Donna Maria Bottomley

he story that my brain constructed for this event based on what it knows from my prior experience is a variation of impostor syndrome.

e cannot alter the fact that our brain makes predictions, but we can start to change why it predicts things in that way, and we can decide how we interpret the effects of that prediction.

There has been some research showing that the brain gets a hit of dopamine (the reward chemical) when we put something off.

There have been damning statistics showing that black men are judged much more harshly by the psychiatric system, and as a result are logically going to find it very difficult to seek help.

particularly a fear of judgement (Topkaya, 2015)

Sadly, the way that the brain then retrieves memories where we have had the same feeling, means that we are likely to have other thoughts and images and feelings which we may label as ‘failure’ and then this can colour the way we see the present. We can then become stuck in low mood and feeling like everything we do is a failure.

We also need more emotional ‘granularity’ (Barrett, 2017): more words for describing how we feel, so we can choose from a wider range. At the moment we have a limited vocabulary to use to describe our struggles.

Researchers have found that an effective strategy can be simply to label what is happening, rather than try to stop or suppress it. For example, explaining to your daughter that this is the feeling of fear. It is there because something frightened her. The wobbly, fluttery sensation in their body is normal; it will come, but it will also go away soon. This strategy is called ‘affect labelling’, and it has been found to be a surprisingly simple but effective strategy for understanding and regulating.

If we perceive that we are safe and we feel connected, then this can help us to tolerate both increases and decreases in our arousal level.

Stephen Porges has coined the term ‘neuroception’ to describe the way our nervous system picks up on information from our environment and transmits danger or safety signals via the vagus nerve to the brain.