Empathy

Empathy can be a very powerful thing - it allows us to connect with others on a deep and personal level but it can also cause us a lot of distress depending on the circumstances.

I'm proud to have been gifted with a high amount of empathy, overall I would rather have empathy in my life than not, despite the emotional harm it causes me on occasion. I have to actively observe and manage my empathy or it can send me into a spiral.

Yesterday was one of those days, a student in my class shared an extremely distressing situation she has been recently going through with her family and afterwards I realised I was carrying it very heavily for the rest of the day. I got wound up in imagining how I would feel if that had happened to me and my family and got myself very fused with those thoughts. I was close to tears about something that has never and may never happen to me.

While that empathy was useful when in conversation with that person it was no longer helpful to me in the hours afterwards. This was a great chance to practice some Defusion. I started with asking a few questions like "is this thought helpful to me right now?" Well, I thought, it is not helping me in this moment but it is trying to tell me something - these thoughts and feelings are telling me how much I don't want this situation to happen to me and my family. I then realised that despite this empathetic reaction having dragged me down it was actually an amazing gift, so I thanked my mind for trying to help me. That woman hadn't seen these events coming and can't change what has happened but I have been given the opportunity to plan ways to prevent a similar thing happening to me and my family. This thinking process effectively defused me from the thought - rather than thinking from that woman's perspective I was thinking from my own perspective again, planning and thinking ahead. I was left with a much healthier sympathy for what the other woman was going through rather than being haunted by it as if it were my own pain. I allowed that feeling to sit with me and pass in its own time while continuing to get on with my day.

So what was key in this example was first noticing that I was getting fused with my thoughts and then practicing some Defusion to give myself a bit of space from those thoughts. This gave me the opportunity to look at them more logically and see what I could gain from this experience. Finally I practiced some acceptance on the feelings and took action on my values by simple carrying on with my day as planned despite those thoughts and feelings.

Empathy is a wonderful gift but it is important to notice when it is time to Defuse and move on.

The effects of caffeine

Today I presented another session of ACT at the Recovery College. I always get a bit of anxiety and stress during these sessions but today the effect was particularly pronounced, to the extent that I was physically shaking every time I stood up to talk. I started to wonder why I was getting such extreme emotions today - I have presented the course many times before and not experienced such anxiety. Then I remembered, just before the session started I had taken some paracetamol for a headache, but the only paracetamol I had to hand contained caffeine. Caffeine has been shown to enhance the painkilling effects of paracetamol and is quite commonly combined with it in certain brands of painkillers. I'll admit that my headache was very much gone for the morning, however the adverse effects of the caffeine were particularly marked for me.

In my teens I used to consume a lot of caffeine in the form of soft drinks and then energy drinks at university and then coffee and tea in my 20s. I never thought it was causing a problem - I was very dependent on its effects to keep me feeling awake. I'm sure that a lot of my dependence on caffeine was probably built up as I tried to counter the tiredness that came with the depression I developed in those same years. It was part of my agenda of control - when feelings of tiredness popped up I would automatically try to avoid them with caffeine.

When I became pregnant with my daughter almost 3 years ago I gave up caffeine completely for the sake of the little foetus developing inside me (as well as giving up alcohol but that's another topic for another time). Though it was hard to give up (hideous headaches and urges) I found that I didn't really miss it all that much in the longer term. After birth and the majority of breastfeeding I started to reintroduce caffeine occasionally - a cola with a meal out, a cup of tea here and there but I started to notice the sensations which the caffeine induced in me. It wasn't instant, so it was easy to miss the connection between the drink consumed and the emotions felt. For me it was a particularly jittery stress or anxious feeling. I would feel like I couldn't sit still and that I needed to take action. I also found myself being far more aggressive and snappy with others and generally more emotionally volatile. I also felt a lot less able to cope with everyday things. I found that I couldn't tolerate the thought of doing any of the things I usually like to do when under the influence of caffeine (like read a book or watch a film).

A distinctive feature of these caffeine induced feelings was that they seemed to appear from nowhere, though I noticed that my mind was very quick to come up with explanations - dredging up old hurts or worrying at everything that could go wrong in the future. The other feature of these feelings was that they were very resistant to acceptance techniques - though it isn't the purpose of acceptance and you can never guarantee it, I usually find that allowing and expanding around a feeling eases it somewhat. When I use these techniques with a caffeine induced feeling the feeling remains just as intense until the timer runs out on the caffeine and it finally goes through my system.

Now that I've observed what caffeine does to me, I have chosen to avoid it on most occasions because the detriments outweigh the benefits for me. When I do choose to consume caffeine I do it fully informed about what the effects are likely to be for me. I now know, through mostly trial and error, plus careful self-observation, what level of tiredness I need to be feeling for caffeine to have a beneficial effect on me.

