A mental health specialist and GP, Dr Harry Barry has a good knack for explaining how the brain works in a mechanical way – a way that offers hope to anyone who is struggling, mental health-wise. Think electrics and circuit boards, and ‘rewiring’ your brain in order to feel less anxious or panicky.
In Dr Barry’s books we also find talk of hormone control boxes, of the ‘gunslinger’, the amygdala – the part of the brain that gets trigger-happy when stress occurs – but that can be put back in its box.
By way of achieving all this, Dr Barry offers what many self-help books probably don’t – the actual exercises to re-train your brain. There’s no keeping his findings under his hat for face-to-face clients only. There are YouTube videos too, for example, about how to stop panic attacks, for those who are not into reading.
At the meeting in Wexford, Dr Barry wasn’t mincing his words.
“Anxiety is at epidemic levels in this country, depression is becoming a significant issue as well; 9.1% of our school-going female population are self-harming and suicide statistics are of great concern. That’s the background to all this – to why people need help in managing their mental health,” he said.
Life resilience skills include being able to cope with the unfairness and uncertainty of life (he mentioned farmers’ challenges this year particularly), developing a healthy work-life balance, knowing how to resolve personal conflicts, learning how to stop catastrophising – and how to cope with both failure and success.
“Emotional resilience is our ability to handle stress in life. Many of us will become frustrated or anxious when we get stressed. Whether or not we feel down when we get stressed very much depends on whether or not we have emotional resilience skills.”
Skewed priority
To bring a few truths home he set a few short tasks. First off we were asked to put a list of priorities in order 1-6. The ideal order is self, relationship, children, wider family, work, the rest (social media, hobbies etc).
“Most people have skewed priority lists, prioritising the wrong things,” he said. “Get the order wrong for too long and you risk mental health problems. If you put work first, then children and family, it is a recipe for anxiety, stress and depression. It’s only a matter of time before you crack and eventually there will be nothing but work left.”
As well as putting your own physical and mental health first (think oxygen mask in aeroplane on first) he advises valuing your partner/spouse greatly if you have one.
“Guard that relationship with your life because that he/she is the next most important person to yourself. Your workmates might go to your funeral, but they won’t be there for all the difficult bits before it.”
He mentions how many women instinctively put their children first, but this isn’t a good idea.
“They think it would be selfish not to do so, but your children will struggle if you and your relationship is struggling. I see a lot of anxious adolescents because of the house having a skewed priority list, so it’s important to make time for yourselves as a couple every week.”
Anxiety is rampant
Acute anxiety, social anxiety and general anxiety (worrying and catastrophising) are widespread in society, Dr Barry believes: “I see a non-stop flow of these in my clinics. I hear wonderful people telling me that they feel useless, ugly or stupid, and it’s not true. In relation to anxiety, we have to forget thinking that feeling anxious is abnormal – but that you can learn to lessen it.”
Pathological critic
We all have a PC – a pathological critic – giving out to us all the time, he says, and if you’re feeling down you start believing your PC’s negativity.
“It tells us we are stupid, ugly, useless… If we believe those things we feel down. If we believe other people believe those things about us, we feel ashamed. That’s the core of social anxiety.
“Writing things down helps by bringing your rational mind into play. Can a human being be a failure or success? No. Their skills can be, but not the human being. People fall into the trap of thinking they are weak. No one is weak or strong, but we can be strong or weak ‘at something’. The difference is that if I say I am weak at X, I can improve. If I believe that I’m a weak person I sit in a corner and feel sorry for myself.”
Smartphones are ruining our lives
Dr Barry wasn’t pulling any punches when it came to what is increasing people’s social and general anxiety – smartphones.
He advocates parents parenting: “Who gives children the phones? Parents have to parent. Parenting isn’t about being liked. Smartphones are ruining our lives. As adults, too, there is the constant cause of stress for us of constantly checking our phones. We become addicted to this and become anxious about missing something.”
Cope with uncertainty
He had other suggested exercises, including one to get used to dealing with uncertainty, like the toss a coin exercise – heads you can do whatever enjoyable thing you are planning to do, tails you can’t. Practice that for even a week and you get more used to accepting uncertainty – and learn a lot about how well you deal with frustration.
