MENTAL HEALTH AND WELLNESS
I help to take a naturalistic approach, where you learn to address the issues within your psyche by using awareness, a tool that enables non-judgmental observation. I specialize in how does the autopilot of emotional reactions and shortage in the skills of awareness lead to consequences that we have come to know as clusters of psychiatric symptoms.
My work consists of helping people with mood, anxiety, stress and attention-related disorders. I have gone into depth with investigating burnout – what are its true causes, phases, prevention and cure.
As a sub-specialty, I can help address intimacy issues that often accompany psychiatric illness and antidepressants, result from an emotional load/tension or influential life event. However, instead of mapping dysfunction, the focus will be on healthy intimacy by addressing disturbing emotions, cultivating skills to rotate awareness, switch between the senses and intentionally train sensoriality.
A decade of personal practice, implementing awareness and qualities of consciousness enabled a shift in my focus from illness to wellness.
Today I know that the fine line between the two depends on practical skills to wisely manage 3 meta-categories of life: awareness, emotions and thinking mind.
Every moment offers hundreds of possible experiences. So please contemplate – will you have any time left for peace and balance if you remain so occupied with the disturbing ones?
Please see below, how I can help:
- Companies and organizations to address mental health and wellness at workplaces
- Individuals with mood and anxiety disorders
- Individuals looking for practical inner tools to reduce pain, stress, problems with attention, emotional reactivity, intimacy issues etc
The hidden force that determines how we think, act and perceive the world
Among the top 1% most cited scientists in the world, Lisa Feldman Barrett (Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University who in 2019 was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in neuroscience), known for her research in psychology and neuroscience has made a revolutionary discovery: emotions are learned and determine every aspect of our lives.
Having published 185+ scientific papers, she has found that what we feel is at the core of all mental events. Affective experience critically shapes what we expect to and actually do see, hear, and smell. Feeling significantly distressed or threatened can predictively contribute to perceiving the world as more stressful or threatening. Affect is not unique to bursts of emotion but is present in every conscious moment. In this way, affect infuses all perception and action. Her work has been the first to provide direct evidence that a perceiver’s affective state influences in selecting the contents of consciousness, indicating that we do not see the world veridically. Instead, we see the world as we predict it to be. Affective realism changes how people see one another, influencing decision making in real-world where errors can have costly or potentially deadly consequences (why police officers perceive targets as more or less threatening depending on how they feel). (Front Psychol. 2019; Dev Psychol. 2019; Psychol Sci. 2018; J Exp Soc Psychol. 2011)
At birth, we are all new to this world. We enter life without psychological problems – no envy, inferiority, pride, prejudice, attitudes, or worldviews. Everything that orbits our inner sphere is learned from society. Thus, each of us constructs our personal worldview, consisting of thousands of event-reaction chains.
Every moment is colored by what we feel, and every reaction contains an emotional counterpart. Thus, emotions either activate or slow us down, leading to positive or negative actions. But looking at reactions – you have certainly noticed how emotions self-activate, regardless of your will? Awareness is the tool to first catch this autopilot and as the next step, free ourselves from its dictating role as a trigger mechanism for harmful emotions and thoughts. With every discontinuation, you free yourself from under the dictatorship of the autopilot and take an actual step towards feeling lighter, brighter.
The qualities of consciousness are our main tools, including awareness. It is crucial to distinguish between your being (existence) and the set of autopilot reactions (received during life). This is beyond taking a different look at things. It’s a set of practical know-how to orient within oneself and achieve well-being, meaning and goals just by removing the excess.
“Future mind-medicines may be quite specific to discrete emotional traits and may work optimally in the context of environments that enhance emotional education” (Panksepp and Harro, 2004).
Our brain continuously re-wires itself and undergoes changes in response to experiences
Brain sculpting: “We should think of the nervous system as a continuously changing structure of which plasticity is an integral property and the obligatory consequence of each sensory input, association, reward signal, action plan, or awareness. This is the mechanism for learning, growth and development. The challenge we face is to learn enough about the mechanisms of plasticity to be able to guide it. Brain sculpting can occur even without input from the outside world and mental practice alone may be sufficient to promote the plastic modulation of neural circuits” (Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 2005).
The new paradigm of inner skills: “One of the most salient findings is perhaps the observation that the adult brain can still change significantly in both structure and function as a result of experience” (Boyke et al., 2008, Maguire et al., 2000; Draganski et al., 2004).
Emotional tension as the neuronal killer: “Stress decreases the expression of genes that make neurotrophic factors such as BDNF, which are critical to the survival and function of key neurons” (Stahl’s Essential Psychopharmacology, p. 489).
