Sensory Soothers for Trauma and AuDHD this Brigid

Sensory Soothers for Trauma and AuDHD this Brigid: Episode 96 of the Feel Better Every Day Podcast

Do you want to learn to soothe and support your extra sensitive (whether through trauma/s, AuDHD (autism and ADHD) or anything else) nervous system?

The Goddess Brigid (we had a bank holiday yesterday to honour her, as well as her namesake, St Brigid, yesterday) is associated with so many wonderful qualities. Use her inspiration, healing and wisdom energies to protect and work with your sensitive nervous system instead of pushing through.

I share some of my personal journey with swimming and sensory challenges, offering practical strategies for finding activities that bring you joy (glimmers) as well as triggering more challenging sensory issues. Navigate sensory triggers with self-compassion and create a self-care practice that honours your AuDHD brain.

#brigid

#sensorydifferences

#sensitivenervoussystem

#audhd

#trauma

CHAPTERS

0:00–2:24 Introduction, AuDHD, balance, and nervous system support

2:24–3:13 Honouring Brigid and working with an extra-sensitive nervous system

3:13–6:03 Swimming as sensory soothing, regulation and coming home to the body

6:03–8:16 Glimmers, play, balance and how swimming supports ADHD symptoms

8:16–10:23 The Feel part: identifying glimmers, benefits and sensory blocks

10:23–12:28 The Love part: self-compassion, adaptation, and working with sensory needs

12:28–14:04 The Heal part: community, co-regulation and choosing when togetherness helps

14:04–15:50 Closing reflections, encouragement and next episode

FULL TRANSCRIPT

I love the balancing elements in terms of ADHD, balance is really helpful in terms of working with the cerebellum part of the brain and that’s really helpful in terms of some of our symptoms.

Hi, I’m Eve Menezes Cunningham and you’re listening to the Feel Better Every Day Podcast. You can find out more and access older episodes at thefeelbettereverydaypodcast.com and you can also access loads of free resources and find out more about the book, 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing, the column I write for Platinum every month, other titles I contribute to, my work, loads of free resources I’ve created over the years.

I really hope you enjoy this episode and if you haven’t already signed up for my free newsletter, it goes out on a Monday, Míle Buíochas Mondays. Míle Buíochas means a thousand thank yous in Irish, which I’m very slowly learning. It’s polyvagal informed journal prompts to help you each week. There’s the gratitude practice element, figuring out more of what brings you joy on a daily basis, what helps you feel in that ventral vagal state (I call Purr! when I use the rescue cats with the Polyvagal Purrs approach) and I also share some of my own gratitudes, some of the things that have helped me feel more in ventral vagal that week.

Some of those will be resources that might benefit you and I also share news about upcoming events, special offers, things like that. The journal prompts also include encouragement to look at what is creating sympathetic survival responses (that Hiss! with the Polyvagal Purrs approach) and potentially the dorsal vagal (Freeze!). It’s really helping you learn to map your own nervous system, get to know yourself and to support yourself and it’s all free. If you haven’t already, you can sign up at selfcarecoaching.net and if you have any questions again, let me know eve at selfcarecoaching.net. I hope you enjoy this episode.

Welcome to episode 96 of the Feel Better Every Day Podcast and this week we’re honouring the Goddess and Saint Brigid. It’s a new bank holiday in Ireland the last few years and Brigid has enormous associations with many, many things but particularly healing, inspiration, wisdom and protection.

I thought that for today’s episode we’d look at ways in which you might be inspired to heal and protect your extra-sensitive nervous system and to have that wisdom to stop pushing through and to actually work with what you need.

We’re going for sensory soothers. A few weeks ago I shared some of the ways in which I’ve made yoga more accessible to myself. Yoga, breath work and meditation as well as with countless clients and students. I was thinking about it when I was swimming and if you know me at all you probably know that I adore swimming, absolutely love it, but I’m also very averse to many elements of it.

Not just the cold getting into the sea but the getting changed, the noise, the hairdryer, hand dryers, any smells if people are spraying things, wet floors and ickiness in general. I struggle with an enormous amount but because I know how much I benefit from being in the water, I do it.

