to your overall wellness, which is then linking up to your mental health and wellbeing, there’s going to be quite a few different episodes linked specifically to the different life transitions and the different life events that happen and how they affect our wellness spectrum so you can have a much more specific detailed plan if you are experiencing those life transitions yourself. It’s remembering that all of this stress basically creates internal stress factors and external stress factors, which lead to a conditioned mindset and it’s your conditioned mindset that then has to respond to everything in life.

Now, for some people for example, they may have created what I would look at as a negative conditioned mindset. Somebody who has the inability to accept uncertainty, for example, otherwise known as somebody who likes to be in control. That is not necessarily always a good positive mindset to have. Being pessimistic isn’t necessarily a good one for us to have. Having lots of negative self-talk isn’t a good mindset to have. Setting ourselves unrealistic expectations through perfectionism isn’t a good condition mindset to have and getting into that victim or blame mindset isn’t necessarily a good one to have either because then we’re in this I want to be in control but I’m giving the control to everybody else. So, when it comes to our conditioned mindset, we really have to think that one through, and this is where our spiritual wellness comes in. So all of this stress in our life, all of those memories in our life, all of those experience in our life, they have gone and settled deep within our hippocampus, within our mindset and they are either helping us or they’re hindering us and only you know the answer to that question.

In order to change them, you need to start looking at your spiritual wellness and your intellectual wellness, the internal world, because that’s where the conditioned mind will be based and then you need to manage them from there. That will then improve your things like your emotional wellness and how you respond to the stress and how you respond to the emotions that come with the stress. It’ll improve your physical wellbeing, because ultimately as we know, whatever affects you mentally affects you physically and then that makes the external dimension of work and social and all of the other things as well, those other four elements, the other two dimensions will suddenly work a lot better for you because you’ve got that internal world and that condition mindset where you need it to be.

So that’s what you need to think about ultimately, you need to think about what life events am I experiencing, what memories and experiences from my earlier life, whether it’s childhood, teenage years, only a few weeks ago, whatever it might be, what might be there, what bullets am I holding onto and how are they being triggered by everyday life events. Is there something I can do about releasing those bullets safely so that they no longer get triggered so I can manage my stress more effectively, it can’t be a gateway to other mental health issues and I feel like I’m back in control as best I can be with regards to different parts of my life.

This is how you transition from stress. You transition from stress, from understanding yourself well enough to know why certain situations trigger the stress in you. You transition from stress by learning to manage the stress that you experience and by managing the stress that you experience, you reduce the signs, you reduce the symptoms, and therefore you reduce the risks of that stress turning into mental health. Then you are fully back in control and how do you do all of that, well, rather than try and resolve the problem as a big ugly problem, you break it down using 8Wise™ and using the 8Wise™ Ways to be able to improve the different areas of your wellness spectrum so that you can manage your stress more effectively moving forward.

That is ultimately how you transition from stress. 8Wise™ can be used for so many different things. It can help you if you’ve got anxiety, it can help you if you’ve got depression, it can help you if you’ve got mental health issues, but it can also help you prevent yourself from having all of those issues if you are able to manage the stress that leaves you vulnerable to developing them. That is where the prevention element of 8Wise™ comes in.

You can use it for recovery and you can use it for prevention and what that gives you is a framework for the rest of your life to manage your mental health and wellbeing, to be able to have a better quality of life by having really good psychological wellbeing from now until whenever it’s no longer there, or whenever you are no longer with us.

So, I hope you found that quite useful. As I said, I want to take you through what 8Wise™ was, which is what we’ve done in the previous episodes and today I wanted to explain to you a little bit more to how it links to stress, and then how stress can generate some of those other mental health issues.

If you are somebody who would like to learn more about 8Wise™, obviously, you know you can go and get the book 8Wise™ Ways to a Healthier, Happier Mind. You can implement your own, what I would call, therapeutic coaching model using the book, using the journals and using this podcast as well if you want to do it from home in the safety of your own home.

Now I do work with some clients one to one, so if any of this is starting to trigger you and you’ve identified, actually I need a little bit of help, and you’d like to know how I might be able to help you or how I might be able to signpost you to people who can help you, please do feel free to head to my website www.8wise.co.uk and you will be able to find contact details for me there. Get in contact and I will help you if, where and however I can. But if you would like to come along and join me on some of my training, my training is all on hold at the moment for the summer, but we will start to be delivering training again probably from October. So, in October I will be delivering training and the first course we’re going to do is the 8Wise™ Discovery course and 8Wise™ Discovery literally is a one day course. You can either do it as a one day via Zoom or what I’ll do is I’ll break it down into 90 minute modules that you can cover over a week and what that does is it takes you through 8Wise™, but it specifically takes you through step by step how you can implement your own 8Wise™ strategy and action plan for developing your own mental health and wellbeing using 8Wise™ moving forward.

So that’s going to be running, probably, in the autumn so keep an eye out again, head to my website, the information will be there. Feel free to follow me on everywhere on social media because I’ll be updating everybody on social media with regards to when it’s happening, core states, all of that kind of stuff. But if you’d like more information, then please, please, please do get in contact and I’ll give you that information as much as I possibly can.

So that’s been episode 10, transitioning from stress. The key to transitioning from stress is understanding stress, understanding stress means understand yourself to know what your signs are, what are your symptoms, how are you responding to it, are those responses helping you or are they hindering you and what do you need to make sure, ultimately, that your bathtub doesn’t overflow and damage every other part of your life.

So that’s me, Kim Rutherford, psychotherapist, author, and clearly podcast host and this was Live the 8Wise™ Way. Please, if you haven’t done so already, like, subscribe, share, do all the other stuff we’re supposed to do with regards to social media. There’s a lot of people out there struggling and it’s not always affordable to get the help you need and maybe, just maybe, this podcast can help a few people achieve what I hope everybody achieves one day, which is to develop a healthier, happier mind and a better quality of life. I look forward to chatting to you again in our next episode when we’re going to be talking about habits and goal setting.

So until then, thanks very much for joining us. I will speak to you then. Bye for now and take great care.