West Wales Life&Style Winter 2020

Health and Well-being
West Wales Life&Style
West Wales Life&Style
Health and Well-being
Dyfed Wyn Roberts knew the stresses of 2020 would put
a strain on his mental health, here’s how he dealt with it
Learning to manage
those lockdown lows
As someone who had
experienced depression in
the past, I knew that I would
have to work harder at keeping
well when the first Covid lockdown
was announced in March. I hadn’t
actually been ill for years and yet
the odd low mood would come over
me like a thick sea mist, only to
quickly evaporate. The threat of
mental ill-health seems always
there, lurking in the shadows, and
finding ways of keeping well has
been an important part of my life.
So knowing that I hadn’t been fully
cured of my depressive tendencies, I
realised that lockdown could prove
difficult. What to do?
Road runner
One thing I hadn’t been doing
enough of was physical exercise. The
evening Boris Johnson announced
Lockdown 1.0, therefore, I decided
I would start running. He insisted
that we would be through the crisis
in three months and so I gave
myself a target of achieving 5k by
the end of that period.
Though I had been a gym user in
the past, I had not been doing any
regular exercise for a few years.
Yes, I would walk quite a lot with
my camera but they were hardly
strenuous romps; more a gentle
amble, with lots of stops to shoot the
scenery. Running was a different
prospect, as I soon found out.
I aimed for 3k on my first day and
I probably managed to run half the
route in short bursts and then walk
the rest. Red-faced and panting
arriving back at my front door, an
observer might well conclude that I
had run 10k, if not half a marathon.
In the weeks that followed, I would
run the whole 3k, extend to 4k and
then finally complete my first 5k.
That achievement in itself gave
me a boost. There’s something about
setting a target and achieving it,
that gives our mood a significant
lift. Add to that the chemical hit our
brain gets every time we exercise
properly, and low moods would
barely register in those early weeks.
As I now aim for 10k, I realise that
physical exercise in itself is just a
sticking plaster, however.
Mindful soul
My second strategy in this period
was to increase a method of keeping
well which I have been using for a
couple of years: meditation.
A bit like the Spice Girls in the
90s, mindfulness has become
something of an overnight
sensation. Unlike the girl band,
this meditation practice is sticking
around and with an increasing
number of studies showing that its
benefits are long lasting, it will be
with us for some time to come.
It has its roots in Buddhism but
requires no religious affiliation. All
you need is 10 to 15 quiet minutes
a day and a comfortable place to sit.
There are plenty of online resources
to help you get started but I went
for a book published by two of the
most respected teachers in the UK,
Mindfulness: a practical guide to
finding peace in a frantic world.
Unlike the quick hit of physical
exercise, mindfulness is a longerterm
practice. It’s only by looking
back over months of using the
technique that you come to realise
that you have a better control over
the thoughts and fears that race
around your head and which so
easily drag you down. Indeed, it
may be that the first thing you learn
through mindfulness is how much
negative thinking you get
caught up in.
The key to
understanding
mindfulness is that it’s a
technique that helps you
notice your own mind and
body. That’s it.
It doesn’t provide a cure for
negative thoughts. It doesn’t stop
them from happening. It merely
shows you they’re there. Half the
battle in getting to grips with
thoughts that drag us down, is to
notice them in the first place. To
notice them dispassionately, rather
than get caught up in them.
We all know how it works. A
negative thought pops into your
mind. Out of nowhere. But you start
to play with it. You start creating a
scenario around it. If it’s a memory,
you delve deeper into the incident.
Maybe you try and play it out in
different ways. What if I had done
this instead of that? And suddenly,
you’re in a trance that changes
nothing but gets you so wound up
it can affect your
whole day.
Mindfulness helps
you notice those
initial thoughts.
You might even
label them. ‘Here’s a
bad memory that’s
just popped into
my head. I wonder
where that came
from? No need to
do anything with it.
Just move on.’
And it really
works. Gradually,
noticing negative
thoughts before
they escalate
becomes second
nature, giving you
a head start in the
battle of the mind.
Wise counsel
Physical exercise gives you a shortterm
hit; mindfulness gives you a
longer-term strategy; but neither
can go to the very roots of why
you’re prone to mental ill-health
in the first place. For me, it took
‘
Exercise gives a short-term
hit...mindfulness gives a
longer-term strategy ’
counselling to expose those roots.
I went to my GP suffering from
regular migraines. I had a hunch
why I was tensing my body to such
an extent that it was making me ill
and I explained that to her.
“Try counselling,” she said. “You
can get six sessions free on the NHS
but it probably won’t be enough.”
So I found a private practice and
paid.
At £45 a shot, my 15 to 20 sessions
proved to be draining on my
finances but the boost to my mental
health made it well worth it.
Actually, ‘boost’ is the wrong
word. Delving into a painful past
can be quite harrowing. I felt more
drained than boosted after many
a session. Yet, as that delving
Dyfed Wyn Roberts and his pet pooch Sidan
progressed - expertly guided by a
psychotherapist - the roots of my
illness were slowly being exposed.
For some, mental illness is a
chemical imbalance in the brain but
for many it is rooted in historical
trauma. This is where the slow
process of counselling can
make such a difference.
I cannot say I’m cured.
My moods can take a
dip every now and then.
Running gives me regular
boosts of happiness.
Mindfulness helps keep
a busy mind more ordered. But it
is counselling that has been the big
breakthrough.
It’s possible that because of
counselling the low moods I still
experience would be nothing
but shallow and temporary. I’m
not taking that chance though,
especially during lockdown. Ten
minutes of quiet, followed by a
forty-minute run can make such a
difference.
Lockdown 2.0 is now over and
there is real hope of a vaccine. The
crisis seems to be drawing to an
end, however slowly, and because of
the strategies I have followed, my
mental wellbeing hasn’t been badly
affected.
Now, to reach that 10k goal!
72 westwaleslifeandstyle.co.uk
westwaleslifeandstyle.co.uk
73