If I’m at the sea [or a lake or river] there’s the cold, the unpredictability of it all. There are lots of things and I think I realised I don’t remember swimming at school as a child, I remember I’ve got a picture of me as a small child at infant school, I remember us going at infant school to a local pool like it was half an hour away or something and everyone else in my class could swim and I couldn’t. I remember walking across the bottom of the pool and moving my arms like that saying, “please let me into the big pool” and they wouldn’t because I couldn’t swim.

And then I learned and I learned by playing. Playing is such a wonderful way to learn and diving for things, so I realised it’s not just the swimming, it’s all the glimmers I get, all the sensory soothing. I love, at the end, the hot shower then getting cooler and cooler and cooler and where I was younger I’d have turned it into a cold shower. Sometimes I do now but I use it very much as a what do I feel like today and where I normally go, you can adjust the temperature really easily in a way I can’t at home (I don’t dare adjust the temperature at home).

In the changing room, I can ignore most of what I find horrific in order to benefit from the jacuzzi jets, the steam room, the being underwater, I adore the sensations, I’m not a runner or anything like that but I love the breathlessness and the getting your heart rate up and the feeling held by the water, feeling immersed and cleansed and reset and especially when I’m in the sea even if it’s just for a minute or less it’s that just coming home to myself.

It was the first “resource” I had when I began my trauma recovery work, my personal trauma recovery work, the idea of myself way, way, way out to sea floating. I love the feeling of being held by the ocean or in a swimming pool if there’s enough room, I love floating face down, what me and a friend used to call Disturbing Position.

The actor Doris Day was apparently prescribed it for her anxiety but it is about breath control and there’s just something so relaxing for me about being face down. I’ve learned along the way (having been told off by a lifeguard in Sarajevo and various people) if I forget, if I get too relaxed it’s like so I generally move from that into an underwater handstand and I just adore my shoulders are much stronger again but I haven’t done my handstands up against the wall in a while.

I don’t want to risk hurting them again until I really feel ready but every time I swim I’ll do at least one underwater handstand and I just love that feeling of being upside down. I love the stretch throughout the body, throughout the abdomen, I love the balancing elements in terms of AuDHD, ADHD, balance is really helpful in terms of working with the cerebellum part of the brain and that’s really helpful in terms of some of our symptoms so these things that innately naturally feel amazing for my body are also helping me with my symptoms.

I love the warmth of the steam room, the heat, I love the feeling for my joints. If it’s empty I’ll do a bit of yoga in there and I love the ahhhh just after exerting myself. I love my DIY snorkel training where I’m at the very bottom of the pool doing things that when I was first learning how to do them I never believed my body would be able to. And I started that in my late 40s.

There are so many glimmers I associate with swimming, it’s a no-brainer for me anytime I’m down, anytime I need a reset. Anytime I need to feel human again I get into the water.

I’m sharing this in hopes that it will encourage you to think of some of the things that you might just have in your week, in your day as something that you know the glimmers make the sensory issues worth it while also having compassion for yourself around the sensory issues.

For the Feel part of the Feel. Love. Heal. framework, identify what it is that you enjoy doing, the things that bring you many, many glimmers that help you feel most like yourself and that are good for you, that it might be swimming. It might be something completely different but notice, identify, list things that bring you many, many glimmers and also identify some of the blocks to doing those things.

I told you (More Joy, Less Angst: Trauma-informed Yoga for AuDHD: Episode 93 of the Feel Better Every Day Podcast) about some of the blocks I find with yoga and meditation and breath work. But I’ve depended on them for decades for pain relief, for my mental health, for so many things. It’s the idea of not doing it, I might adapt my practice, I might change how I approach it but the benefits by far outweigh the sensory issues and it’s the same with swimming for me but by identifying blocks it helps me, like the pool that I’m normally a member at, it’s smaller than most pools, it’s smaller than I would like but it’s really lovely in every other way.

And it has sections where it’s adult only times of day where it’s adult only and that is really beneficial for me because I find crowds really hectic and I find noise very hectic. And...