Tag: mental-health

Diaphragmatic breathing

Posted on by Dr Laura Walton in Practices, Uncategorized

Diaphragmatic breathing, also called deep breathing or belly breathing, is a way of breathing slowly and fully into the abdomen rather than the chest. When we’re stressed, our breathing often changes: it becomes shallower and faster, and this plays a part in keeping us feeling wound up, because it reduces the time the body has to rest and repair. Practising diaphragmatic breathing regularly gives the body a chance to settle, and it can also be a useful way to calm yourself in the moment when you’re feeling stressed.

What is the diaphragm?

The diaphragm is a large, dome-shaped muscle that sits underneath your lungs, separating your chest from your abdomen. When you breathe in, it contracts and flattens, drawing air deep into your lungs and making room by pushing your abdomen, and your lower ribs, gently outward. When you breathe out, it relaxes back into its dome shape. Breathing this way, using the diaphragm fully, is a more efficient and calming way to breathe than shallow breathing high in the chest.

Like any skill, it takes a little practice. The instructions below will talk you through it, and you can follow along with the audio whenever it’s helpful.

How to practice

Find a safe, quiet space where you won’t be disturbed.

Sit or lie down, and make yourself comfortable. If you’re sitting, place your feet flat on the floor with your legs uncrossed. If you’re lying down, let your feet flop outward.

Close your eyes, or let your gaze soften, and turn your attention inward.

Take a few normal breaths, not big breaths, just your usual volume, in through your nose and out through your mouth. Notice any tension in your shoulders, neck, stomach or chest, and allow it to relax. Let your breath slow, and take a few moments to settle.

Place one hand on your chest and the other on your lower abdomen.

Fully exhale, letting your lungs empty, then let your breath settle into its own natural rhythm. Without trying to change anything, simply notice which hand is moving: are you breathing mainly into your chest, with the upper hand moving, or into your abdomen, with the lower hand moving?

Now bring your focus to breathing using your diaphragm. It can help to imagine your lower abdomen like a balloon. As you exhale, the diaphragm relaxes and the abdomen deflates, so the lower hand moves inward. As you inhale, the diaphragm pulls out and downward, the abdomen inflates and your lower ribs widen slightly too, so the lower hand moves outward. Your chest and upper ribcage stay relaxed, so the upper hand stays still, or only moves a little.

When you’re ready: exhale, and feel the lower hand move inward. Inhale, and feel the lower hand move outward, your lower ribs widening a little as you do. Continue breathing this way, slowly and deeply, for around five minutes.

When you’re ready, open your eyes, look around, and shift your focus back outward.

Diaphragmatic Breathing

Download audio
Notes from Dr Laura Walton

Self-compassion

Posted on by Dr Laura Walton in Uncategorized

Self-compassion is a really useful skill to develop. A lot of the time, we think that we will get further by beating ourselves up or being highly critical of ourselves when we make mistakes or find something difficult. The evidence suggests that this isn’t actually a particularly effective way to motivate ourselves. If we want to do things differently, learn from our experiences and generally be more psychologically well, self-compassion can be a much more useful approach.

Self-compassion is also something that can be developed and practised. A really good place to start is the work of Dr Kristin Neff, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin who has been studying self-compassion for many years. She has developed a range of practices and exercises through her work, many of which she makes freely available online.

What is self-compassion?

A good introduction is Kristin Neff’s TEDx talk, The Space Between Self-Esteem and Self-Compassion. In this talk, she explains what self-compassion is, why it matters and why being compassionate towards ourselves doesn’t mean letting ourselves off the hook or losing our motivation.

Kristin Neff describes self-compassion as having three main components:

Self-kindness – responding to ourselves with kindness and understanding when we’re struggling, rather than immediately criticising or judging ourselves.

Common humanity – recognising that struggling, getting things wrong and experiencing difficult emotions are all part of being human. Rather than treating our difficulties as evidence that there is something uniquely wrong with us, we can recognise them as part of a shared human experience.

Mindfulness – noticing and acknowledging what we’re experiencing without becoming completely caught up in it. This includes being able to recognise that something hurts or is difficult and giving ourselves enough space to respond to that experience.

Practices and exercises

Kristin Neff’s website has a collection of self-compassion practices and exercises that you can explore for yourself. Some are audio practices that you can listen to and try out, and others are written exercises.

I often recommend particular practices when we talk, depending on what we’re working on. You can also explore the collection yourself and see which practices are useful for you. There isn’t one particular exercise that everybody needs to do.

Explore Kristin Neff’s self-compassion practices and exercises

Hand on heart?

One of the things you may come across in self-compassion practices is the use of supportive physical touch. Traditionally, many practices suggest placing a hand over your heart. That can work well for some people, but it doesn’t necessarily feel comfortable or soothing for everybody.

Kristin Neff encourages people to experiment and find a form of touch that feels supportive to them. One alternative is placing a hand, or both hands, over the solar plexus: the area in the centre of your upper abdomen, just below the bottom of your ribcage and above your belly button. Other possibilities include holding your own hand, touching your face or giving yourself a hug.

The important part isn’t getting the position ‘right’. Notice what it is actually like for you. If putting a hand over your heart doesn’t feel particularly helpful, try somewhere else and see whether another form of supportive touch feels different.

Learn more on self-compassion.org

Notes from Dr Laura Walton

Understanding Shame: The Emotion We Often Don’t Know We’re Feeling

Posted on by Dr Laura Walton in Notes, Uncategorized

Shame is one of the most fascinating emotions I work with, and one of the least understood. Unlike fear or sadness, shame is often invisible even to the person feeling it. Many people come to therapy dealing with panic, anxiety, or a pattern they can’t explain, with no idea that shame is sitting underneath it.

This post is an introduction to what shame actually is, why we have it at all, and what we can do when it becomes a problem rather than a help. I have collected together some of my favourite resources on shame.

What is shame, really?

A good starting point is Brené Brown’s research, which did more than almost anyone’s to bring shame out of the shadows and into public conversation.

The Power of Vulnerability: Brené Brown, TED →

Listening to Shame: Brené Brown, TED →

Between them, these two talks describe shame as something almost everyone experiences but almost no one talks about, and show how much of it operates quietly, shaping our behaviour without our full awareness.

Shame isn’t the enemy: it has a job to do

It would be easy to conclude from this that shame is simply bad, and something to get rid of. In fact, for quite a long time I thought that was what I needed to help people to do. But I would tend to find people were reluctant to let go of shame. Some people were able to tell me that they thought it was important to have shame … and I realised they were right.

Shame does something useful: it helps us understand where the edges are in our relationships and our communities. It’s part of what helps us notice when we might be overstepping a boundary, or at risk of hurting someone, or of putting a relationship at risk. In that sense, shame is a social emotion, one that helps us stay connected to the people around us.

What we want is an adaptive shame response that helps us to function.

This is explored well in a talk by Lisa Etherson, a psychosexual therapist and researcher who has developed something called Shame Containment Theory:

If you want to change your life, change your relationship with shame: Lisa Etherson, TEDxUWS →

This is why we don’t want to try to remove shame altogether, even if that were possible. The problem isn’t that shame exists. It’s what happens when it gets out of hand.

When shame drives panic

Shame is deeply uncomfortable, and that discomfort often makes us want to get away from it as fast as possible. But here’s the difficulty: you cannot get away from an emotion by fighting it. Trying to push shame away doesn’t make it disappear; it tends to do the opposite.

A useful way to picture this is quicksand. If you panic and thrash against it, you sink faster. The instinct to fight is exactly what makes it worse. Emotions, shame included, tend to work the same way: struggling against the feeling is often what tips it over into a full state of fight-or-flight.

This is closely connected to something called experiential avoidance: the general pattern of trying to avoid or escape difficult internal experiences, which so often ends up amplifying them instead.

Contained shame and uncontained shame

One of the most useful things Lisa Etherson’s work offers is a distinction between two different experiences of shame:

  • Contained shame is the quieter, more chronic version: things like a persistent sense of not being good enough, imposter feelings, or a nagging self-criticism. It can sit underneath someone’s life for years without ever being named as shame.
  • Uncontained shame is the acute, overwhelming version: the “kick to the gut” experience of suddenly feeling exposed, often triggered by an unexpected event. This is the version most closely tied to panic, shutdown, or a sense that everything has fallen apart.

Recognising which one is present, and that shame is present at all, is often the turning point in therapy. Once it’s named, it becomes something we can actually work with.

What we can do about it

Over time, we all develop strategies to manage shame. Many of these strategies genuinely helped us once. The trouble is that we can outgrow them, or they can start to get in the way more than they help.

Often, I find that the shame people are carrying has outlived it’s usefulness.