PSYCHOTHERAPY
Psychotherapy: Stress Management and Wellness Coaching
Psychotherapy is primarily a talking therapy which is designed to help clients change and overcome their problems in desired ways and improve their health and well-being.
Remember the age old saying: a problem shared is a problem halved. This is very true and by just talking to your therapist can be immensely beneficial in starting the process of resolving your problems and enabling you to begin the process of helping you to move forward with your life.
A combination of tools can be used within this therapy such as Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), critical thinking and coaching. Indeed psychotherapy can be a very useful adjunct for both the professional and amateur sports person who wishes to improve and enhance their confidence and performance.
Almost all types of psychotherapy involve the client and therapist developing a therapeutic relationship and this enables a pathway of honest and confidential communication, creating a dialogue, and working together to overcome problematic thoughts or behaviours. The Psychotherapist will listen and discuss important issues with you and from this discussion strategies can be designed to help you to learn new behaviour and to cope and/or resolve a problem or problems. Indeed, many clients often develop their own solutions.
Psychotherapy is increasingly viewed as a distinct profession in its own right and psychotherapists may come from a variety of backgrounds, and may be legally or voluntarily regulated. Both our Practitioners are Registered Members of The National Council of Psychotherapy.
Psychoanalytic:
An approach to therapy that involves delving into a patient's thoughts and past experiences to seek out unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories that may influence behaviour.
Cognitive-behavioural:
A type of psychotherapy that involves cognitive and behavioural techniques to change negative thoughts and maladaptive behaviours.
Humanistic:
A form of therapy that focuses on helping people maximise their potential
We use our skills in Psychotherapy to predominantly help clients with Stress Management and Wellness Coaching to enable them to learn coping strategies and have a toolbox of skills in order to bring a functional and healthy balance to their lives.
Stress is when we feel emotional or mental strain or tension when we find ourselves in anxiety producing situations. Depending on how we interpret the level of 'threat', our bodies react accordingly and instinctively.
Short term stress is helpful to the body and is known as Eustress, however, long term exposure to stress is harmful to the physiology and hemodynamic functioning of the human body.
Exposure to long term (chronic) stress can result in substantial and/or severe long term clinical health problems. Stress causes a surge of hormones in your body. These stress hormones are released to enable you to deal with pressures or threats – the so-called fight or flight response.
1. Alarm reaction: Fight or flight response
When we are stressed, in fight or flight mode, one of the body’s physiological responses is that our breathing increases, and becomes rapid and shallow. The fight or flight reaction is our body’s primitive response to what it perceives as a ‘threat’. The ‘threat’ used to be predators chasing us or when we had to run away from our enemies. Nowadays the 'threats' are more subtle, such as 'internal threats': stresses in our family life, fears at work, being stuck in traffic, a job interview, an impending exam, a stressful social situation, or when we feel anxious.
2. Resistance or adaptation
When we reach Stage 2, our bodies have a rapid physical response to the perceived threat. There will be increased and decreased activity in various bodily functions as your whole system prioritizes what it needs in order to deal with the stressor. For example, your circulation increases blood supply to brain, muscles and to limbs so you can run faster and digestion slows down or stops as it is not needed at that precise moment.
After the 'threat' has been perceived as resolved, the parasympathetic nervous system returns many physiological functions to normal levels (homeostasis) while the body focuses resources against the stressor or 'threat'.
However, at this point, blood glucose levels remain high, cortisol and adrenalin continue to circulate at elevated levels, there is an increase in the heart rate and blood pressure, with rapid possibly shallow breathing yet the outwardly you may appear normal.
Even though you may feel as if you have dealt with the 'threat', for example, having got through the stressful job interview, your body may still be on high alert.
3. Exhaustion stage or burn out
After lengthy periods of incessant stress, people enter the third phase of exhaustion or burn out. This is when people often start to get sick as their immune system is compromised. At this stage we have no defenses left as we have been on high alert for so long and it's fair to say that physical and/or mental disaster is imminent.
By identifying and understanding what actually causes your stress and/or your stressors.
Learning coping strategies and applying tools to limit and/or reduce your stress level.
Planning a way forward and by sign posting you on how to make the changes that will enable you to manage your stress by yourself and/or with our support ...and in some special cases, with the support of other health care professionals.
We use a variety of techniques:
- Psychotherapy
- Hypnotherapy
- Coaching
- Solution Focused Therapy
- Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)
- Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
Do you have a question?
Please feel free to contact us.