Кэтрин Роско Барр: научный подход к самопомощи и простые привычки для улучшения самочувствия

There are a lot of wellness coaches in the world who base their advice solely on vibes, but not Vancouver-based author Catherine Roscoe Barr. Her accessible framework for self-coaching, shared through coaching sessions, retreats and her book Feel Better Now, was built on the evidence-based foundation of her neuroscience degree and personal training career, plus a voracious appetite for both peer-approved research and self-help books. “I like a healthy dose of spirituality with my science,” she says. What Kind of Common Threads Are You Seeing in People Who Come to You? My big aha moment when I started coaching over 20 years ago was one word: “unmindfulness,” a lack of awareness about how what you think, what you say and what you do makes you feel. No one wants to feel bad. We all want to feel good. Yet the vast majority of us, myself included at times, do things that make us feel bad. It’s that disconnect with what you’re doing and how it makes you feel that causes almost all of our suffering. In a way, it’s cool that it’s so simple. Why Do We Get Caught in These Traps of Doing Things That Are Bad for Us? We’re so busy and we don’t ever just sit there and say: What do I want? What do I need? How do I feel? There’s a pause that’s missing. All I do as a coach is ask people questions. I’m like: How are you nourishing yourself? How are you resting? What do you want? And so many people say, “I don’t know, I’m too busy.” I just can’t believe the pace that we are all travelling at as a society. It’s not what our body and nervous system needs. It’s way too much. So How Do You Practise a Pause? I’m such a fan of micro-habits. Anybody can donate one minute of their day to their well-being. Set a timer and go in a dark, quiet room. Sensory deprive yourself and take 60 seconds and just let stuff come up: I call it “the bubble up.” At first it’s like, you forgot the dry cleaning. And then it’s like, what about your dreams? I always have a pen and paper nearby to jot down what comes up. Your brain uses 25 percent of the energy you consume, but it’s only two percent of your body weight. It’s a massive hog. If you’re letting things simmer on the back burner, that’s energy you could use to be creative and exercise and make a good meal for yourself. So get it out. What Do You Do With That Information? To compound the power of those thoughts, I practise journalling. Because then you’re processing it on a different level: you think about it again, then you write it down. But also having that data is really important. I see journalling as a scientific notebook. You can see: This is not serving me. My life is not serving me. I’m not alive. Journalling is an opportunity to document the positive things, too. We have this massive radar for negative stuff because our ancestors that survived were the most negative because they were scanning for poisonous plants and dangerous animals. But that doesn’t serve us now. There’s so much going on. We aren’t meant to know about every catastrophic thing on the planet. It’s too much for our little brain. I think this can cause unhappiness because we can feel like everything is shit. Psychologist Rick Hanson says our brains are like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones. So a gratitude practice is so key to experiencing happiness because then all day you’re scanning for good. It’s like giving yourself an assignment. And it helps you balance. Because even when everything is shit, it’s not. There’s lots of good. And when you write it down in your journal, it’s data. So, on a bad day, I end every journal entry with five things that are good, so I can go back and read five things every day and be like, oh, things aren’t so bad. What Do You Do to Cheer Yourself Up When You’re Having a Bad Day? Movement, music, physical affection. You know, like I’ll hug my kid or hug my husband or myself. There’s a book I love by Julie Holland called Good Chemistry: she talks about the importance of oxytocin, and how even physical affection to yourself can spark that. Most nights before bed, I will massage myself with lavender oil. Oxytocin is the queen of hormones that can help lower cortisol and affect all of our sex hormones, testosterone, estrogen and progesterone. Dancing, or physical touch, all of those things can lower cortisol, which helps you shift your nervous system into a parasympathetic state, which helps you feel happier. How Important Is It to Understand the Physiology of “Feeling Good”? A simple understanding of what’s going on inside our body can help us shift the way we feel. Your vagus nerve, for example, tells your brain that you’re safe, and it’s connected to your lungs. So when you take a deep breath, your body is saying to your brain: we are safe. And what happens when you feel safe? You shift to parasympathetic activation. All of your body systems come online. You have access to calm, creativity, clarity, kindness, just from one stinking deep breath. What Other Small Things Could Somebody Start Practising Today? Action precedes motivation. How I arrived at what I do is that I was deeply struggling with crippling depression and I could not find a way to get out of it. And then I realized that action precedes motivation: that I had to move my body. As animals, every organ system in our body relies on movement to function optimally. Our brain, our gut, our lymphatic system, our digestive system, every single body system was designed to work through movement because our ancestors were constantly moving, and now we are constantly sitting. We can always do something and move our body in the direction of something positive. And that in itself will spark something in us. Move any way you want. I’m all about micro-habits. One breath, that’s a meditation. Five squats, that’s a workout. If you can be okay with that bar, then it’s easy to do more, but you feel successful and you trust yourself to care for yourself. There’s this whole ripple effect of lowering the bar.