Join us for the second part of our special 3 part series with Stuart Couling, a seasoned mindfulness and well-being coach, on the Happiness, Health, and Relationships podcast.

This episode delves deeper into the practical applications of mindfulness in everyday life, exploring how being present can transform our interactions and experiences. Stuart shares insights on combating stress through mindfulness, including personal case studies and the transformative 'STOP' technique.

Learn how to embrace the present, reduce anxiety, and improve overall well-being through simple, mindful practices that anyone can incorporate into their daily routine.

Don't miss these valuable tips on living a more mindful, fulfilled life.

We're back again for part two in our three-part series with Stuart Coulson, a mindfulness and well-being coach. Can't wait to get started on part two for some more top tips and advice. Let's get started.

Welcome to Happiness, Health and Relationships podcast. If you're looking for inspiration on powerful healthy habits, you've come to the right place. I'm Angeline and I've been working with people for over 10 years in therapy and this podcast will cut through the myths and misinformation on healthy lifestyle.

I'll be interviewing experts in their field, providing top tips and motivation for six elements of living medicine. The six elements are reducing stress, exercise and fitness, nutrition, sleep, reducing addictive substances and how to master healthy relationships. Let's get started.

So, so being fully present and mindfully, mindfully doing the yoga or doing the cleaning or whatever it may be. Because what you tend to find is that, um, I experience it sometimes on a weekend where I'm, uh, busy planning what I'm going to have for a takeaway. And while I'm having that takeaway, I might be choosing a film to watch after the takeaway.

While I'm watching the film, I might be on my phone, but I've, I, that's the old me really, because that's what I used to do. And I noticed a lot of other people doing that. So, um, somebody will ask you that, oh, how else to take away? I don't know.

Cause I was choosing something to watch on Netflix. You weren't fully present. I was eating it very fast.

So what we, what we tend to find with, um, human beings in this current society is that we're, our brains are so fast. We're, we're programmed to multitask and do a million things at once that we struggle to slow that down. So we're always a step ahead.

So we're never fully present with what we're doing because we're thinking after this, I'm going to, it's like planning a holiday and you get on that holiday and often you'll get people who are planning the next holiday. Oh, I like it here. So where do you think we'll go next year? Well, we're here at the moment, let's experience this holiday.

And it's about training the brain in every part of our lives, whether it's work, whether we're just chilling, whether we're going for a walk, whatever it is to just experience the now. And the more you do that, you will enjoy the now. And you won't miss out on so much because that's what happens is our minds get so busy and we're planning.

I didn't notice that little Robin that's out there. I didn't notice that person who might've needed a hand with something. So yeah, you live a much fuller life if you can be present.

Absolutely. What can people expect? So let's talk a little bit about the impact of stress. We're talking about one of the six pillars of living medicine is stress.

And so I guess mindfulness would be the most obvious antidote to that, I guess. If we're stressed, we know there's a link with chronic illness and it impacts us in lots of different ways. What do you think about that? What have you found in your experience that the impact, I guess, of stress and then the benefits of mindfulness that you've seen? If you can give us a case study of some description, I guess.

Yeah. So obviously, as you say, stress can lead to lots of physical conditions. And what I get people to do is accept where they are at this moment.

Where are you at this moment? So my stress levels are 10. So, okay, what does 10 mean to you? So what is stress to you? And a lot of people can't answer that straight away. So it's really simple.

So what's in your mind when you're stressed? Okay, so it's worrying. So what is worry? So I'm worrying that this is going to go wrong. So it's often going into the future.

Sometimes it'll be going into the past. I'm worried that I did that wrong and I'm going to be in trouble for it. And I'm worried about my health or somebody else's health.

So where are you feeling that in the body? So where is stress in the body to you? What is stress? So I'm clenching my jaw. I'm really tense in the body. I've got my shoulders are so tense that they are really aching and I've got a backache and I've got this and this is happening to me.

So, okay, so you've recognized that now by being mindful. So you've brought your full awareness into your thoughts and your mind and your body. And so what we're going to do now is, okay, so we're going to bring our awareness to what we can see around us.

What can we hear? What can we touch? What can we feel? What can we see? And it's about sort of like coming away from that and just detaching from the stress, from the mind, from the body. And it's about practice. And the more that you do it, the more you start to realize, actually, I don't feel so stressed.

So you get people to journal it and week after week. So if I do a one-to-one with somebody, they'll come back the next week. Okay.

So you said you was going to practice the stop practice. What shall I, I'll explain that in a second, actually, what stop is. So what did that do for you? It really helped.

And this is one of the most powerful things, is practice called stop, which I'll obviously explain. So when they journal things, they start to recognize, actually, two weeks ago, I was really stressed. I was recognizing that my mind was really busy.

I couldn't take anymore. My body was tense. I was aching in my shoulders because I was holding them in a certain way.

And then I chose to actually, because I put my full awareness with my body, I scanned my body. I decided that I would loosen my shoulders. I'd take deeper breaths because we don't breathe much when we're stressed as well.

So, so yeah, I've gone off a complete tangent there, but that's kind of like a typical case study of like who, who will come in with stress and anxiety. And it's about accepting where they are at the moment and then being curious about the body and their mind. Yeah.

And I guess it makes sense if we're holding tension in the body, then we're putting the body under duress. And so over time, that's when we start to suffer more physical symptoms. Yeah.

And if you can bring your awareness to your shoulders that are tense, you could do something about it. But if you're stuck in the mind, your awareness is with your mind and your thoughts. So you will never go to the body.

But if you can just remind yourself to come to the body in the breath, am I breathing fully? No, I'm shallow breathing. That's what we do, isn't it? When we get, so if you get in traffic and we think you're going to be late for something, you're in the mind. So you tend to like shallow breathe and you're tense and you hold the steering wheel really tight and your shoulders are like this and you're clenching your jaw.

When you bring your full awareness to all that, you can release all that. I'll explain the stop process if you want. Yeah.

When you're in one of those situations where you've got stress and anxiety, something might've gone wrong. Say you're recording this podcast and we get a power cut. So something will happen.

So it's like, so you got to that point of stress and anxiety. So the S part is just stop. Okay.

So that's going on. We'd stop what we're doing. We'll put everything down and we go on to the T part.

The T part is take some breaths. So maybe you can just put your hands on your tummy and take some full deep breaths and make sure that you're breathing into the stomach. Cause when we're shallow breathing, we're breathing to the chest.

So we're just like that. So you breathe fully all the way down. Notice the, the breath entering through the nose, the full journey of the breath and how it sounds, how it feels to release that breath.

Do as many of those as you want. And often I find that that's enough to make me feel calm. The O part is observe what's going on.

So you observe what's going on in the mind. So my mind is really peed off at the moment that I've got a power cut and I hope I'm not going to manifest this by the way. Um, I'm really like the power cuts happened.

It means I've got to start again or it means I don't know where I'm at and what's going on in your body. So I'm clenching my fists. I'm in fight or flight really.

So I'm frozen. So my, oh, my jaw is like tight. So I'm not moving anywhere.

So, um, observe the mind, observe the emotions that come up. I might be feeling anger as well. Um, and where am I feeling some tense in my body? The P part is proceed.

So that might have given you enough time to pause and just take some time out to carry on doing what you're doing. CK, I've noticed my body's really tense. I can let it go.

I can breathe. I recognize what's going on. And so I'm going to just relax now.

And that might be enough for you to go ahead and go and do what you want to do. It's going to help you, as I said earlier, to be able to respond to that situation rather than react. So you can throw the computer out the and see where we're at.

So what I was hearing there is like the mind body connection, really that the noticing what the emotion is, is it anger? Is it frustration, but also noticing where it isn't, where the tension is in the body. So that's some really great practical advice there that when we're in certain situations where our emotions, whatever that emotion may be is running high, is to stop. Big old pause button and go through that process to breathe, to calm the nervous system, I guess, really, because we're getting into kind of a fight and flight mode there, aren't we, in those situations.

So that's really helpful. I love that. You can always press that pause button on your thoughts.

You can ask yourself, what's my next thought going to be? I often find that just stops them. It's like, okay, yeah. And actually when we're in an interaction with somebody as well, and for whatever reason they are annoying us, we can feel that emotion starting to build.

A big pause button is great in those situations, isn't it? Because 99% of the time we don't have to respond. 1% of the time it's an emergency. We have to.

