When you start to expose your feelings through a practice like journaling, your nervous system may be further shaken up and activated. You may be wound up full of emotion from your practice, and feeling overwhelmed with distressing topics you’ve addressed and let rip in your expressive journal writing.
Regulating your nervous system out of this hyperarousal fight or flight survival state is key to healing and soothing yourself is a great way to not only balance and ground yourself after the emotional work, but to soothe the fear in your mind. Dialling down the anxiety allows your brain to let go of the over-practised pain pathway, fear focus and flare response that comes with having chronic stress illness issues.
There are many ways to self-soothe. Take a walk in nature, do some yoga, listen to music, watch a funny show, cuddle your pets, sit in silence, meditate, take a warm bath, co-regulate with your favourite person, practice breathwork etc.
My medicines of choice are yoga, meditation and breathwork.
Yoga is my preferred movement of choice which I usually practice after meditating if I have time that day. I particularly love yoga because it can be as gentle as you like, and it works the body, mind and breath at once and has been massively beneficial in my journey for this reason.
I teach gentle beginner-level yoga, meditation and breathwork classes for this community, focusing on calming the nervous system and getting back to movement without fear. Find out more about this in my Mind-Body Mastery Membership.
Meditation has become quite an addiction for me. Another one of those things I used to be quite sceptical about. Meditation is NOT hippie nonsense, but I did think that the idea of quietening my monkey brain was impossible. Meditation soothes me like nothing else ever has for me but it's not for everyone. I usually prefer guided meditations so that I have less chance of my chattering mind distracting me - it still does, but I’ve come to learn that those distractions are normal.
It took me a couple of tries to properly get into it, but now I feel like I’m teleported to another dimension. I can sometimes go so deep that I can see psychedelic patterns, my body feels immobilised and nothing can get in to distract me. I crave this feeling now and do it and recommend it to others as much as I can. During my healing journey, I always practised after JournalSpeak, but often before bed too, and after yoga.
Meditation has made me calmer and more mindful overall, it's like a sweet sedative with NO bad side effects. The power of visualisation and imagination are really astounding. Being able to imagine your eyes melting like molasses into the bed beneath you, can put you in an incredibly relaxed frame of mind that has MANY MANY benefits to your overall wellbeing.
Meditation teaches you how to cultivate equanimity, which basically means you are much more likely to stay calm and centred amid any kind of chaos, which is really beneficial for recovery as a neutral/safe mindset towards your symptoms is really key.
Meditation offers a powerful practice of observation that calms mental chatter, reduces overthinking, and significantly diminishes tendencies towards procrastination and rumination, benefits that extend to all aspects of daily life, regardless of journaling practices.
Research indicates that meditation induces physiological changes in brain structure, positively influencing emotional regulation, fear, anxiety, and self-perception. Furthermore, meditation training enhances various willpower skills, including attention, focus, stress management, impulse control, and self-awareness.
Critically for us self-healers, it counteracts hypervigilance by activating the parasympathetic nervous system and quieting the sympathetic nervous system, facilitating a shift from the stress response into a state of rest and repair, which is essential for healing. Emerging research also suggests that meditation can regulate the body's vibrational frequency, restoring balance with the Earth's natural resonance; an imbalance in this frequency may contribute to distress, anxiety, insomnia, and a compromised immune system, thereby hindering the healing process. I find this subject both compelling and the practice deeply rewarding, a state of profound calm I've not experienced anywhere else.
One of my favourite things about all of this work is that it takes very little external influence to work, once you've learnt the basics...
Find out more about the benefits of yoga, meditation and mindfulness here.
THE POWER IS ALL INSIDE OF YOU, AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN. It can feel like you are literally coming back from the dead, to save yourself!
Self-soothing can also come in the form of comforting and soothing yourself and your thought patterns. The more you can meet the chaotic thoughts you’re having about your symptoms, the more likely they are to relax.
I used to be quite a catastrophiser, I reacted dramatically to pretty much everything and was always assuming the worst-case scenario. I obsessed over how rubbish my life had become. Over time I started to understand that my thoughts were perpetuating my situation so I started to learn grace and patience with unlearning those patterns and changing my mind.
By turning fear, symptoms, anxiety and the ongoing stress of my situation around, I started to see real results.
Right now, take a deeper breath if you can, into your belly and fill your ribs right up to your neck, and as you exhale decide with your whole heart to try not to fear what is happening because there is literally nothing to fear. You are not broken!
More on mindset in the following section.
Having the right mindset and redirecting maladaptive patterns, thought spirals and beliefs gives you the tools to banish chronic conditions for good.