“The whole point of this exercise is that life is like the toss of a coin, sometimes it goes our way and sometimes it doesn’t. You have to be able to cope with that and adapt.”
The rating game
Dr Barry also talked about the negative impact of rating ourselves against others: “Playing the ‘rating game’ is the number one cause of anxiety, depression, shame and social anxiety, in young people particularly. Social media is making a fortune out of us doing it. Developing unconditional self-acceptance is a skill that’s vitally important.”
Coping with failure
Young people are really struggling at coping with failure, he says.
“They can’t handle sport or academic failure because in the modern world success is seen as the goal. If I’m not a Kardashian I must be a failure. Society is struggling because we are feeding this garbage to our young people. I teach young people that they are going to fail – we all are, a lot of the time – and that it’s not about failure, it’s about getting back up again and thinking about what you could do differently next time.”
Perfectionism can also cause anxiety: “They want to do everything 100%. What happens then is that they won’t try, because if they don’t try then they can’t fail.”
Lifestyle advice
Exercise 30 minutes every day – mandatory.Eat healthily.Drink less alcohol – the more you drink the more likely your mood is to go down.Get eight hours of sleep. If we miss out on REM sleep we don’t get to detach our emotions from our memories, leading to feeling of anxiety. No coffee after 6pm.Bed by 11pm, blackout blinds and a well-aired room.Use three-minute mindfulness exercises. Write down what’s upsetting you – this helps you to think logically rather than emotionally.Ban technology at mealtimes and from bedrooms. Depression – a key message
It’s important for everyone to realise that depression is not for life, Dr Barry says, but that the first bouts of depression often occur between the ages of 15 and 25 – a bout of depression can last six to nine months.
Dr Barry has published several books about mental health, including Flagging the Therapy: Pathways out of depression and anxiety; Flagging the Problem: A new approach to mental health; Toxic Stress; Depression; Anxiety and Panic and now Emotional Resilience.
See www.drharrybarry.com for more information.
Champion sheep shearer George Graham from Gorey and chairperson of support organisation Awareness Head to Toe gives talks himself about mental health at agricultural events. He attended the Dr Barry talk in Wexford.
“He certainly mentioned a great amount of serious stuff in a short time. I could see myself in a lot of what he was saying.
“Perfectionism would have been a problem with me, I thought I was coping with stress too, but I was just covering it up with work a lot of the time.
“I did suffer from anxiety – I remember when I was really bad and I’d gone to Norway to shear, getting on a plane was terrifying and I’d never have had any problem with flying before.”
He found the priority list exercise useful.
“A lot of people don’t put themselves first. It was good mentioning how your family is going to gain from your relationship being right.
“I can relate to the importance of it. I’ve worked in 13 countries and 32 counties, and seen relationships good and bad. You see the difference it makes in a house if the relationship is right.”
He found the points about failure useful too.
“No person is a failure, but they can fail at doing things and the important thing is to get back up again. Everything is not going to go right in this world – you have to accept that.”
One tip he adds from his own experience is to learn to say ‘no’.
“Sometimes people take on too much and that leads to problems. Now I say: ‘I can’t do it for you now, but I’ll see how I’m fixed next week or next month’. You have to learn to manage your own time – not let someone else control it for you.”
George is open about suffering a bout of depression a few years ago.
Recovered now, he regularly gives talks about farm safety and mental health at agricultural events around the country, preferring to be at marts to speak from the ring and ‘be on the ground with people’, rather than speak from a podium.
‘Take the first step – there is light’: is the organisation’s slogan and getting better for him was a matter of taking that first step to seek help.
“Going to a GP isn’t easy, but you have to talk to someone.”
He mentions a few things he has learned and that he uses in his own talks.
1.Remember four letters - H-A-L-T. They stand for Hungry, Angry, Lonely and Tired – together those four words spell trouble.
2.Mental health problems can happen to anyone at any time.
3.The cup of tea is important – you never know what someone wants to tell you/talk about when they invite you to have one.
4.The greatest gift we can give anyone is our time.
5.Eat well for good physical and mental health – never miss breakfast. ‘Remember, you can’t run a jeep without fuel’.
