Caroline Cavanagh, a therapist with 12 years of clinical experience, opens a 10-day program on managing seasonal low mood. She explains how your brain's subconscious responds to seasonal cues, then gives three concrete steps: go to bed earlier, eat seasonal local foods, and rate your mood using a downloadable tracker.
Chapters
Hi there and welcome to Autumn Blues. Thank you so much for registering. If you don't know me, my name is Caroline and I'm going to be popping up in your inbox for the next 10 days sharing tips and techniques that I know work. So let me tell you why I'm doing this. It started probably about 4 or 5 years ago. I was out on a dog walk with a friend of mine whinging about how hard things seemed to be at the moment, that I was really tired, anxiety levels seemed to be higher, and she turned to me and said, Caroline, don't we have this conversation this time every year? And it was one of those what I call aha moments. We just went, oh yeah, that's true. And that was when the seed of Autumn Blues was sown. If you want to do something, if you want to feel differently, do something differently. And so what I've drawn on is 12 years of working as a therapist to use the tools that I know work with my clients, but most importantly, they're the tools that I use so that I haven't kept repeating that cycle. Now, I don't want to pretend these are magic wands. They're not. The atmospheric changes do influence, influence us And it is likely that you will feel a bit more tired, a bit more anxious. But what I'm aiming to do through this program is rather than that happening, is that it doesn't go as deep, but more importantly, you bounce back up more quickly. So today, what we're gonna start with is a little bit of a biology lesson. So if you imagine your brain in 2 parts, front part here is the part we call the conscious mind. It's rational, logical, deductive, and also has the ability to go out into the past or out into the future. Back here is the part we call the subconscious, which is irrational, illogical, immature, only works in the now, because it's doing all those things that need to be run in the now. So it's making our heartbeat, it's making us breathe, it's digesting food, it's keeping our body alive. And all of those programs have been embedded over millions of years evolution. Also stored back there is what I call the database. Everything that we experience gets filtered into that back part of the mind and stored away, and the mind uses that database to help us in the behaviors and decisions and thoughts that we make. So for example, you'd have had the experience at some time of burning your hand by putting it on something hot, so that stays in the database and So that it prevents you from making a bad decision and burning your hand again. It all works. So if we want to change a behavior or a feeling or a thought, we need to change what goes on in the database. And that's fundamentally what we're going to be doing over these 10 days of working together. And the first thing I'm going to share with you today is another one of those aha moments. It's one of those things that you probably realize already, But when you— when someone brings it into the front of your mind, that you go, that makes sense. And if we go back to the fact that a lot of what we do has been programmed over millions of years, we have what I term an inner Neanderthal. We're a little less hairy now because we've got electricity and walls, but our inner Neanderthal is still running the programs That they have been running over those millions of years. So our Neanderthal ancestors, at this time of year when it got dark early, would go to sleep earlier. They would only be eating seasonal foods. They were reacting with the environmental changes. However, what we now do is fight against them. And there is— my daughter's going to be proud of me because I actually looked this off— it's the 3rd Newtonian law that every force is met with an equal and opposite force. So the seasonal change is doing this, and we are doing this, and it creates friction, it creates stress, which drains us. So what we're going to be looking at doing is, rather than fighting against it, is to Start to work with it. So the action that I'd love you to take on board today is acknowledge we can't stop the clocks going back, we can't stop having to go to work in the dark, coming home in the dark, but start to listen to your inner Neanderthal. If they're saying, you're really tired, you need to go to bed earlier, go to bed earlier. Don't let that conscious mind try to override that subconscious inner Neanderthal and say, no, no, I've still got this to do, because all you're doing then is creating that inner stress which is going to drain you more. Think about what you're eating. Neanderthal man wouldn't have been eating tomatoes imported from Greece. They eat what's local. So the more you can eat seasonal foods, things that are readily available in nature now, The more you're giving your body what your body is programmed to need at this time of year. So your activity for day 1, for today, is to start listening to your inner Neanderthal and rather than fighting against it, start to work with it. And there's one other little activity that I'd love you to do. On the email that you got this morning, on which you clicked to get to this video, there's also another download to a document. And this activity is gonna take seconds, definitely less than a minute. What I would love you to do is to give you a score for how you feel today. Where are you right now? Because by investing in this 10 days of doing this program, you need to know if you've made a return on it or not. So we need to know where you are now, so in 10 days' time, you know where you've got to. And if it really works, you're more likely to do it again next year. So listen to your Neanderthal, and rather than fight, work with it. Go to bed a bit earlier, eat the right sort of foods, and acknowledge how you're feeling is relevant. And give yourself a score through the series of very short questions To know where you are now so you can see where you've got to at the end of this course. So that's all for me for today. I will be popping up in your inbox again tomorrow with something that builds on what we've started today, a bit more biology, but I'll save that for tomorrow. Bye-bye for now. Have a great day.
