WELLNESS WEDNESDAY

Hey folks, Sally Riggs here, psychologist, fellow long hauler, and your Long COVID Coach, and welcome to another Wellness Wednesday. First of all, I'd like to draw attention to something that I wouldn't normally draw attention to, but very relevant in the Long COVID community, I have pulled my hair up today, I don't think you've probably ever seen me with my hair pulled up. And yesterday, I did my run walk in the morning, I had put it off a day because it was freezing rain the day before. And I typically still don't have the strength to wash my hair and go for a walk on the same day. I'm now up to running 95 seconds, although yesterday I was doing faster 30-second intervals, which was fun, and feels good.

But I got back, I'm still dealing with this nausea in the morning, which I'm trying to lean into, and did not have the strength to wash my hair. So a fun new thing that I've discovered and many of you who also are dealing with similar issues around hair washing may have discovered a similar thing. I know I've seen in a few of the Facebook's recently, especially for us curly girls, people hacking curly hair drying with particular diffusers, hanging over the side of a chair or on a beanbag or something like that. Anyway, I discovered these fabulous hair extension ponytail things. Because when I put my hair in a ponytail, you I don't really have very much hair. And so it doesn't really look like thing, not very professional looking. It looks like I'm about to go to the gym. But if I stick this fabulous thing on, it looks like I have a proper hairstyle, except which I thought you would also fully appreciate. I also didn't wash my hair this morning, because I'm getting my haircut later. And the color needs refreshing.

So you've got this lovely moment where this is the color my hair normally would be. And then all of the colors grown out. So it looks quite ridiculous. But in true Long COVID form, I was on many zoom meetings yesterday and complained of tiredness because it's been a long week. And several people told me that I looked fabulous, which I thought you of course all can relate to, and is hilarious in our own, not hilarious way. Anyway, having shared that with you all because I am enjoying noticing that I look silly. And I think sometimes it's alright to lean into our frustrations and be playful and silly about them.

I wanted to talk to you about this week, the Facebook group that we are launching. So you will be getting this email on Wednesday. And we are hoping for it to start taking members Wednesday or sorry, Thursday or Friday. Now I know that in America, Thursday is the Thanksgiving holiday. And I know that not all of you are in America. I actually will be traveling on Thursday, but members of my team will actually be working because I have a bit of an international team. So we're hoping to start taking admissions Thursday, Friday with there's going to be a link underneath this email to join. And I just wanted to say a couple things. Because I am really hoping and I already received some lovely positive feedback for you all about some mentions that I gave about this Facebook group before. So this Facebook group is going to be focused on Mind Body and Polyvagal support for Long COVID.

So first and foremost, hopefully, you've heard me say this enough, and yet I still will say it every single time. Long COVID is undoubtedly 100% of physiological disorder, and physiological illness even. We know that Mind Body interventions are incredibly powerful in illness. And you have heard me talk many, many times over the last couple of months and you will again about Polyvagal theory, the Vagus Nerve, its central role in illness and mediating inflammation, and many other processes in our body that make it super relevant that these Polyvagal techniques that we do, including the Safe and Sound Protocol, are incredibly relevant to Long COVID.

So this will be a space for people who are working in those ways. We will police entry very carefully to make sure that we do not get any negativity, we do not get people posting negative posts about those types of things, conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers, anti-sciences. We're going to be really careful to try and filter all of that out, so there will be quite a lot of entry questions. And I will have my admin team approving both posts and entry. So if you make a post, it may take 24 hours or over the weekend a little bit longer for posts to get approved. And bear with us as we do that endeavouring to create a safe space where we can have conversations about these very important things. It will be a place to ask questions, it will be a place to share wins, share learns, information that you have come across things that are working for you, and things that are not working for you if you want to troubleshoot a little bit.

As I also mentioned previously, we are going to police venting. I know some of the Facebook groups are just places where people go and dump how awful they're feeling, laundry list of symptoms, et cetera, et cetera. We all know the laundry list of symptoms, and we all know how bad it gets. And venting doesn't actually make us feel any better. If we're feeling awful, and we want to journal it out privately, that's great. But sharing it in a space that will trigger others, is not helpful. So one of the things that we're going to include within the rules is personal responsibility that we agree for each of the things that we bring to the Facebook group in terms of posts that we make or answers that we give to other people's posts, to be responsible for the energy that we bring and responsible for our own reactions.

