Living Well with Long Term Health Conditions 1

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A series of four workshops designed to help participants build sustainable practices to support their wellbeing and resilience in the face of life's inevitable stresses. Each session in the series is designed as a stand-alone workshop, so participants can book on to all four workshops or just one on its own.

Kathrin Hicks is a clinical psychologist who has worked with many different patient groups in the NHS. Her most recent focus has been staff working on the Covid front line.

Workshop 1: How mind and body interact in long term health conditions

Delivered by Kathrin Hicks from the University Counselling Centre

Kathrin will present a framework for understanding how physical and mental factors interact in the experience of long term health conditions, drawing on ideas from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Mindfulness. This framework will provide the rationale for the interventions presented across the sessions – understanding how and why a technique works will increase the motivation to try it out. In a nutshell, the experience of long term physical health problems can set in motion a vicious cycle of thought processes, emotions and behaviours that makes it even harder to live with the symptoms of the condition. This is not our fault but a consequence of the way the human brain is wired to respond to stressful situations. If we can understand and manage this response better, we can work towards a way of living well with our health problems, rather than feeling like we are in a constant battle.

Concepts to be covered include:

• The CBT model of the relationship between thoughts, feelings, physical symptoms and behaviours
• The idea of the “second arrow of suffering” – how we can make a situation worse by thinking about it in a certain way
• The mechanism of the fight/flight stress response and how this operates in chronic physical health problems
• The first practical exercise: The 3-minute breathing space

Joining instructions will be provided on your booking confirmation email.

Number of sessions: 1

Zoom Video Conferencing