We all know the knock-on effects of a bad night’s sleep, but when insomnia becomes chronic it can affect our whole being and ability to function. The daytime fatigue it creates can send us reaching for sugar and stimulants, which in turn affect sleep.

Insomnia falls into two categories; difficulty falling asleep and waking in the night. It tends to be divided into primary insomnia, where sleeplessness is the main symptom and secondary, where sleep is affected by another condition eg arthritis, fibromyalgia and depression. From a holistic and psychoneuroimmunological (PNI) perspective - where our bodies work as one completely integrated system – the calming and soothing mechanisms that allow sleep have such far reaching effects on lowering inflammation, modulating immunity and regulating mood and motivation, that promoting sleep quality is a foundation of health; not just the absence of disease, but quality of life.

When offering evening classes to support sleep quality,...

We all know that quality of sleep the night before can have a huge influence of how we feel and behave the next day. On average, humans spend nearly two-thirds of their lives asleep and this is time well spent. The rejuvenating effects of sleep are not so much about time with eyes closed in bed, but the quality spent there.

Sleep is a state of altered consciousness, where we drop into brain cycles where we have a relatively low sensory relationship with the external world. Nearly all of our voluntary muscles – the ones we can control to move around – are inhibited and we move between two distinct states; REM (Rapid Eye Movement) and non-REM sleep.

During both waking and sleeping, our brains run through 90 minute cycles – these are similar, but obviously the night-time ones involve dropping down deeper into unconsciousness. In sleep, within this period, there are four stages of non-REM sleep (about 75% of the night), followed by REM, which gets longer each time...

Right now, as we navigate the Covid-19 pandemic, the usual boundaries between the outside world and our internal landscape have shifted in ways we could not have anticipated. Plunged into rapid-response mode, we are fire-fighting; bodies and minds racing to keep up with the most appropriate and effective responses to current threat and danger.

Two body systems at the heart of these responses are the immune and respiratory systems – how we protect ourselves and how we breathe. Given the nature of the coronavirus, these two functions are of optimal interest at the moment – supporting their function may not prevent us picking up or contracting the disease, but how we move, breathe, reduce stress and eat can have an affect on how our immune system deals with it and the severity of symptoms.

While we know that those with pre-existing conditions – immune-based issues (such as respiratory, inflammatory or autoimmune conditions), heart conditions and metabolic issues such...

Spontaneous Physical Activity

We can tend to place physical activity purely into the category of exercise and like many aspects of modern life, domesticate it into specific, corralled time slots. When we add this into sedentary tendencies to sit down all day, this all-or-nothing approach to movement can be jarring (and felt as such into areas like the lower back and knees) and does not move tissues and fluids around the body as designed.

One of the downsides to the rise of gym culture is that, having worked out a couple of times a week, people may think being sedentary the rest of the time is okay. The reality is that this sudden shift from 0–100 miles an hour can shock the body and cause the very stress we’re trying to avoid. We need to move regularly throughout the day – ideally a little every hour. This movement is often referred to as Spontaneous Physical Activity (SPA) or sometimes ‘incidental’ or exercise, as it’s simply about moving more...

Whilst teaching yoga for a specific condition might be termed as therapeutic yoga, when it comes to anxiety, even when teaching a group class, we can be pretty assured to have someone included who has experience of anxiety. Whether this is more reactive heightened stress states to a particular event or current circumstances, or deeper ‘trait’ anxiety where anxious states dominate day-to-day living. Many people who tend to ‘social anxiety’ may even feel that arising within the context of a yoga class, where there is close proximity to others, and they may feel expectations of ‘doing it right’.

Understanding the nature and mechanisms of anxiety can help yoga teachers offer the tools and guiding language that recognises this state as part of the human condition. For many, simply being with themselves in a kind space can create anxiety as they meet vulnerability. It is important to be able to meet these self-protective responses and not judge them as...

“Let food be thy medicine, and let medicine be thy food” – Hippocrates

In my blog series on Respiratory & Immune Support at Home, so far we have looked at your capacity for self-care, focus on the breath and focus on lifestyle factors to do at home. In these blogs, we have covered:

• Our respiratory system and the importance of creating energy in each of our cells.
• Our immune system – how we can help our bodies to work in harmony to be able to operate a defence system against invaders.
• Breath awareness and how every single time we inhale or exhale, each of these actions is directly linked to our immune system.
• Different types of breath and the beneficial impact they have on us, e.g. nasal breathing, mouth breathing and diaphragmatic breathing.
• The all-important factor of oral hygiene, lymphatic health and stress reduction to aid our bodies’ self-defence capacity.

This week we are looking at diet and...

If you were one of those with more time to spend at home and reflect on previous habits, you may have been including self-care practices that reconnected you with your body and nature. There has been some ‘official’ talk of the importance of supporting immunity through diet and exercise, but with the focus on ‘fighting the virus’ has in many ways taken the focus away from this opportunity to understand the nature and needs of our innate immune system.

Viruses are always part of the world we live in and how we support our innate immunity is part of the call to eat, move and breathe as close to our natural design as possible. That means tuning into health not as an action (something ‘to do’), but rather an opportunity to focus inwards and find the rhythm and flow of how all of our natural defences work.

From our oral, lung, skin and gut microbiome, to our emotional states to bring down inflammatory tendencies; we can have a profound involvement with...

For those of you reading this blog during the coronavirus outbreak, my aim is to give you some useful information to help your support your optimal health. This applies during this time, but is also important on a daily basis – our respiratory and immune health can determine our quality of life. Self-care is a key part of the kind attention and self-compassion that gives us the resources to be able to care and look out for others.

It can also provide reassurance that you are taking the self-protective action that can help quell a sense of fear that can come from feeling out of control. It is important to be able to sit with and meet feelings of vulnerability (please see Brene Brown’s work on this!); we can notice what we can control, so we can develop some ease and adaptability around that which we cannot.

This ease and calm within the nervous system (and therefore the whole mind-body) is a crucial part of immune and respiratory health. This calm parasympathetic...