by Lucy Hone
Kindness (generosity, nurturance, care, compassion, altruistic love): doing favours and good deeds for others; helping them and taking care of them.
Social intelligence (emotional intelligence, personal intelligence): being aware of the motives and feelings of yourself and others; knowing what to do to fit into different social situations; knowing what makes other people tick.
Teamwork (citizenship, social responsibility, loyalty): working well as a member of a group or team; being loyal to the group; doing your share.
Fairness: treating all people the same according to notions of fairness and justice; not letting personal feelings bias decisions about others; giving everyone a fair chance.
Leadership: encouraging a group, of which you are a member, to get things done, and at the same time maintaining good relations within the group; organising group activities and ensuring they happen.
Forgiveness: forgiving those who have done wrong; accepting the shortcomings of others; giving people a second chance; not being vengeful.
Humility: letting your accomplishments speak for themselves; not regarding yourself as special.
Prudence: being careful about your choices; not taking undue risks; not saying or doing things that might later be regretted.
Self-regulation (self-control): regulating your feelings and actions; being disciplined; controlling your appetite and emotions, overcoming short-term desires for long-term benefit.
Appreciation of beauty and excellence (awe, wonder, elevation): noticing and appreciating beauty, excellence, and/or skilled performance in various domains of life, from nature to art to mathematics to science, to everyday experience.
Gratitude: being aware of and thankful for the good things that happen; taking time to express thanks.
Hope (optimism, future-mindedness, future orientation): expecting the best in the future and working to achieve it; believing that a good future is something that can be brought about.
Humour (playfulness): liking to laugh and tease; bringing smiles to other people; seeing the light side; making (not necessarily telling) jokes.
Spirituality (faith, purpose): having coherent beliefs about the higher purpose and meaning of the universe; knowing where you fit in the larger scheme of life; having beliefs about the meaning of life that shape conduct and provide comfort.
STEP 2
Looking at the strengths with the Top 5 scores, ask yourself the following questions to identify your ‘Signature Strengths’.
Is this the real me?
Do I enjoy using this strength?
Does using this strength energise me?
Write your Top 5 Signature Strengths here:
1. ____________________
2. ____________________
3. ____________________
4. ____________________
5. ____________________
Pick one of your Signature Strengths and try to use it more over the next week.
Ask yourself the following questions:
How did you find this exercise?
What did you learn by filling out this survey?
Are some of these strengths more useful while grieving than others?
Which ones?
Did you score much higher or lower on one strength than you anticipated?
How does ______________________ strength feel for you when you use it?
Who sees this strength in you?
What about your partner, what strengths do you see in them?
Are there some strengths you consider as family strengths?
When have you used this strength in the past?
How might you apply these strengths to help in your grief?
Where else in your life could you use these strengths now?
Chapter 12
Managing exhaustion and depression through rest and exercise
GRIEF IS UTTERLY EXHAUSTING. Nine months in I went back to sleeping in the afternoons whenever I could. Partly due to the pointlessness of it all, but usually just due to plain old tiredness. Grief is so unlike any other of life’s challenges. I have found myself bewildered and frustrated by the never-ending nature of it all. Usually, when I have a job to do, I work out a plan of how to get through it and, eventually, with enough hard graft, problem-solving and continual effort, reach the end. Job done, take a break, start again. But with grieving it feels as though there is no end, no break. Just one perpetual uphill struggle to convince yourself this is do-able: up, up, up we go, and instead of being rewarded with a downhill cruise after all the effort, along comes another hill. Some days it’s a hill, others a mountain, at times you find yourself in a lull of acceptance—a gully between the uphill slogs. But up you have to go, again and again. No wonder it’s exhausting.
Successful grieving requires successful energy management. For me, this started with acknowledging my tiredness to myself, and then to others. Now Trevor and I have conversations about tiredness over and over again, particularly on Monday mornings, which are always the worst.
‘Think I must have some kind of virus,’ he’ll say.
‘Maybe. More likely it’s just the exhausting process of grieving and living without her,’ I’ll reply.
SUCCESSFUL GRIEVING REQUIRES SUCCESSFUL ENERGY MANAGEMENT.
Having acknowledged it ourselves, the importance of letting other people know also became clear. If I hadn’t told others how frequently I felt tired, they might have thought us rude for leaving parties, work or work functions early. Rude, or lightweight, or uncommitted. Telling them that, even nine months later, I often felt overwhelmingly tired and just needed to bail out or have a 20-minute power nap in the car, or on the couch in the office, helped me from feeling bad or becoming overwhelmed. As I’ve said before, part of my ground rules for trying to return as quickly as possible to regular functioning is that I do not ignore the signs of my grief when they require my attention. The graphic below outlines the steps to take.
