Horses Help Humans Be Real, Honest, and Present | Liz Letson | TEDxBemidji

Taking therapy outside benefits patients and therapists

22 January 2020 - Link to article

Talking therapy sessions held outdoors in natural settings can be more beneficial than those held inside.

That is the finding of research by chartered psychologist Dr Sam Cooley being presented today at the annual conference of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Clinical Psychology in Solihull.

Dr Sam Cooley, from the University of Leicester, said:

“Talking therapy is an established and effective form of support for a range of mental health difficulties, but it appears the four walls of the therapy room aren’t always the most effective place for it.”

The researchers conducted a review of 38 previous pieces of research into outdoor therapy published since 1994, which involved 322 therapists and 163 patients.

They found that therapy conducted outdoors benefited from providing patients with increased freedom to express themselves, and created a greater connection between therapist, patient and the natural world.

It also provided benefits for therapists themselves, with wellbeing increasing when conducting therapy sessions outdoors.

The therapists included clinical psychologists, counselling psychologists, counsellors and psychodynamic psychotherapists.

Dr Sam Cooley added:

“Outdoor therapy can provide an alternative approach with real benefits for both clients and therapists.

The option of outdoor therapy should be included in more training curriculums and formalised to provide genuine choice to clients when the circumstances are right for it.”

‘Kintsugi’ is the remarkable Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with elegance and grace - a tradition with a lot to teach us more generally about how to handle the broken bits of ourselves.

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"Widen the Window"

 No matter how much you may struggle today because of stress and trauma in your past, you can train yourself to be more resilient.

"During the course of her pioneering research into coping with adversity, prolonged stress exposure, and trauma, Dr. Stanley has worked with neuroscientists and stress researchers to test her game-changing resilience training program among U.S. military troops. She’s taught these tried-and-tested methods to thousands of individuals who work in high-stress environments.

Reflecting on her own experiences of stress, trauma, and recovery, her approach is at once personal and wide-ranging. With plenty of stories from the people she’s trained, she explains the science of how to direct our attention to perform under stress and recover from trauma.

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Widen the Window takes on the “top-down” thinking brain-dominant tools that still dominate most performance enhancement and resilience programs—and mental health care practices—in America. As she explains, the newest scientific findings about the brain, nervous system, and body suggest these techniques are incomplete, especially for recovery after trauma. Stress arousal and recovery are survival brain jobs. Thus, widening the window requires targeting the survival brain with “bottom-up” strategies, which many mainstream techniques neglect.

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Link to book

"Vision and Breathing May Be the Secrets to Surviving 2020"

Stanford neurobiologist Andrew Huberman discusses the two things we can always control, even during a high-stress election and scary COVID pandemic - 

By Jessica Wapner on November 16, 2020

What is stress?

"Stress is one position along the continuum of what we call autonomic arousal. At one end of this continuum would be somebody in a coma. At the very other end of that continuum is a full-blown panic attack: heart racing, pupils dilating, hyperventilating. In between we have lower levels of stress [and the states of being] alert and focused, sleepy and asleep. Stress is generally a high level of autonomic arousal. It was designed to be a generic response to mobilize the body.

Sometimes that’s well matched to the demands of life. If you need to run and catch your train, you want all the things that go along with stress to go pursue that train. But if the stress response is spontaneous or excessive, it can start to feel pathological."

What is stress’s relationship to vision?

"When you see something exciting or stressful—a news headline, a fraudulent credit-card charge—heart rate increases; breathing increases. One of the most powerful changes is with vision. The pupils dilate, and there’s a change in the position of the lens in the eye. Your visual system goes into the equivalent of portrait mode on a smartphone. Your field of vision narrows. You see one thing in sharper relief, and everything else becomes blurry. Your eyeballs rotate just slightly toward your nose, which sets your depth of field and focus on a single location. This is a primitive and ancient mechanism by which stress controls the visual field."

How does this visual mode affect the body?

This focal vision activates the sympathetic nervous system. All the neurons from your neck to the top of your pelvis get activated at once and deploy a bunch of transmitters and chemicals that make you feel agitated and want to move.

Why is the visual field so connected to this brain state?

"Something that most people don’t appreciate is that the eyes are actually two pieces of brain. They are not connected to the brain; they are brain. During development, the eyes are part of the embryonic forebrain. Your eyes get extruded from the skull during the first trimester, and then they reconnect to the rest of the brain. So they’re part of the central nervous system.

Having the eyes outside the skull orients the organism to the time of day. But it also means that you’ve got two pieces of brain that can register events in the environment at a distance in order to adjust the overall state of alertness in the rest of the brain and body. It would be terrible if we had to wait until things were in contact with us before we could prepare to react to them."

Is there a visual mode associated with calmness that can change our stress levels?

"Yes: panoramic vision, or optic flow. When [you] look at a horizon or at a broad vista, you don’t look at one thing for very long. If you keep your head still, you can dilate your gaze so you can see far into the periphery—above, below and to the sides of you. That mode of vision releases a mechanism in the brain stem involved in vigilance and arousal.

We can actually turn off the stress response by changing the way that we are viewing our environment, regardless of what’s in that environment."

Read the rest of this article here