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Interesting facts about anxiety and stress

Aisling — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 15:50:51 +0000

Heart pounding, breathing increasing and breaking out in a sweat are all signs that we are feeling stress. Many people feel this experience and start to panic, becoming anxious and worried. Repeatedly having this stress response in the body has created an awareness of stress causing sickness over time and even premature death. Yet why is it that two people can have the exact same stress and yet their physical outcomes can be completely different. Recent Harvard research has shown that the internal mental belief system of the person experiencing the stress dramatically affects the outcome in the body. People who enjoy the experience and are driven and energized by it are healthier and live longer.

How you think about stress matters.
Breathing faster is increasing oxygen to your brain and when you feel your heart rate increase due to stress, if you think positively and see this response as your bodies intelligence rising to the challenge of the stress, then your body believes you and its reaction to the stress becomes healthier, less anxious and more confident.

For more help understanding stress and anxiety and techniques to help you to manage your stress, fully qualified psychotherapist Aisling Uí Riada, Merchants Rd, Galway city works with a variety of techniques, including mindfulness to help people to work with their own internal stress responses. Sessions Cost 60E with a recommended 6-8 for initial support, however long term therapy is also available. For more details call 0876722385.

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Why Mindfulness doesn’t always work?

Aisling — Sat, 21 Feb 2015 17:20:07 +0000

Mindfulness workshops, yoga, meditation, cd’s, books, classes, courses – for some reason not everyone just naturally falls into a space of deep peace when they make efforts to practice mindfulness. As a yoga and meditation teacher and psychotherapist Aisling Uí Riada has worked and practiced with people for over twelve years in the area of mindfulness. It’s a vast field, seemingly simple and yet deeply complex. Why don’t we all just slot into the same boxes? Why is it so difficult to have clarity and how is it that everyones experience is so different?
We are all unique and individual and some people are drawn more to kinesthetic, visual or auditory stimulation. We all have different life experiences and therefore have individual habit patterns of the mind. Aisling offers one to one counseling sessions to support people in understanding their own patterns and helps them to find their unique ways that create a sense of inner peace or calm, whether coming from an anxious, fearful or stressful backgrounds.
This work can help the individual to get a greater sense of who they are and how they work. Ultimately this is empowering for people and they can gain a sense of control or a way to work within their own mind frame. With over fifteen years of study and practice, Aisling has a large set of techniques and tools to work in a variety of ways with people from all walks of life. Cost is 60E per session, with a recommended course of six to eight sessions. For those with deeper life long issues, they may naturally seek longer term therapy, which is also available. Aisling is based in a beautiful space in Merchants Rd in Galway City Centre. For more details contact 087-6722395 or check www.optimum-health.ie/galwaypsychotherapy.

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Benefits of Yoga

Aisling — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 19:16:51 +0000

Why Do Yoga?
Yoga is a real buzz word these days, everyone’s trying it or doing it and there are many types and styles and many ways to do yoga. Here are a few of the benefits that you can experience from a weekly or regular Hatha yoga practice:

1. Increased Flexibility
Hatha yoga is a slow, gentle practice guiding the practitioner into stretches that are held for about a minute. By relaxing and breathing into a stretch, the muscles start to adapt to a new length and grow in flexibility. Sometimes you may use of props to hold postures without causing pain or injury.

2. Toned Muscles
While you are stretching some muscles, you will use other muscles to push you into the stretch. These muscles will then become stronger and are strengthened by the very action of pushing. There is a certain physical demand to enable you to hold each pose and this increases muscle tone throughout the whole body.

3. Improved Posture
By lengthening and strengthening the muscles in the body, it allows the skeleton to return to a state of balance. This means that the muscles and bones return to a place of improved alignment and correct posture. Even the smaller stabilizer muscles get stretched and toned and leave the body feeling straighter and even longer.

4. Pain Relief
As you realign the muscles and bones, tension that was causing pain, especially in connection with the hips, back and neck, is often greatly improved. Feeling straighter, lighter and stronger, with a better core, the body is less susceptible to injury.

5. Improved Breathing
In many ways breathing is the foundation of your well being. You might have noticed that in stressed states the breathing is erratic. Good breathing is often overlooked but when your breath is in a natural state and rhythm, the whole body falls into its natural rhythm and you feel and look better on many levels.
Throughout the class the focus on breath-work in the beginning and then within the postures enables the practitioner to deepen and slow down their breath. Breath, body and mind all interact with each-other and when we are stressed and busy are breathing is usually out of sync. By returning the breath to a calm state throughout the class, this impacts the calmness of the mind and aids in the well known side affects that we experience after class.

6. A Calmer Mind
The act of breathing and focusing on relaxing in a stretch moves the thought process from whatever the mind was doing before a class, this often results in a feeling of calmness and contentment. In many ways this is a meditation and the more you practice, the more of an impact this will have on your life.

7. Better Food and Lifestyle Habits
We all know that when we are feeling good in our bodies and good in our minds, that we tend to focus on healthier, more positive ways of living and working. It is very common for people that practice yoga to begin to choose healthier lifestyles and to have better food choices.

8. Protection from Disease
So naturally the healthier the body and mind the less likely we are to get sick. The lymphatic system in the body and the digestive tract get stretched and moved through many of the yoga poses. As these internal systems are essential to good health, improved well being is a natural result of yoga. Stretching also helps to move toxins stored in tissues, stimulates the circulatory system and the nervous system and there is often gentle internal organ massage created by poses such as twists and inversions. All this helps keep the body in a state of homeostasis or balance.

9. Improved Sleep
Many people experience deeper sleep on the night after a yoga class. It’s possible to bring what you learn into your personal wind-down process each night.

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