To contact email awarenessheadtotoe@gmail.com
For more information on the Pfizer Healthy Town Initiative see www.facebook.com/HealthyTownIreland
A mental health specialist and GP, Dr Harry Barry has a good knack for explaining how the brain works in a mechanical way – a way that offers hope to anyone who is struggling, mental health-wise. Think electrics and circuit boards, and ‘rewiring’ your brain in order to feel less anxious or panicky.
In Dr Barry’s books we also find talk of hormone control boxes, of the ‘gunslinger’, the amygdala – the part of the brain that gets trigger-happy when stress occurs – but that can be put back in its box.
By way of achieving all this, Dr Barry offers what many self-help books probably don’t – the actual exercises to re-train your brain. There’s no keeping his findings under his hat for face-to-face clients only. There are YouTube videos too, for example, about how to stop panic attacks, for those who are not into reading.
At the meeting in Wexford, Dr Barry wasn’t mincing his words.
“Anxiety is at epidemic levels in this country, depression is becoming a significant issue as well; 9.1% of our school-going female population are self-harming and suicide statistics are of great concern. That’s the background to all this – to why people need help in managing their mental health,” he said.
Life resilience skills include being able to cope with the unfairness and uncertainty of life (he mentioned farmers’ challenges this year particularly), developing a healthy work-life balance, knowing how to resolve personal conflicts, learning how to stop catastrophising – and how to cope with both failure and success.
“Emotional resilience is our ability to handle stress in life. Many of us will become frustrated or anxious when we get stressed. Whether or not we feel down when we get stressed very much depends on whether or not we have emotional resilience skills.”
Skewed priority
To bring a few truths home he set a few short tasks. First off we were asked to put a list of priorities in order 1-6. The ideal order is self, relationship, children, wider family, work, the rest (social media, hobbies etc).
“Most people have skewed priority lists, prioritising the wrong things,” he said. “Get the order wrong for too long and you risk mental health problems. If you put work first, then children and family, it is a recipe for anxiety, stress and depression. It’s only a matter of time before you crack and eventually there will be nothing but work left.”
As well as putting your own physical and mental health first (think oxygen mask in aeroplane on first) he advises valuing your partner/spouse greatly if you have one.
“Guard that relationship with your life because that he/she is the next most important person to yourself. Your workmates might go to your funeral, but they won’t be there for all the difficult bits before it.”
He mentions how many women instinctively put their children first, but this isn’t a good idea.
“They think it would be selfish not to do so, but your children will struggle if you and your relationship is struggling. I see a lot of anxious adolescents because of the house having a skewed priority list, so it’s important to make time for yourselves as a couple every week.”
Anxiety is rampant
Acute anxiety, social anxiety and general anxiety (worrying and catastrophising) are widespread in society, Dr Barry believes: “I see a non-stop flow of these in my clinics. I hear wonderful people telling me that they feel useless, ugly or stupid, and it’s not true. In relation to anxiety, we have to forget thinking that feeling anxious is abnormal – but that you can learn to lessen it.”
Pathological critic
We all have a PC – a pathological critic – giving out to us all the time, he says, and if you’re feeling down you start believing your PC’s negativity.
“It tells us we are stupid, ugly, useless… If we believe those things we feel down. If we believe other people believe those things about us, we feel ashamed. That’s the core of social anxiety.
“Writing things down helps by bringing your rational mind into play. Can a human being be a failure or success? No. Their skills can be, but not the human being. People fall into the trap of thinking they are weak. No one is weak or strong, but we can be strong or weak ‘at something’. The difference is that if I say I am weak at X, I can improve. If I believe that I’m a weak person I sit in a corner and feel sorry for myself.”
Smartphones are ruining our lives
Dr Barry wasn’t pulling any punches when it came to what is increasing people’s social and general anxiety – smartphones.
He advocates parents parenting: “Who gives children the phones? Parents have to parent. Parenting isn’t about being liked. Smartphones are ruining our lives. As adults, too, there is the constant cause of stress for us of constantly checking our phones. We become addicted to this and become anxious about missing something.”
Cope with uncertainty
He had other suggested exercises, including one to get used to dealing with uncertainty, like the toss a coin exercise – heads you can do whatever enjoyable thing you are planning to do, tails you can’t. Practice that for even a week and you get more used to accepting uncertainty – and learn a lot about how well you deal with frustration.