I know that this Polyvagal stuff is complicated. And we can easily move into Dorsal and Immobilization, we can easily move into Fight or Flight or Sympathetic, and sometimes it is something that somebody else does, that triggers that. And something that we talk about in trauma very, very, very, very commonly, it is not your fault, what happened to you. But it is your responsibility, what you do, from here on out to manage that. And it's very easy and I know that it's been in goodness with the Me Too Movement, which what five years or so now has been going on. There has been a lot of "You triggered me" and a lot of "Here's my story". And from a psychological perspective, those things are not helpful to anybody. So we're all going to agree to take responsibility for our own energy, and our own responses.

If I feel crappy, that's on me, and it's on me to do some Polyvagal techniques to ameliorate that, or it's on me to sit with it and feel that feeling. But there's no space for blaming others. And this is also really, really crucial. There is no space for saving others. I know that part of what we experienced sometimes also manifests in, I want to help someone else feel better. And it is not our responsibility to fix other people, even me as a psychologist, not my responsibility to fix other people. We all fix ourselves. I'm here as a sounding board, you will also be there as sounding boards. So we're going to keep this community very safe and very containing in that way in order to achieve those things.

And another thing that you will see, and I just want to pop this here I am not someone who is empty, profanity, curse words, swear words, whatever you call them in the country where you live. And there's certainly some research that suggests that using these words have positive health properties. However, Facebook doesn't love them, and you can get banned temporarily for using them. So you might want to insert the asterisk or the exclamation mark for some of the letters. And obviously, we don't ever use these words in reference to other people. But if you are making a point about something that you have experienced in terms of a Polyvagal technique or a Mind Body technique, not a story. You want to describe something that showed up in your body and it feels important to use one of those words, then I will not be policing that.

And I know that feels a bit confusing, because "Wait a second, she's creating a safe space. But are those words safe?" They are safe if we're using them in the right way. And I know a lot of the other groups have devolved into sometimes religious discussions, or sometimes please don't use profanity. That will not be the emphasis in this group. So just to give you a heads up on that, we may be evolving things as we figure out what works and what doesn't work. And please bear with us as we do that. But ultimately, what I'm hoping is to build on this community of you all, who are opening these emails every week, and many of you who messaged me back, these videos will be available in the community, if they're not there when we open fairly shortly afterwards, and I know that my assistant will be going through tagging them with keywords. So if you signed up to this Wellness Wednesday, partway through the series, maybe you started with week five, you will get to go back and be able to see weeks one through four, etcetera, depending on where you started.

So this will be a lovely opportunity. If you're newer to the Wellness Wednesday emails, you will still get those. But you can go back and see earlier videos in the Facebook group and ask me questions if you want to. And of course, the most crucial thing in terms of community is building relationships. We all in our Long COVID journey, and I know you've heard me speak about this before have lost friends and have lost family in terms of people not supporting us people gaslighting us, or toxic people that we've realized are not good for us. And as we slowly go back to build our lives, many of the rest of the world are out there happily living as if COVID didn't exist. And we're realizing that we need new friends and new friendship groups. This is definitely a place where we can begin to do that. I certainly have built friendships with other long haulers. And some of the places that I have done that have been through Facebook groups that was more or less safer communities where I got to know people.

So those of you who are attending our group format of the Safe and Sound Protocol. I know many folks also report that that's one of the lovely things that they enjoy about that the opportunity to connect with like-minded long haulers. And that will be a similar cofacilitation in this group. So if you know others that you would like to invite you to join, it will be a private group, but it will be searchable on Facebook. So it's not just if you've got the link you can jump on in and we will be looking at answers to questions and approving people. So I hope that this becomes a place that we all can benefit from. And if there are any tech hiccups, please bear with me, I am not the biggest Facebook person. My assistant is pretty good, but we're all going to be learning in this together. And I know that you will understand that. Looking forward to seeing you all in there.

And for those who are celebrating the holiday for Thanksgiving this week. Wishing you if you're traveling a safe and easy travel. Don't forget to use those wheelchairs at the airport, it makes all the difference. And if you're contending with family, go carefully use your boundaries. Don't be afraid to exit a room if you need to, to create safe space for yourself. And we will continue to think about these themes as we go through the continuing holiday season right into January.

So wishing you Happy Thanksgiving for those who celebrate and I will see you again on another Wellness Wednesday. Take care.