WELLNESS WEDNESDAY

Hey folks, Sally Riggs here, Psychologist, fellow long hauler and your long COVID coach and welcome to another Wellness Wednesday. And coming to you today from London. I just popped over here for a few days, my god daughter had her first communion on Saturday. And for all those who like to follow my travels, because they want to hope that they will be traveling again soon. This trip has been super easy, and I'm doing pretty good.

But what I wanted to talk to you about today is my new ecourse, which is going on pre sale this week. You may have caught the videos the last couple of weeks, I've been talking a lot about brain retraining programs, and neuroplasticity. And I wanted to talk today about the ecourse that I'm launching, to tell you a bit more about it and what it includes where it came from etc. So, you know, probably from watching these videos, that my recovery started in about September 2021, with something called the safe and sound protocol, which was invented by Dr. Steven Porges. And I will link videos below about my story and about the safe and sound protocol.

Many of you also know but to explain a bit more, I actually did the safe and sound protocol where the company that doesn't sit with you on Zoom or in person while you're listening. And this is not something that I recommend. We offer it very differently in my practice, and recommend that you find somebody who is using the safe and sound very similarly. But what that also meant for me is that I didn't learn a ton about polyvagal theory and my own nervous system while I was doing the safe and sound protocol. And so as I was learning to do this work with you all, I have done a ton of research and learning about polyvagal theory. And really the second thing that helps me enormously in my recovery, especially moving the needle after that first kind of initial period of improvement, has been learning my own nervous system, understanding its sensitivities, understanding how it works. And then also understanding what strategies I can utilize from polyvagal theory and somatic practices in order to support and calm my own nervous system for recovery. And when I am offering long COVID coaching, more than likely I am doing both the safe and sound protocol and teaching people how to learn their own nervous system, learn their own sensitivities, and learn all these wonderful strategies. And the question that I get asked most frequently by you is, but what are the strategies, and in all honesty, there's a lot of them and it takes a while to learn them. And it isn't something that I can easily explain to you in one or even two videos. And so it made sense to me to put all of this material into an accessible course, so that you can also learn it too. And the reason why this is so important.

So many people understand the role of the autonomic nervous system in long COVID. And yet they don't understand how we can calm it and to that, and move our systems to a new place that we can be in rest and digest more frequently. I remember when I was very early in my lung COVID journey and meeting with clinicians at the long COVID clinic at Mount Sinai. And they were very much stressing the autonomic nervous system role. And I said to my doctor at the time, okay, great. So how do I get into parasympathetic? And she kind of looked at me and shrugged and said, I don't really know how about resting. And as you will know, and I certainly know very well, resting does not fix long COVID. Resting is not a way to calm your nervous system. Resting is very important when we don't have mitochondria that can efficiently produce enough energy to get through the day. But resting is not an autonomic nervous system intervention. And, again, something that I talk about very, very frequently, there are lots of autonomic nervous system interventions, there are lots of ways of calming our nervous system. And the nervous system in general is talked a lot about very widely now, on TV, in the media, people on social media for all kinds of applications. And almost, you know, I can barely get through 24 hours without seeing some type of a post somewhere about how I'm supposed to support or calm or even reset my nervous system. And typically, these people are talking about taking a walk in nature or doing some deep breathing, or humming or singing.

