How do you cope when someone lets you down: a natural mindful approach

How do you cope when someone lets you down?

This happened to me today so I'm trying to think of mindful things I can do.

1. "There will be better days":

I like this long-suffering phrase, it reminds me that even when I'm beset by lots of problems it won't be the same tomorrow. Also that however great my angst it is, I'm not dead yet. I can always find a few tiny things I've been putting off so tomorrow really will be better, pay for the central heating, book the bike in to be serviced.

2. Tell people 

Email friends. They won't necessarily respond but some may notice and sympathise. Even more important, tell people you meet. Otherwise they might think you're being antisocial. Ask for what you need: a hug or a talk, text people, phone people, arrange to meet, light up the network of people you know.

3. Walk in Nature

Nothing works as well to restore a mindful state of mind for me as a walk outside. Watching chance happenings, birds soaring, colours in people's gardens, birdsong and the feeling of climbing a hill all help me to feel myself, maybe sad, maybe distracted. So I'm going out walking now... Nature always seems to surprise me with colours, sounds and smells, 

which brings me to:

4. Variety

More variety in food, avoid the cheapest supermarket, have regular drinks and meals, if you don't feel like baking go out and buy a treat. Beware of silently or noisily singing the same old songs, you could be wallowing in morose thoughts ie Leonard Cohen, think of different tunes. Read a poetry book like Staying Alive, mark the poems you'd choose to read aloud to someone. Baking usually helps me but today feels like a day to knit or draw. Any activities that are calming, creative or automatic, colourful. Music too, listening or playing helps me. This is a great opportunity to do things differently.

5. Notice when you forget why you're feeling sad.

This will happen increasingly as time passes but you might even notice it on the first day. It's encouraging to notice how feelings change constantly, sadness to anger, anger to fear. And even a surprising moment of humour or joy. If someone's let me down I can sometimes smile when I remember that I've let people down too. This time the boot's on the other foot.

Natural mindfulness, surprise and curiosity.

I've been thinking that natural mindfulness implies surprise and curiosity. 

Curiosity: having a question in mind provides me with a reason to be observant. It always seems to lead me to something that surprises me. 

Here are some examples of questions that I put to myself when I go out walking.

What's different today?

It could be the wind, the sky, the time of day, the angle of the sun, the signs of the approaching season, the mood of the birds or colours that stand out. Then I check to see if any of these change while I'm walking.

What colours can I see?

One question a painter asks is: 'where is the reddest red?' I try to work systematically through the rainbow but today I found the reddest object near the end of the walk. 

I'm sure I wouldn't have noticed this toadstool if I hadn't been looking for colours.

What's the smallest beauty I can find in nature?

In summer it's possible to do a mini safari by lying on the grass and crawling along to see the smallest plants and creatures at work. In winter it's about studying the bark of trees and fallen twigs to look for shapes and colours in the forest of mosses and lichens. 

What patterns can I see in the plants?

Plants need light, nutrients and water so they congregate where these are most suited for growth. I like to see epiphytes, plants that grow on other plants: ivy and clematis on trees, moss and lichen on stone. Trees have differing patterns according to whether they've grown in thick forest: tall and thin and curving up seeking the light or out in the hedgerows: wide and spreading like specimen trees. Even in winter it's possible to recognise trees: ashes have keys, beech saplings hold their leaves all winter.

Do you have questions that you put when you're out walking?

Cotswolds: road death capital of Glos

Which Glos roads are the most dangerous?

What's special about Glos Road deaths?

UK Government statistics show an impressive fall in annual road deaths from 3,000 a year to under 2,000.

But Country roads remain dangerous; more dangerous than motorways and A roads. If you live in a rural area you'll know the reason: speed.  According to Brake one in three drivers admits to driving too fast on country roads.

Which Glos District do you think has the highest number of accidents? Cotswold or Gloucester City?

Here's the stats available from Road Safety Gloucestershire 

32 Glos road casualties in 2013 include one cyclist.

Cotswold roads are among the most dangeropus in the whole of the UK.  How does this compare with previous years?