Now that I have realised what caffeine does to me, I wonder if the use of caffeine actually contributed and worsened my depression in the past. When considering my usage in terms of the agenda of control I have no doubt that it was shrinking my life space but also making things worse in a number of other ways. The volatility worsened my relationships, the dislike of doing things I used to like enhanced the same effect which came from depression, it likely made my sleep worse and caused me to ruminate unnecessarily in an attempt to explain what I was feeling.

Obviously my reaction to caffeine could be rare but I imagine it affects many people in ways they don't realise. I wonder if a lot of aggression and discontentment in the workplace could be in part caused by the normalised use of caffeine in the workplace. If you think that caffeine could be impacting your life then I highly recommend you make attempts to lessen your use of it and see if that makes a difference for you.

Feelings - when the other half goes out for the day.

My husband and I work from home, so I'm very used to us both being in the house at the same time. However, it doesn't mean we necessarily see each other much during the day - he works in his office and I look after our toddler. We might cross paths at mealtimes but that's about it, so I'm used to being on my own with our toddler.

Today my husband left to visit his parents - a 6 hour round trip excluding stops, so he's going to be away for a full day and I found all sorts of distressing feeling surfacing the moment he left. It's not that my day is going to be particularly different to usual but just knowing he is not in the building has left me feeling desperately lonely, with a sadness that brings me close to tears.

This is a great chance to practice acceptance. I started by using the observer self to view my own emotions and then did a bit of objectifying feelings - looking at where the feelings are in my body, what size and shape they are, what colour and texture and then moving on to allowing those feelings to be there, breathing into and from them and expanding space around them. They didn't go away, that's not the purpose of the exercise, but I knew that they would move on in their own time and in the meantime I've eased some of the tension I had been building up around them.

Why did all these feelings emerge today just from the idea of my husband being away from the house, despite it actually making little difference to my day? Well it's understandable if I consider how my husband is a safety net for me if things go wrong during the day, so that would be a very natural source of worry. Also, the mind doesn't like change to the routine it is comfortable with and there could be an element of the prehistoric mind warning against letting a member of my group leave. So it is very reasonable that these feelings arose, I have no control over what emotions appear, but thanks to some simple ACT tools they didn't end up ruining the rest of my day.

When disaster strikes - how I've changed.

Look what happened to my phone the other day - I wasn't holding it firmly and the cat, being too friendly for his own good, knocked it out of my hand. "So what?" I can hear you say. "Happens to people all the time." Indeed it does and my intent is not to moan about it but to share with you how my response to such an accident has changed since practicing ACT.

In the past this sort of accident would have knocked me for a hell of an emotional loop. I would have spent ages internally screaming at myself for being so stupid and clumsy. I would have called myself an idiot and all other manner of hurtful names. I would have shouted angrily at the cat and probably ignored him for days. I would have felt a burning fury at myself and got caught in a loop of trying to will it not to have happened with a kind of temple popping, breath-holding intensity. It would have brought up intense feelings of worrying and distress about money (regardless of how well or poor our finances are at the time). There would have been a lot of inconsolable crying. This cycle of emotion and hateful self-talk would have continued at varying intensity for several days minimum, if not weeks.

But all that didn't happen on this day and I think it really nicely demonstrates how far I've come and how much emotional resilience I've managed to build up through using ACT techniques. What actually happened is at first there was the inevitable string of expletives and then I could feel a surge of emotion coming my way so I called through to my husband for support (mainly to look after my daughter while I had what I thought would be a little break down). Once my daughter was safely being looked after I allowed myself to feel the feelings of frustration and sadness at breaking my phone and accepted that it was an accident which I can't change. I spoke to my husband about our finances and yes, this came at a really unfortunate time and I'll have to wait a few months until we have enough spare cash for a new phone. This brought up a very old and familiar story for me - the "we have no money" story which always brings along a host of uncomfortable thoughts and feelings. I acknowledged it for what it was - just a story my mind was telling me and let it pass in its own time. The amazing thing was that the turnaround from the upsetting event to me getting back on as normal was under half an hour. I was prepared to get further waves of turmultuous thoughts and emotions about the phone later on - I was ready to defuse and accept - but very few even turned up and the ones that did I dealt with almost automatically. Defusion and acceptance can be quite a heavy going conscious effort when you are first practicing and I previously doubted that they could become automatic but it seems that I have actually managed to start retraining my brain in this way.

So I guess the point of this post is to say keep on practicing ACT in your daily life because it really is making a difference in the long term, even if you can't see the immediate effects right now, you may well see how far you've come further down the line.