joe lynch, life coach belfast, catherine mchugh, life coach belfast,joe lynch, life coach belfast, catherine mchugh, life coach belfast, We focus on solutions not problems.... The World Health Organisation, back in 1948, defined “health” as ‘A state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. Having good mental health is perhaps the most vital of all our needs. Stress, anxiety, depression and trauma are the most common ill health problems that affect so many people with major increases in our young people. Community First Coaching sees people as having the innate capabilities to generate solutions, become healthier and create better self resilience. When people are not having their needs met this will have an impact on their health and wellbeing. Our emotional needs include: security (stable home life, privacy and a safe territory to live in); the need for attention (to give and receive it); connection to others through friendship, fun, love, intimacy; a sense of autonomy and control; being part of a wider social community, which satisfies our need to belong; the need for status; a sense of self- competence (that comes through maturity, learning and the application of skills) and a drive for meaning and purpose. Our resources include: curiosity; longterm memory; imagination (which allows us to focus our attention away from our emotions in order to problem solve more objectively); a dreaming brain; the ability to understand the world and other people and extract deeper meaning through metaphor - pattern matching; an observing self; the ability to empathise and connect with others; a rational mind to check out emotions. It is these needs and resources, which are built into our biology, that, together, make up the human givens. It is now widely observed that most problem behaviour and psychological distress can be traced to innate physical and emotional needs not being met, for whatever reason, or to the misuse of a particular innate resource (such as imagination, when it generates worrying, envy, or excessive greed). When they work closely in alignment with the 'givens' of human nature, rather than with techniques derived from limited ideologies. Depression: People sink into a depressed mood when their innate physical or emotional needs are not being met and, instead of dealing with this situation, they begin to worry about it — misusing their imagination. All depressed people worry. This increases the amount of dreaming they do, upsetting the balance between slow-wave, recuperative sleep and dream sleep. Consequently they start to develop an imbalance between energy burning dream sleep and refreshing slow-wave sleep. Soon they start to wake up feeling tired and unmotivated. Depressed and anxious people dream far more intensely than non-depressed people. This makes them worry even more as they feel that, "something is wrong with me". Depression is a human vulnerability. Suppose we have a setback or suffer some traumatic event that interferes with getting our innate needs met. This arouses negative expectations in the autonomic nervous system — feelings of frustration, being 'stressed', anxious, angry, guilty etc. — but, instead of taking action to bring the arousal down, which is what the autonomic nervous system is designed to help us do, we start to worry even more, going over and over what's troubling us: 'Why did I lose that job?'…"Why do they treat me like this?"… 'What is going to happen to me?'… 'How am I going to pay my bills?' — on and on creating a mountain of negative expectations. This over-stimulates the autonomic arousal system which is why depression is such a strong emotion. All strong emotions focus and lock attention and, with depression, attention stays focused on all the bad things that seem to be happening to us, whether real or illusory. Every little thing we worry about and do not resolve in the day is translated into a bad dream the next night. All these worries have to be worked through in extended and intense periods of dream activity in REM sleep as the brain attempts to rebalance your arousal levels. This upsets the relationship between slow wave sleep and REM sleep. Extended dreaming is exhausting, not just because it deprives us of restful and restorative slow-wave sleep (that should make up three-quarters of our sleep time), but also because it stimulates the orientation response. This is a vital pathway in the brain that alerts us to interesting things in the day, generating motivation to act, but it can't do this so well if it has been over-used in dream-sleep the previous night. So, the next morning we awake feeling terrible because we haven't really slept, and we find it much harder to get motivated to get up and do anything because the brain mechanism that generates that interest in life is exhausted as well. Exhaustion on waking and lack of motivation are features common to all depressed people. Because our normal sense that life is meaningful comes from the actions we take, when our motivation levels are low, life quickly comes to seem meaningless. The natural delight we take in being alive and doing things drains away. joe lynch, life coach belfast, catherine mchugh, life coach belfast,joe lynch, life coach belfast, catherine mchugh, life coach belfast,