If you ask yourself the question "How am I coping with the adversity in my life right now?" and then stay with that question in a sustained, focused way, what answer would you find? Are your coping strategies as effective as they could be?
Most of us were never taught the cognitive, emotional or relational skills that are required to build deep mental resilience and are therefore often dealing with stress and uncomfortable emotions through numbing, distraction, avoidance, pleasure and comfort. Though these strategies have their place, they are unsustainable as primary coping mechanisms.
Mixed Mental Arts™ was designed to help people cope with change and adversity in a way that is skilful and sustainable
A powerful journey through playful experiments, cutting edge neurobiology and a toolkit of twelve practical techniques; Mixed Mental Arts builds your resilience through helping you establish lasting behaviour change.
COURSE OVERVIEW
Mixed Mental Arts is taught over six modules
Breaking our addiction to thought
Hacking the body’s stress response
Neutralising unhelpful thought patterns
Navigating overwhelming experiences
Re-learning relaxation
Re-claiming emotional autonomy
The Modules are delivered on Tuesdays, starting 4th May 2021, 7pm –9pm and running once per week over the course of six weeks until Tue 8th June. Each module lasts for two hours and participants are expected to commit to home practice for the duration of the course, with Audio and PDF guides provided to support.
Each module includes between 1 & 3 techniques, with topics covering the following:
★Module 1: Breaking our addiction to thought
Abstract thought and the mechanics of mind wandering.
Cognitive bias and the phenomenon of worry.
Focus, choice and the war for our attention.
Deconstructing mental training.
Neuroplasticity, rewiring the brain and taming the mind.
★Module 2: Hacking the body’s stress response★
Evolution, a three-tiered brain and the internal tug of war
Neuroception and the vagus nerve
The Autonomic Nervous System and the body-mind connection
Heart-Rate Variability and stress resilience
Coherence and the heart-brain connection.
★Module 3: Neutralising unhelpful thought patterns★
Self-referential thought, cognitive fusion and negative self-image.
Meta-cognition and untangling ourselves from false narratives.
Responding to intrusive thoughts.
★Module 4: Navigating overwhelming experiences★
How emotions create bias, filter perception and affect our decisions.
Adversity, coping and how avoiding difficult emotion leads to burnout.
Interroception, equanimity and how to become ‘better at feeling’.
Traversing overwhelm skilfully.
★Module 5: Re-learning relaxation★
Rest, guilt and the fetishisation of busyness
Cortisol crash, adrenal fatigue and burnout
Refractory periods, deep rest and integrating recovery time into our diary
The relationship between musculature tension and our minds.
★Module 6: Re-claiming emotional autonomy★
Brainwaves, gamma synchrony and self-generating positive emotional states
Coherence and the heart-brain connection.
The relationship between appreciation and thinking clearly.
Mirror neurons and why our mood affects others.
STATS FROM PREVIOUS PARTICIPANTS
85% of students viewed Mixed Mental Arts as an ‘Extremely valuable’ or ‘Very valuable’ use of their time.*
94% of students said they were ‘very likely’ or ‘likely’ to use the practical techniques in their lives going forward.*
95% of students were either ‘very likely’ or ‘likely’ to recommend Mixed Mental Arts training to others.*
*data from 20 courses delivered during the 2020 Lockdown