Here's the data from the UK Govt site

Thirty deaths a year have been average in Gloucestershire, essentially unchanged. Of the West of England rural counties shown here, Dorset has achieved the greatest fall in road deaths while deaths in the other counties remain static.

Brake campaigns in favour of 20 mph speed limits in towns but what can be done in rural areas?

Percentage Medicine, scourge of our times.

Random controlled trials [RCT's] are used to detect benefit from giving treatments to prevent stroke.  But randomised trials depend on weeding out atypical cases and expecting everyone in the study to take their treatment as prescribed.  It ignores the narrative of the patient's life and herds all patients with a condition together, assuming that they are identical.  Normally compliance with treatment is checked regularly and people who drop out are accounted for in the analysis.  

A common measure derived from the studies is 'number needed to treat' [NNT] in order to prevent death or recurrence. How many people need to take common treatments to prevent a further stroke?  What would your estimate be? 5, 10, 15?

Opinions and estimates vary but it is not unusual for doctors to prescribe treatments that have a NNT of over 100, that is 99 people may take the treatment and experience side effects for one person to survive who otherwise would have died. You could call this 'percentage medicine' which follows from the bias of RCT's away from lifestyle changes and towards drug treatments. 

Lifestyle changes such as increasing exercise and weight loss are more difficult to standardise and outcomes are less clear.  Multiple prescribing is the result: anti-platelet drugs [eg aspirin], ACE inhibitors [lisinopril] and statins to lower cholesterol levels.  These may all be continued into advanced age when changes in memory, sight, hearing and interaction between all the treatments prescribed are largely unknown.  Compliance with treatment is almost certainly lower in 'free range' people when compared to well motivated research subjects.

 These treatments work but only in a proportion of cases, sometimes a very small proportion of patients can be shown to benefit from this approach, like 1%.

What else could we do? Drugs will never be the answer, though big pharma would like us to think so. The biggest advances in health have come from public health interventions: immunisation, clean water, improving diets.  We could apply what we already know.  Educate, but you can't force people to exercise more and lose weight. We could be preventing stroke a lot better if we had individualised exercise regimens with incentives for reaching major goals.  Sounds like socialised medicine. The uncontrolled marketing of fatty and sugary foods and slimming remedies has kept the economy ticking over but growth in these areas is impacting on the nation's health. Increasingly sedentary jobs are putting more people at risk.

  Cycling needs to be made safer and why can't cars offer more exercise while you're driving?

UK Cycle Death Conspiracy

Rising Road Deaths in the UK-February 2017

There had been a welcome improvement in the annual casualties of car drivers and passengers up to 2010, from over 3,000 a year to less than 2,000 a year.  Deaths of cyclists, though much less common, had been relatively stable over this period.

But cycle deaths in adults are static or rising: Here are the latest trends in quarterly figures showing a rise in numbers killed or seriously injured in all road users.  

* Serious injury: An injury for which a person is detained in hsoptial as an in-patient: fracture, concussion, internal injuries, crushings, burns, excluding friction burns, severe cuts, severe general shock requiring medical treatment and injuries causing death 30 or more days after the accident.

Here are the figures:

The latest report cites the CRASH system which may have resulted in police recording SI more frequently but even so more people are dying on the roads:

A 'non-significant rise' despite these cautious bullet points, it's hard to ignore the rising numbers of road deaths. The UK will likely soon return to 2,000 avoidable deaths per year.

Hidden among the figures and tables is a 22% rise in child deaths on the road, highlighted in an RAC news report: 

International comparison are of limited value but the reduction of Dutch mortality among cyclists to 162 in 2010, despite much higher cycle use than in the UK is striking.

The UK Government has prioritised road safety for car drivers and relatively neglected the needs of cyclists.

References

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/ras45-quarterly-statistics#table-ras45007
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-main-results-2011

http://www.rospa.com/roadsafety/adviceandinformation/cycling/facts-figures.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reported_Road_Casualties_Great_Britain

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/cyclesafety/article3313260.ece

http://assets.dft.gov.uk/statistics/releases/reported-road-casualties-gb-main-results-2011/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-main-results-2011.pdf

http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2011/04/netherlands-traffic-deaths-down-again.html