But 99% of the time we can say, I'll leave that with me, or I'll get back to you on that one. I'm going to need half an hour, an hour, or... That is really good actually, because mindfulness does teach us that as well. When you're in a general conversation, somebody comes to you for help.

The average person tends to be searching their mind for a solution for that person, which means that you aren't listening. So mindful listening is an actual thing as well, where you're actually paying attention to that person's body language, to their mouth, to the words that are coming out. And you'll recognize that you will naturally want to come up with a solution for this person.

When you do, just bring your awareness back to their voice and your own body language, and what am I... How am I coming across? But yeah, it's good to pause and just let them talk, and let them almost talk it out. And say, okay, so like you said, I just may need half an hour just to think about how I may be able to help you. But thanks for telling me, thanks for sharing this.

And that's sometimes enough. Yeah, or a lot of the time we can't fix it. But just to be there and listen, to be that listening ear, and just validate how they're feeling.

Because feelings are never wrong, they just are, aren't they? And it's whatever people are experiencing that's really important that we have that validated actually. And so, I mean, that's a really important point that we do jump to try and fix things a bit too. Yeah.

And actually, we need to acknowledge how somebody's feeling sometimes, don't we? Exactly. And even in our conversation today, I've noticed with myself, I'm thinking, oh, I must remember to say this. When you're talking or asking me a question, I think, I need to listen to this question actually, because otherwise I won't be able to answer, because I'm preparing something else for later.

Yeah. And it's... When you get in tune with your mind, it's quite funny, really. You can have a laugh at yourself and a laugh at your thoughts and the way that the mind works.

It's like, no, come on, let's get more aware. I'm just interrupting this episode just for a few short moments to let you know that I've got a page where you can leave me a voice message. I want to make these podcasts as interactive as possible and wherever I can include you, my brilliant listeners into these episodes.

So head over to speakpike.com forward slash Angeline and go ahead and leave me a message. It could be a question. It could be a review.

You might even want to let me know what you'd like to hear on the upcoming episodes. Whatever it is, please drop me a message and we might even include your message in upcoming episodes. I'll endeavour to answer all the questions, but I can't guarantee that I'll get to all of them, but I'll certainly give it a good go.

Anyway, let's get back to it. Yeah, brilliant. Love that.

Slow it down. Yeah. So I get so I'm guessing then that that mindfulness might help with overthinking.

Lots of people struggle with that, don't they? Playing out different scenarios and often the worst case scenario, trying to prepare themselves if this happens or if that happens at work or in a relationship or anything in between, really. So it definitely helps with overthinking because it slows the mind down and it takes you away from the mind. So it's like it gets people to understand that they're overthinking, to accept that that's what's happening.

I've got a friend who is the biggest overthinker ever and I can tell by his face that he isn't listening to me and he's preparing something to say. And so you're not listening to me, are you? And then he will go on to something else and there's my point. And so I'm actually going, taking him on mindful walks and stuff.

And it's quite interesting and slowing it down as it be aware of when your, your mind's saying, oh, it's a sunny day and I've got this to do later. I need to mow the lawn or just, just start to just really tune into what your mind get, get friendly with your mind, get to know what sort of mind you've got. People who are overthinkers probably always will be.

But if you can really tune into the fact that you're overthinking, you might be able to just slow it down and occasionally step away. We can't always be mindful because we do need our minds for stuff, but we can just keep giving our minds a little bit of a rest. Yeah.

I think that's actually quite important to say that anxiety, we, we talk about that as a negative thing, but actually we need to be in that fight or flight sometimes. I mean, we, you know, it goes back, doesn't it, to the threat of if we were facing a fierce animal of some description, but, but actually sometimes we might need to say, well, actually how much high alert do I need here? Do I need to protect myself in some way? So, so we do, we need a certain, a certain amount of that. But yeah, it might be that you see some child or a dog running into the road.

So you need that, that fight or flight will kick in and you will just like, well, okay. If you didn't have the mind, you didn't have that fear at that point, that anxiety, ah, this is going to go wrong. You wouldn't have that energy to go and sort that problem out.

And so it is good in useful situations, but, but it's, we're stuck with it in say an office where we go into fight or flight. And because we're not moving, here's an example of where humans, I guess, get it wrong really, because we let all that energy store up in our body when we go into fight or flight, and we don't shake it off. So what I include in a lot of my mindfulness sessions, what do you notice when ducks on the river get into a fight? What do they do afterwards? They flap their wings.

They have a go at each other. And then they flap their wings. They shake it all off and they get on with their day.

What do human beings do? They store it up for years. And they'll be like, I know I can recognize that in myself. 20 years ago, I had a conversation with somebody and some, they said this to me that really wound me up.

I wish I'd said this. And it plays over, doesn't it? And over and over. So I get people now to go to have a think of a scenario from years ago that is stored in your system and you want to let it go.

And what we're going to do is we're going to take a massive deep breath in and we're going to roar it out like a lion. And we're going to shake our body. We're going to release it.

And if we could do that every time we have a situation, okay, so this has just happened. I've fallen out with this person. This person's made me feel like this.

If we can just shake it off afterwards, quite soon, we wouldn't be storing it up for years. Absolutely. That sounds awesome because we know, I read a book by Bessel van der Kolk called The Body Keeps the Score.

And it's about trauma being stuck in the body. It's about that very thing. So that makes complete sense that in order to, alongside that processing psychological stuff, I suppose, from our past, that to join that with some kind of physical activity as well, I think is really helpful.

Yeah, that's why I do mindful movement. So we do mindful walking, which is great. Mindful walking is a really good thing.

If you want to meditate and you want to sit and meditate, but you realize actually today my mind's really busy, so I need to actually do something more physical. So you're mindful walking or mindful movement. And mindful movement takes on some Tai Chi moves and some yoga moves.

I'm not a qualified teacher in any of those things, but we just move the body and we tune into it and we really tune in. Okay, so I'm really tense today, so I'm going to move my shoulders around a bit. I'm going to take a stretch, but you breathe with it and you really recognize what muscles you're using, what the body feels like.

Have I got aches and pains? Do I need to adjust anything? And so movement helps you to really let go because often when we're tense and anxious, we'll sit there like this. Obviously we're on a podcast, you can't see me, but tense and the body's tense. I'm not moving.

I'm stuck in the mind. I don't want to do anything. And you used the word woo-woo earlier.

And I think, but the fact is actually, you know, with yoga in particular and the stretching of the body, the science is actually compelling now, isn't it? Absolutely. That the benefits are off the charts. And the science is there for mindfulness as well.

So it literally trains the brain. So if we are practicing some form of mindfulness, 20 minutes a day for six weeks, it will help the brain grow that part of the brain. I'm not into all the words and the names of the parts of the brain, but I know that it grows the part of the brain that deals with fight or flight.

And it helps you to process information, to help process those feelings as well. So to really get in with yourself and it will help you to just slow down. That's the key here, isn't it? That's to me, sounds like the first essential step is to slow down and maybe bring that pause button or that stop, you know, to the beginning of any practice really, to be fully present.

Whenever I start a session, I do something called an arriving meditation. So I invite you just to arrive here. We are sat here.

We don't need to be doing anything here. I've got no to-do list in this moment. I have no to-do list.

I can leave all that on the shelf. So I'm inviting you into this present moment. And if you'll allow me at the end of this podcast, I'll do a little example of a meditation and I'll read a poem out.

I would love that. Yeah, absolutely. So that's a revelation, isn't it? To be invited to leave all your expectations of yourself.

I love that. And others at the door kind of a thing. We really don't have much relief from those expectations that we have.

And that's down to our conditioning, isn't it? It's not something that we've made up. No, it's cultural. It's the way we're conditioned.

Yeah. We're really not taught to take care of ourselves and not to be producing something, you know, every waking hour. Exactly.

Self-care is key. Self-care is key to living a healthy life. If you can ask yourself daily, what is it that I need right now? It might be that I just need to take some time out, go for a walk.

I need to say no to something. I've been invited to a party. How am I feeling about that? I really don't want to go.

I feel burnt out. I really don't want to go. I'm going to say no.

I've started to use that N-word quite a lot more. So I'm sorry, no, but I haven't got the capacity to fit that in. Easy to say yes, isn't it? But what are we doing to ourselves? If we're saying yes to ourselves, I think you said to this meeting, the conversation a while ago, if you say yes to everybody, you're saying no to your own self-care.

Absolutely. And that's the end of part two in our three-part series with Stuart Coulson, a mindfulness and wellbeing coach. Another great conversation full of top tips and advice.

Tune in next week for part three.