Are You A Hedgehog?

 

Over the weekend my partner, Tom, called me to the bottom of our garden. Next to the wall of the shed, a hedgehog had curled itself up in a small prickly ball, half-covering itself with a pile of leaves.

Earlier in the week, Tom had made a start on chopping back the overgrown laurel hedge in that part of the garden and, as it had begun to rain, he had piled up the chopped down branches on the ground ready to remove later. The happy hedgehog had obviously made a warm, dry home for himself under these branches. Little did he or she know that Tom was planning to cart the branches off to our local recycling centre.


We stood looking at it, feeling helpless and guilty. We could see its heart pounding through its prickles, but there was very little we could do to calm and reassure it. Amusingly, my instinct was to try to touch it or move it, but of course that would only have increased its fear.

As I looked at the hedgehog, I thought about how we humans often demonstrate this same primal response to stress. When things feel as if they are all too much for us, or something happens that shocks our body and leaves us feeling exposed, our automatic response is to curl ourselves up as tightly as we can into a little ball and even to put out all our prickles.

But when you respond to an incident or feeling in this way, there is very little that the people around you can do to help. The prickles that you have put out to protect yourself from real or imagined predators are also a very effective armour between you and the nice, kind people.

More importantly, as your body goes into this ‘fight or flight’ response, you quite literally ‘lock’. Your muscles tense up, sealing the emotion tightly inside you. You can’t move. You are stuck there. Nothing else can happen.

If you’re feeling stuck, the chances are that you have locked in ‘fight or flight’ mode.

But the good news is that there are so many different strategies and techniques that you can use to interrupt this automatic response and to reprogramme your body and mind to respond differently to challenging situations.


Here is a technique that you can use right now:

(i)
Bring your awareness to the situation.

Over the next week, you might like to begin to notice the times when you feel your body switching into an automatic stress response. You might be surprised to notice how often this happens: you’re late for a meeting, you get an unexpected request to give a presentation for which you feel unprepared, you watch a violent or angry scene in a film, your partner or friend or child or parent says something to you that you find upsetting…

Notice the feelings in your body. Just noticing these feelings can be enough to interrupt the response. Some people find it useful to say ‘STOP’, loudly and clearly, inside their head or to put a big ‘STOP’ sign there, or even a hand held up, palm outwards, in a traffic policeman’s ‘stop’ gesture.

(ii)
Next, use the breathing exercise (that I talked about last week). Put your hands on your stomach, take a big deep in-breath and feel your stomach moving outwards until it is completely extended. Now, hold for a moment, saying to yourself ‘I am calm and relaxed,’ and then exhale, allowing your stomach to move inwards.

After a few of these relaxing breaths, you will notice that your body no longer feels ‘locked’.

(iii)
The next step is to gently begin to bring whatever is troubling you – the image, situation or thought – inside the pattern of your breathing. When something frightens us, we tend to think of it as ‘out there’ on the outside and so we put out our prickles to defend ourselves, just like the hedgehog. But when we begin to experiment with gently bringing the troubling image or feeling inside our breath, we can feel a shift in our relationship with it.

The therapist, Stephen Gilligan, whose work I hugely admire, suggests that stress produces a tense, ‘muscle-constricted’ way of thinking that keeps us stuck in the same old patterns of doing. We lose awareness of our breath, we lock on to our problem, and we end up with the same unsatisfying outcomes.

But by moving back into breath-based awareness, we allow life to begin moving through us again so that our patterns of behaviour can change.
 

Now for something a little bit different...

 

As some of you will know, I am a writer and, over the years, I have worked with lots of writers, helping them to develop their projects, overcome 'blocks' and stuckness and get their creativity flowing. In fact, it was through researching the area of creativity and creative writing that I first became interested in hypnosis.

So, over the years, I have been developing strategies and techniques to help people to (re)discover their creativity and I'd like to share some of these with you now as part of my new series of 'Creative Kick-Starts.'

 

Creative Kick-Start Number One

 

Cooking up a storm

1. Think of a project that you’d like to make happen right now. Imagine that this project is a recipe and give it a name. For example,

'My recipe for Instant Confidence' or 'My recipe for a better relationship with Ed'.

2. Make a list of the secret ‘ingredients’ that you already have in your internal store cupboard, ready to use in this recipe: e.g. passion, determination, being able to laugh at myself…

Make sure you don’t leave anything out. If you get stuck, think about what you have in your store cupboard that is ‘hot’; or what you have that makes things bind together; or what kind of special seasoning you have ready to use; or what will help it all to rise/bubble/marinate/crisp up?

Next put all the ingredients together and write a description of your recipe, as if it were for a best-selling cookbook. Make your description of the ingredients and the process as mouth-watering and easy to follow as possible.

For example:
"My recipe for Instant Confidence.

Take three spoonfuls of spicy-hot wit together with a big dollop of cool, concentrated determination…"

When you’ve finished, keep it safe and take it out to glance at it from time to time.

 

It’s your recipe. Use it!

Have fun with these two techniques and  please email me with any stories or comments that you’d like to tell me about at: sophie@sophienicholls.com.

I can't wait to hear what you think.

Have a great week!

 

With best wishes,