Grief is also exhausting because there’s no way to get away from it. How many of us have booked a holiday or just a weekend elsewhere to have a break, only to discover that grief knows no geographical boundaries? It just comes with you. We have found school holidays are the worst. At least during term time we had the boys at home with us, and the busy regular routines of school and work life kept us all busy, and connected. Take that away and we found ourselves frequently alone, sometimes for days on end in the summer months when the boys were away staying with friends or on sports camps, giving us too much time to think. Those first New Year and summer holidays were long and torturous.
Exercise: Make a plan for dealing with tiredness
Which of the following are manageable for you? Which will help you get the rest you need? Identify the times and places that fit in with your own routines and commitments.
• Sleep when you can (a 20minute sleep is really effective).
• Find yourself a quiet space (car, a quiet corner of the office, bed, sofa), drink a decent coffee and then settle down for 20 minutes’ sleep; the coffee will wake you up without needing an alarm, by which time you’ve had the benefit of sleep and the coffee to keep you going. Obviously I’m not advocating drinking too much coffee, but if you simply cannot get away, this is an effective fix.
• Watch your weekday bed times—try not to add to the tiredness by forgetting to go to bed at a sensible hour.
• Watch out for the weekends. Once we’d realised that two late nights over the weekend stuffed up the whole of the next week, making everything harder and us much more miserable, we tried to be really disciplined about this.
Get out and get moving
I’ve long been motivated to exercise for my mental health more than for my physical health. I know how cranky I am if I don’t get outside and move each day and I know, from the research and the empirical studies I’ve conducted, that exercise is the key to living a long and healthy life. I often quote Tal Ben-Shahar, former lecturer at Harvard and author of several books,1 who says that not
exercising is akin to taking a depressant. That is, if you’re not exercising you may as well be taking a pill that makes you depressed—that’s how much difference not moving makes to our lives. The research is incontrovertible: exercise is medicine.2
‘Physical exercise contributes a great deal to happiness; in fact, there is research showing that regular exercise, three times a week for 30 to 40 minutes of aerobic exercise—could be jogging or walking or aerobics or dancing . . . is equivalent to some of our most powerful psychiatric drugs in dealing with depression or sadness or anxiety. We’ve become a sedentary culture where we park our car next to our workplace or take the train and we don’t walk like our foreparents used to. Thousands of years ago our foreparents walked an average of eight miles a day. How far do we walk today? Well, it depends on where we park our car. And we pay a high price for it because we weren’t made to be sedentary. We were made to be physically active.’3
After Abi died, and with Ben-Shahar’s words foremost in my mind, I knew that moving daily was more critical than ever. But, I was also fortunate enough to have studied exercise psychology, which is an entire field dedicated to the science of making exercise happen. That’s right: while sport psychologists focus on how to make professional athletes be faster, quicker and stronger, exercise psychologists are chiefly concerned with how to get the rest of us off the couch and moving a bit more often.
I knew from exercise psychology that humans are designed to live outdoors in nearly perpetual motion. As Stephen Ilardi writes in his great book The Depression Cure, ‘human beings were never designed for the poorly nourished, sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially isolated, frenzied pace of twenty-first-century life’.4
Mechanisation has effectively removed the requirement for daily movement from our lives: we push buttons and flick switches to transport us from A to B, to wash our clothes, vacuum our floors, knead our bread, roast our food and even to switch TV channels. All of our clever inventions have engineered movement right out of our lives, so that our average energy expenditure per unit of body mass is now less than 38 per cent of that of our Stone Age ancestors.5 While Paleolithic man walked five to ten miles on an average day just to find food and water, very little in our 21st-century lives requires us to physically move, push or pull, hunt or gather. As a consequence of this, we are struggling mentally and physically and, just to make it harder still, physical activity has become something of a choice. We have to opt in rather than opt out. For most of us, opting in is hard work; it’s just not the obvious choice, particularly when we are grieving. But when we are stressed, we need to get out and get moving more than ever. Regular physical activity really is a magic bullet for mental health.
I’m not talking about running marathons—the type of physical activity that I’m talking about won’t require you to don Lycra or join a gym. Just to get outside and move, for half an hour a day, in three ten-minute blocks is good. The research is undeniable: aerobic exercise physically transforms our brains and engaging in physical activity is the natural way to prevent the negative consequences of stress. What’s more, while the evidence is relatively new, the psychological benefits of exposure to sunlight are also starting to emerge. Ilardi is big on green exercise: ‘Although simply going outside on a sunny day can brighten your mood, an even deeper link exists between light exposure and depression—one involving the body’s internal clock. As it turns out, the brain gauges the amount of light you get each day, and it uses that information to reset your body clock. Without enough light exposure, the body clock eventually gets out of sync, and when that happens, it throws off important circadian rhythms that regulate energy, sleep, appetite, and hormonal levels. The disruption of these important biological rhythms can, in turn, trigger clinical depression. Because natural sunlight is so much brighter than indoor lighting—over a hundred times brighter, on average—a half hour of sunlight is enough to reset your body clock. Even the natural light of a grey, cloudy day is several times brighter than the inside of most people’s houses, and a few hours of exposure provide just enough light to keep circadian rhythms well regulated. But people who are inside from dawn to dusk often find their body clocks starting to malfunction.’6
But given that exercise is a choice, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that it’s not always the easiest one to make. People who don’t know me well suppose that I love exercise. In some ways I do, but I also firmly, utterly loathe it too. I hate the moment the alarm goes off to tell me it’s time to get up in the dark; I am full of self-pity as I go to bed and set that alarm; I’m often cross as I lace up my shoes; and if, for some glorious reason, I cannot locate my car keys in the morning, I’m only too happy to call the whole thing off and go back to bed.
REGULAR PHYSICAL ACTIVITY REALLY IS A MAGIC BULLET FOR MENTAL HEALTH.
These, according to exercise psychology, are my ‘barriers’ to exercise. Others are: I just can’t be bothered; I hate running, I’d rather have an extra hour in bed; I’m not fit enough to keep up with the others I run with; it’s raining/cold/dark/too hot; I’m too hung-over; or, currently, I’m just too plain weary with grief. Yes, there are multiple barriers to exercise.
Just as there are barriers to exercise, there is also what is known as ‘enablers’ to exercise—the things that motivate and enable us to get out the door. Running, for instance, is cheap (costs nothing aside from a new pair of shoes each year), it’s efficient (all you need is half an hour to accrue a long list of positive physical and mental health benefits), it’s social (the friends I run with can very often become the only friends I get to spend time with each day). In my case, it also involves being outdoors. Best of all? All of the above apply to walking too. It’s cheap, efficient, social and, ideally, outdoors.
Walking is my favourite exercise; it ticks so many boxes. Mostly I go with Trevor and Jack The Dog, but there are times when our circle of grief, the two of us, feels too small and claustrophobic, and I instinctively know we need the support and energy of others. That’s when I’ll text or call a friend, knowing we need company. There are other times, though, when I relish walking alone; it gives me the opportunity to think, to cry, and reflect on what’s happened, what I’m feeling and how I’m coping. I use it as an opportunity to check in with myself.
If developing a regular exercise routine has been hard for you in the past, identifying your enablers to exercise is vital. Knowing your barriers, and finding solutions to them, or the enablers that outweigh them, is equally important. Consider what your personal barriers and enablers might be by answering the questions in the exercise below.
Embarking on an exercise routine when you are grieving might seem initially like adding to your burden, not helping. But remember I’m talking only about three bouts of ten-minute walking each day. Social support is also likely to be key when you’re starting out. As Stephen Ilardi writes: ‘The depressed brain actually has an impaired ability to initiate activities, so those battling depression usually have a difficult time starting anything new. But they typically do just fine with a new activity if someone else can help them get going.’7 My friend Kate helped me get back into swimming. By driving me to the pool, understanding that there are days when I might only manage ten lengths, and turning it into an enjoyable activity rather than a chore, she made this activity possible for me once or twice a week. I would never have kept it up without her.
If developing and sticking to a habit of daily physical activity has been a challenge for you, James Prochaska’s change model may help you understand why you’ve previously fallen off the wagon and what you can do to stay on it. Prochaska and his colleagues identified that in order to develop a habit of any kind, people have to travel through five steps from 1) precontemplation (when we have no intention to change but the inkling of a thought is recognised) to 2) actual contemplation (when we first seriously consider changing a habit) to 3) progressing through preparation (when we consider the difficulties involved and perhaps crystallise goals) to 4) action (when the ne
w behaviour begins) and finally to 5) maintenance (which involves us working out relapse-prevention strategies).8
SOCIAL SUPPORT IS LIKELY TO BE KEY WHEN YOU’RE STARTING OUT.
Their research also revealed two key pieces of evidence informing the successful adoption of an ongoing and ingrained habit of physical activity: first, that our readiness for making that habit occur is the vital indicator of success (that is, no one can be convinced to become a routine exerciser while they are still in the precontemplation stage); and, secondly, that before we can truly adopt a new habit and make it a permanent feature in our lives (i.e. reach the maintenance stage of the model) many of us have to pass through some of these stages many times. But—and here’s the promising bit—each time we do so, we learn more about what successful change looks like for us individually. ‘Most self-changers will recycle several times through the stages before achieving long-term maintenance,’ says Prochaska,9 explaining that the development of a fully ingrained, sustainable new habit does not happen in one steady linear progression. His model resembles an upward spiral like a corkscrew. It is well worth spending some time considering which stage of Prochaska’s model you currently sit at, and what it would take for you to move through to the next stage.
Exercises for boosting daily physical activity
In the professional development workshops I run, aimed at helping employees become more resilient, I use an eight-pronged strategy for boosting daily physical activity:
1. Work out what motivates you to move more by asking yourself the following questions:
• Who do I want to do this for?
• What difference will it make?
• Why do I/they care?
• How will I feel if I do manage to move more?
• What is the consequence of not moving more?
2. Plan each week. This involves working out in advance the 4Ws of activity: