LESSONS FOR PARENTS

Hello, Heather Prince here, Family Harmony Coach, with Information for Parents, where we help you be the best informed parent to create the right choices. Today I have the pleasure of introducing you to Fiona Flaherty, who will explain about the huge changes in our health service and common problems.

Stress is when the body responds to a set of circumstances that can either be physical or they can be mental. The problem is, it's recognising them and doing something about them.

Yeah.

The good news is they're not avoidable, and you don't always want them to be avoidable because that's how our bodies function.

Yes.

So some of the issues that either parents or in fact teens bring themselves is that it's how you're feeling. So it's permission to feel really well.

Yes.

And most of the time we don't feel really well. It's because we actually don't know what feeling well is about. So if I was to do a broad brush of some of the issues people bring, it's to do with digestive issues, it's to do with sleep and sleep patterns, it's to do with outside stressors, things like friendships that you keep. The world is driven by IT, So it's the speed and pace that things are going.

Yeah.

If you look at us as a gene pool, as humans, we're changing evolutionarily over millions of years. So right down to our digestive systems, they haven't changed, but processed food has come in and that's made a huge difference to us.

So do you feel, Fiona, that our diet needs to be looked at and processed foods should be cut out completely?

No, I don't. And the reason I say that is diet is a Greek word for daytime eating. And that was great when we were all Neanderthals, so we lived in caves and we didn't have electricity. We lived by fires that we had built. Most of the time, if you're looking at processed foods, it's because of this magic word called convenience. So we really want to just take process that we are living longer. But we're not living in great health. So we want to improve the health because actually our bodies are actually lasting 70, 70+, 80, 80+. So we want to have the best health ever. So processed foods do actually have a place, and I'll talk about this a bit later.

That's really interesting. So when a teen or a 20-something has got skin issues, that's normally related with their digestive system?

Yes, of course it is, and you're right to notice that. So if we look at skin issues, so the commonest ones are psoriasis and eczema. They're the two we tend to think about. Your digestive system goes from your mouth right through to your bottom. In an adult, it's 33 feet in length, which is huge. So it's a big organ and it functions almost independently. The problem is the skin is an organ that excretes toxins, so if you put things into your digestive system that you just can't absorb very well, it'll come out in your skin. So that's why we often relate things like eczema and psoriasis to particular food groups.

So Fiona, how would you recommend to someone regaining balance with regard to stress, which is shown by a skin complaint or a feeling of unwellness?

First of all, it's about, and I would recommend this for all of us, is keep a journal. A journal is not a diary. A journal is just a record of what's happening to you at any point in time. If I define depression first of all and its manifestations, then we'll have an idea of what perhaps we could do with it. So depression can be So stress is often defined as either anxiety or feelings that have physical symptoms, as you've mentioned earlier, such as indigestion, to affect your digestive system, or your concentration. What we want to look at first of all is sleep patterns, because the human body demands sleep. If we don't get sleep, we don't detoxify, and if we don't detoxify, it's all those toxins that we're carrying around with us Every single day, and that is one of the biggest causes of depression. So with an adult, it's at least 8 hours of quality sleep, and the only way to get quality sleep is to be in an area that has no other distractions, such as mobile phones, such as television, even things like books. You actually need to rest the whole mind and body. Because when you get feelings of Depression, anxiety, blood pressure goes up, and you're never too old to have blood pressure that is raised above a normal level. So the only way to control it is to put your whole body in an environment where you've reduced that big risk.

And how do you feel about working with meditation at this time to help the mind go within and reach that inner peace within yourself?

It works. The problem is when we're younger, we're living at such a fast pace, we see meditation as something that we don't get, we don't understand, and it's using time that perhaps we haven't got. So it's about refocusing. So let me find the opposite of meditation, which is if you're always on a smart telephone, if you're always watching TV and playing games, You're exciting all your brainwaves, so you're never actually getting to experience that inner peace.

Yes.

So one of the ways to get really simple meditation, when people say, how do I do it? How do I relax if I'm doing a physical activity like yoga or Pilates? Is if you take away that stimuli, which is electronic, which is artificial, you automatically have gone into a meditative process. What happens is the brainwaves If you think of them as like this, if you've got an IT device, start to pattern out, you actually get quite a flat pattern. It means that your thoughts start at the beginning and they go to the end.

There may be a number of parents watching this video today who are thinking, my teen or 20-something is actually working on addiction. It could be an addiction to computer games, it could be an addiction to chocolate, or many other things. And what would you say about that?

Addictions are real, and the good news is, as a grandparent and as a parent of a 25 and a 21-year-old, we all have addictions. It's about recognising whether the addiction with a big A Is it bigger than us? Because if it is, it takes over how we completely function. So let's take really simple addictions. One of them for us could be constantly addicted to your mobile device, which means that it's consuming more of your waking time. Or it could be in a food source, so it could be chocolate, could be cheese. It could be something recreational like alcohol or cigarettes or indeed recreational drugs. All of these have physical Physical symptoms on our body, which means that normal function is either deleted, interrupted, or stops completely. And once the addiction is bigger than we are, it's very difficult to get that control back without professional help. So as a parent, what do you do? If you chastise, it doesn't work. It's about recognising how that addiction has actually changed that person.

What do you feel, Fiona, that parents can do about creating boundaries?

As we know, we spend a lot of our time telling our children what to do, and then as we get older, our children don't want to be told what to do. It's perhaps about recognising what are the potential issues and how they could be addressed to And working together. So as a parent, we'll always have responsibility for our children, even if they've left home. We worry about them, so we become intrusive, we become invasive. We, we don't become their Facebook friends. That's one of the issues. So it's about signposting young people into finding great ways that they can potentially manage it. The problem with a lot of stimulants, so if we take alcohol and cigarettes and smoking and recreational drugs, is they don't make you feel good for very long. They actually have quite a depressive effect on our systems, which means that long-term they affect what happens in our brain and often permanently. So if you see a change in behaviour for which you cannot find a reason, so it's not having joined a gym or or in a new relationship in which you can see that there's either an excitement, a happiness, euphoria. It's where you actually start to see some negative behaviours creep in, that's where you want to tackle them. And the easiest way to do that is not to ask invasive questions. They shouldn't be finger-pointing and they should be open. It's really getting somebody to open up about how they feel. And asking somebody how they feel, particularly if they're a teen, is usually answered by fine. And fine is not a word. And I do laugh because that's something that we pick up a lot in our clinics. It's giving describing words and giving people the opportunity to say, do you feel today is a day when you feel that you are alive and happy and Giving, giving individuals something that they can work with.

Absolutely. I know that when I work with teens and 20-somethings that they often say, I don't feel heard. And sometimes it's just giving them the space and the silence to actually put into words what they're feeling.

Exactly. And we live in a world that is You don't have to do everything now.

It will be there.

If you don't have your phone to play with now, it will still be there. If you don't ring a friend, they'll still be there. It's about realising that, you know, your entire life is a journey and you don't have to do it all in your 20s or your 30s. In fact, you can have a great time when you get much older. There may be physical things you can't do, but it's about enjoying the entire journey. And most people are in a hurry to get there. My definition of there is it doesn't exist.

I totally agree with you. It's very cheesy, but it is all about the journey.

Yeah, because it's now.

Yes.

It is just now.

Yeah, and it's to be in the moment.

Exactly.

And enjoy now.

Yeah. I think something you mentioned earlier, Heather, about exam pressures and work pressures. Is we've got to remember that we've actually got a lot more control than we think. If you are at school, so you have schedules, and if you're at work, we have schedules in terms of times that they expect us to be there and times and jobs, things we have to do when we're there. You still have an element of control, and it's about completion. And most dissatisfaction, most unhappiness, Most anxiety, which precludes depression, tends to come from the fact that it appears to be bigger than us. And what you've always got to remember is you are always bigger than everything else that you do. And if you were to analyse that, just think of it as a piece of paper that you've cut into tiny squares, and really you can pick up as many as you need. You don't need to do everything at once or straight away.

Absolutely, yes. And it's just acknowledging that, isn't it, and getting that into perspective and understanding that you have no control over anything apart from yourself.

Exactly. You are the, you are the most important person. And parents with the best will in the world often tell us what to do. And we know ourselves, as we become older parents with elderly parents ourselves, they will still advise us about what we should and shouldn't do. It's about taking that, making decisions for yourself. And the simpler the decision is, and the simpler you keep your life, the happier you will be. Health perspective has changed enormously. I think that there is less dependency on our GPs and our pharmacy services, thankfully, because it's acute care, which means that they're the resources, those, the hospitals, that we use when we need them. And it's about managing ourselves. Medigate Healthcare does pop-up clinics, which means that we pop up in colleges and in schools. We pop up in mosques, we pop up in synagogues, we pop up in Christian churches, and we run a lot of open events. We do a lot of workshops for families, which we segregate either into toddlers or teens. mother and baby, we do a lot of men-only workshops. So it's the opportunity to talk about most of our concerns and where needed with physical examination at the same time.

So if anyone watching this thinks that's absolutely fantastic, how do I get in touch with Fiona? How do they?

You can find us on our website, which is the World Wide Web, which is meducatehealthcare.com. We cover all of East London and we're currently based in South Woodford. which is on the borders of London, but we have the advantage of we pop up where you are.

Excellent. Thank you so much for your fabulous advice today, Fiona. It really is a refreshing eye-opener, and I hope that everyone who's watched this has gained something from listening to you.

Excellent. Thank you again, Heather.

Thank you. Bye-bye. If you've enjoyed watching this short video with Fiona, please pass it on to your friends and any parents that you feel would benefit from what we've chatted about during this short video. And if you like what I do, please sign up for my newsletter on my website.