“The whole point of this exercise is that life is like the toss of a coin, sometimes it goes our way and sometimes it doesn’t. You have to be able to cope with that and adapt.”
The rating game
Dr Barry also talked about the negative impact of rating ourselves against others: “Playing the ‘rating game’ is the number one cause of anxiety, depression, shame and social anxiety, in young people particularly. Social media is making a fortune out of us doing it. Developing unconditional self-acceptance is a skill that’s vitally important.”
Coping with failure
Young people are really struggling at coping with failure, he says.
“They can’t handle sport or academic failure because in the modern world success is seen as the goal. If I’m not a Kardashian I must be a failure. Society is struggling because we are feeding this garbage to our young people. I teach young people that they are going to fail – we all are, a lot of the time – and that it’s not about failure, it’s about getting back up again and thinking about what you could do differently next time.”
Perfectionism can also cause anxiety: “They want to do everything 100%. What happens then is that they won’t try, because if they don’t try then they can’t fail.”
Lifestyle advice
Exercise 30 minutes every day – mandatory.Eat healthily.Drink less alcohol – the more you drink the more likely your mood is to go down.Get eight hours of sleep. If we miss out on REM sleep we don’t get to detach our emotions from our memories, leading to feeling of anxiety. No coffee after 6pm.Bed by 11pm, blackout blinds and a well-aired room.Use three-minute mindfulness exercises. Write down what’s upsetting you – this helps you to think logically rather than emotionally.Ban technology at mealtimes and from bedrooms. Depression – a key message
It’s important for everyone to realise that depression is not for life, Dr Barry says, but that the first bouts of depression often occur between the ages of 15 and 25 – a bout of depression can last six to nine months.
Dr Barry has published several books about mental health, including Flagging the Therapy: Pathways out of depression and anxiety; Flagging the Problem: A new approach to mental health; Toxic Stress; Depression; Anxiety and Panic and now Emotional Resilience.
See www.drharrybarry.com for more information.
Champion sheep shearer George Graham from Gorey and chairperson of support organisation Awareness Head to Toe gives talks himself about mental health at agricultural events. He attended the Dr Barry talk in Wexford.
“He certainly mentioned a great amount of serious stuff in a short time. I could see myself in a lot of what he was saying.
“Perfectionism would have been a problem with me, I thought I was coping with stress too, but I was just covering it up with work a lot of the time.
“I did suffer from anxiety – I remember when I was really bad and I’d gone to Norway to shear, getting on a plane was terrifying and I’d never have had any problem with flying before.”
He found the priority list exercise useful.
“A lot of people don’t put themselves first. It was good mentioning how your family is going to gain from your relationship being right.
“I can relate to the importance of it. I’ve worked in 13 countries and 32 counties, and seen relationships good and bad. You see the difference it makes in a house if the relationship is right.”
He found the points about failure useful too.
“No person is a failure, but they can fail at doing things and the important thing is to get back up again. Everything is not going to go right in this world – you have to accept that.”
One tip he adds from his own experience is to learn to say ‘no’.
“Sometimes people take on too much and that leads to problems. Now I say: ‘I can’t do it for you now, but I’ll see how I’m fixed next week or next month’. You have to learn to manage your own time – not let someone else control it for you.”
George is open about suffering a bout of depression a few years ago.
Recovered now, he regularly gives talks about farm safety and mental health at agricultural events around the country, preferring to be at marts to speak from the ring and ‘be on the ground with people’, rather than speak from a podium.
‘Take the first step – there is light’: is the organisation’s slogan and getting better for him was a matter of taking that first step to seek help.
“Going to a GP isn’t easy, but you have to talk to someone.”
He mentions a few things he has learned and that he uses in his own talks.
1.Remember four letters - H-A-L-T. They stand for Hungry, Angry, Lonely and Tired – together those four words spell trouble.
2.Mental health problems can happen to anyone at any time.
3.The cup of tea is important – you never know what someone wants to tell you/talk about when they invite you to have one.
4.The greatest gift we can give anyone is our time.
5.Eat well for good physical and mental health – never miss breakfast. ‘Remember, you can’t run a jeep without fuel’.
To contact email awarenessheadtotoe@gmail.com
For more information on the Pfizer Healthy Town Initiative see www.facebook.com/HealthyTownIreland
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