PUBLIC SPEAKING – AT COMPANIES, ORGANIZATIONS, EVENTS
A lecture on mental wellness or burnout prevention (2,5h)
LECTURE ON MENTAL WELLNESS. At a modern workplace, we use “software” to work and create value – instead of physical muscles, today our primary asset is knowledge. And once the head became our main tool, safeguarding it became a necessity. What is mental wellness and what does everyone need to know about mental health? How to train attention, handle negative feelings, and stop the cycle of worry?
LECTURE ON BURNOUT. It is possible to be highly productive without feeling anxious, stressed or risk burning out. What is at the core of all those seemingly different factors leading to burnout, that most workshops never address? What is relaxed awareness? The high overlap between burnout and depression – who is at risk?
Results: People learn how to nurture mental wellness; They have skills to become grounded and calm; They discover what is attention, how to direct it and use it to be fully present; They can end negative self-talk; Have increased insight on emotions and ways to address them.
My clients
INDIVIDUAL PSYCHIATRIC CONSULTATION
When how we feel and think turns life into a burden (60 min)
“Although distraction, repression, aggression and somatization are among ways to deal with emotional suffering, these are associated with psychopathology and considered less healthy” (A.Granieri et al, Frontiers in Psychology, 2017).
FOR WHOM: When you feel that in addition to the latest science and medication, you also want to adopt a practical naturalistic view of your condition. Open your eyes to those hundreds of automized reactions, emotional and mental. How is the autopilot learned and how to eliminate these harmful psychological habits? How do you go from illness to health to prevention?
WHAT WILL HAPPEN: I will run an evaluation on your mental state, formulate a diagnosis when appropriate, and suggest a treatment plan. Based on findings, it will include:
- wisdom to understand the emotion-symptom axis
- referral to learn the techniques to implement awareness and discontinue inner automatic reactions (the AoCC toolkit)
- suggestions on diet, lifestyle and wellness rituals
- psychopharmacology / medication
Why is non-pharmacological know-how an absolute necessity to skillfully handle mental health issues?
Expectations to medication alone: U.S. Food and Drug Adminstration (FDA) database analysis found the overall mean effect size for antidepressant medications to be 0.31, as reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. Results for 18 meta-analyses concerned with psychotherapy outcomes had a median effect size of 0.75 (Lipsey and Wilson, 1993). In medicine an effect size of 0.8 is considered large, 0.5 moderate, and 0.2 a small effect.
Risk of relapse: “More than ⅓ of patients who achieve removal of ALL symptoms (with AD) experience another depressive episode at twelve months (33% after one, to 70% after four treatments). Of those who don’t achieve removal of ALL symptoms, 70% experience another depressive episode in 12 months” (Stahl’s Essential Psychopharmacology, p. 518).
Role of learning and experiences: “Learning as well as experiences can indeed alter which genes are expressed and thus give rise to changes in neuronal connections. This, in turn, may produce long-term changes in behavior caused by the original experience and mediated by the genetic changes triggered by that original experience” (Stahl’s Essential Psychopharmacology, p. 88).
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SESSIONS TO CULTIVATE HEALTH AND WELLNESS
A holistic approach to life’s challenges, burnout, intimacy (90 min)
FOR WHOM: Everything seems to be well… You may even have no major problems, just these small incidences of irritation, disappointment, feeling not good/beautiful/accepting enough. Yet when you look at the consequences of these incidences and sum them up by the end of the day, you start to see a different picture – you have chronic issues that repeat daily, changing in expressions like a chameleon.
OUTCOME
Maybe you lost someone or something but have been unable to disconnect the emotional tie and move on. A traumatic event in your past that still causes distress? Maybe you go into overdrive driven by the fear of missing out? Feel like an impostor or never good enough? It may be loneliness that you feel, regardless of whether there are people around you or not. Whatever it is, you will find a resolution.
If you are at the risk of burnout you will benefit from knowing how to address it in the 1-2 phases (the vital), preventing it from evolving into phases 3-5 (the physical).
It may have been childbirth, divorce, burnout or something else… Maybe you have never felt relaxed and at ease when it comes to intimacy. Many couples today go through the IVF process, also giving rise to a myriad of emotions and fears. Causing you to close up, feel tense, frustrated – all this can change with fostering the use of awareness and senses along with the know-how to liberate disturbing reactions.
THE ART OF CONSCIOUS CHANGE
It is not about others. Or the weather. Or “life” that causes your pain.
Where is your pain – in or outside of your skin? Where do you feel anxiety, loneliness, anger, despair – again, under your skin? Whenever a negative emotion activates, you feel it as pain. All else is collateral data – a memory, place, person etc.
Similar to how seasons shape our external climate, emotions are forces that determine the one we have on the inside. Are you surrounded by rainfall, heavy clouds, tornadoes or lightning – what are your TOP 5 emotions? Now, imagine your days equipped with techniques to change it in 10 seconds, discontinuing the emotion from the position of the Witness.
As a licensed teacher of this novel method created by Ingvar Villido Ishwarananda, you can join me next on: