Stress busting tip number 8 - compartmentalisation, easier to do than say!!

Hi there, it's Caroline Cavanagh, and I'm here with tip 8 of my stress-busting advent calendar. These are all tips that, as an anxiety specialist, I use with clients, but also a vast majority of them I use myself on a day-to-day basis as well. And today, this is one I love, and I'm very mindful that all of these videos that I've done so far is like, oh, this one's brilliant, this one— they've all been brilliant, but This one I do teach a lot one-to-one with people, and when they get it, they really can make some quite profound changes. I'm going to start off by reading this little poem out to you. So I don't know it off by heart, so forgive me. So it goes like this: Lost your pen equals no pen. No pen equals no notes. No notes equals no study. No study equals fail. Fail equals no diploma. No diploma equals no work. No work equals no money. No money, no food. No food equals skinny. Skinny equals ugly. Ugly equals no love. No love equals no marriage. No marriage, no children. No children, alone. Alone equals depressed. Depressed equals sickness. Sickness equals death. The moral of the story: don't lose your pen or you'll die. Now it's, yeah, a fun poem, I get it, but I love it because it indicates how quite often something little can just spiral out of control really, really quickly. The antidote I have to this is something that I call compartmentalisation. Now, the best way to think about this is if you imagine an Intercity 125 train. If a fire sparks up in that train, it's a bit like that poem, things spiral out of control. The smoke, the flames will transfer through the train really, really quickly. and affect everything within that whole train. However, if you turn your train into like an old Edwardian Victorian style carriages, and in my mind I love the, like, the Dumbo train, you know, where the one that they got the giraffe head sticking out the top. I always think of this as like the Dumbo train, but they're very separate carriages that are kept together with buffers. They That means that if a fire breaks out in one carriage, it can't actually spread to the other ones nearly as easily. Now, this is a technique that I've really sort of stolen, adapted, probably a nicer way, from a process that's used with people that have depression, because depression is a bit like that poem. Things spiral out of control very, very quickly, and that fire spreads throughout the whole of the train, whereas if you can compartmentalize it It means that you can deal with that fire, but other areas of the life can continue to actually be very effective. So the technique is about looking at your life as a number of carriages. So for most people, you have your— you might have your health carriage, you have your parent carriage, you might have your friends carriage, your career carriage. Most of us will have, you know, 5, 6 carriages, maybe more. On your train, some of them bigger than the other. But the whole point is, when you're in your carriage, you just focus on what's going on in that carriage. So if, for example, a fire does break out in your work carriage and there's just a nightmare going on in there, when you leave work, you shut the door, you hop over into the other carriage, which may be your home carriage, where everything is still safe, calm, and normal. And the wonderful thing is, when you leave the fire raging in that carriage and you're not stoking it and poking it, giving it your energy with all of your thoughts, the fire typically dies down. Even if it doesn't die down the next day when you go back to work, the fire is still raging, at least you're going back into it with a clear mind, having been able to relax in the other carriages. So this is kind of perhaps not the most simple of techniques to get your head around, and if anyone wants to talk to me more directly about how this may work for them in their life, please just message me directly, get in touch in any of the many ways that you can get in touch with me, because it is a wonderful one. As I said, this is one that's used with the clinical treatment of depression, and I've just adapted it to help people with stress and anxiety just by keeping some boundaries in between the different areas of your life and So that stress, anxiety is contained in certain areas. So as with all of these videos that I've been doing, uh, so far, so there's 24 that I'm bringing to you throughout the whole of Advent. I would love to get these messages out because the more tools that people have to deal with stress, the more that we can help make what is a really stressful world easier to live within. So if anyone would like to share any of these videos, I would really, really appreciate that. And please let me know that you shared it, and I'd love to then put your name in a hat. Similarly, if anyone likes my page, because that all helps more things get spread and other people get notified— if anyone knows about Facebook logarithms, help me on that one too— equally, their name will go in a hat, and then after Christmas I'm gonna pick a couple of names out of that hat and offer to work with people one-to-one with my absolute compliments. So please help me to help others. This is tip number 8. If you want to go back and share some of the others, that would be wonderful too. But for now, think trains. Change your Intercity 125 into, in my case, a Dumbo-like train or one of the Victorian-type carriages. Compartmentalise the stress, and you'll find that then you've got areas that you can go to relax that are still working really, really well. And that sometimes can be an absolute lifesaver. So that's my tip for now. Over and out, and I'll be back tomorrow with tip number 9. Bye-bye for now.