Now, yes, these are all polyvagal interventions. And they are enormously effective for some people, but not for people whose nervous system is so far gone into shutdown, that they can't even get up to sympathetic momentarily. And for most of us with long COVID that is what's happening. You may have seen the article in The Guardian Last week comparing the functional impairment and disability in long COVID to stage four lung cancer. And I have very frequently said that long COVID is one of the worst things that anybody could go through in their lifetime, if not the worst. And so unfortunately, the seriousness of our nervous system deterioration isn't really comparable to looking at pictures of birds on the internet. And we certainly don't have the strength to even sit in nature, let alone go for a walk. So while these suggestions are very well intentioned, we actually need different support than that. And the question that I see so frequently in Facebook groups, and in other places on the internet, well, how do I do it then. And this is what this course is for. It's specifically designed for us, people with long COVID every video that you watch will be referencing something that you know, and you will feel validated, you will feel seen, you will feel heard. And at no point will you need to take the material and modify it to something else. So many of us have taken so many online courses, programs, trainings, trying to recover from long COVID. And so frequently, we access the material and we get so far in and then we're thinking, wait a second, this isn't relevant for me or this won't work for me or this is going to be too much. We can't do that. This will not happen in this course. As you know, I have had long COVID since March 2020. I have lived it, I have felt it in my body. And this course is tailor made for us. One thing that I have found during my extensive research of polyvagal theory and somatic practices. There are hundreds of wonderful books that have been written and materials on YouTube and online. And yet the majority, I get a couple of pages into the book. And I started thinking wait a second, this has been written as if our default setting was rest and digest and occasionally we might get into fight or flight or freeze when in the case of long COVID. Our default setting is freeze response shut down immobilization and so we need something that meets us where we are and the strategy that you use if you get into sympathetic activation is going to be different. If you have the energy to complete the cycle and move up again, then if your mitochondria are broken like ours, and you are going to shoot straight back down. So I have broken the course into three steps to make it more manageable because of course, we need everything to be in small steps and manageable. And those are sensitivities, strategies and supports. And what that means is in the first module, you're gonna learn about your own nervous system, not my nervous system, or somebody else's nervous system, but your own nervous system, you're gonna learn your sensitivities, you're gonna learn how it responds. And most importantly, and this is really the most crucial part of the program, which is missing from a lot of other materials that I've seen, you're going to learn how your symptoms correspond to your nervous system. So when you have X symptom, where are you on the ladder? What does that mean? Are you in fight or flight? Are you in shutdown? Are you in rest and digest? Or are you moving between one or another? One of my most common symptoms was chest pain. And it would come on when things were getting stressful. So maybe I'm about to teach a workshop and something's gone wrong right before. And so I start to notice the chest pain. And then if that didn't get something, it would progress further into coat hanger pain, which is exactly how it sounds. So that shape of a coat hanger right across your back, very common for people that have M casts. And so I learned over time that if I got a little bit of chest pain, potentially, I was in sympathetic, and I could do a strategy to move back up into rest and digest again. But if I started to get the coat hanger pain, that was a sign of no return that my body was imminently going into freeze. And so I couldn't use that same strategy that I would have done with just a chest pain to try and move up. Because inevitably, I was going to go down. And at that point, we do something different. So this is really crucial for you to learn, it almost doesn't matter how many polyvagal or somatic strategies you have, if you don't know your nervous system, then you aren't going to be able to implement them effectively. And the other thing to take into consideration, most of us don't know our nervous system. So when I started out, most of the time, I assumed I was in rest and digest, when in actuality I was in total shutdown. And most of us with long COVID are in that space. But because our symptoms are so intense, and because the emotions that come from that are so overwhelming. It's very easy that our bodies just kind of dissociate from all of that. And we go into this weird kind of numb space that almost feels calm. And so we think we're in rest and digest. And that is the beginning of the process learning. Actually, no, this is what fight or flight feels like. This is what freeze feels like. This is what the path between the two feels like. And you will definitely get that in this course in that first section called sensitivities. Then in the second module, which is strategies, we're going to learn a ton of polyvagal strategies, but not in an overwhelming way. Because again, your body and my body, your nervous system and my nervous system are not the same. A strategy that works for my nervous system may not work for yours. And so we're going to work through them systematically, one at a time, one day at a time. So in that section, it will take you two weeks to work through it. Because each day you will only have one strategy to try out and you can try it out multiple times throughout the day see what happens. If it works for you, you can add it to your toolkit. If it doesn't, no worries, and you'll get a new strategy the next day. At the end of that section, I've also thrown in a few Mind Body things some of which we may have spoken about on these Wellness Wednesday videos, just so that you have everything all in one place. And then as we go into the final module, you're gonna learn how to begin to put it all together in a holistic way. Building that brand new life from the ground up that supports your nervous system and is protective against anything like that happening again in future. So we're gonna look at your career or your job or your vocation, we're gonna look at friends and family and relationships, we're gonna look at grief, which is a big one, and nobody ever tells us what to do with it. And I have some fabulous strategies that were totally brand new to me. Even though I'm a psychologist, and have worked in the field for 20 years, on how to manage grief without being overwhelmed, which is crucial for our nervous system work, then we're gonna think about setting up that dream live for the future, which you can have, if you have been following me for any length of time, you can see that I went to Japan, and I'm here in London for my god daughter's first communion. And then when I get back to the US, the week after I'm going to Palm Springs for a conference, I have building the life that is important to me. And for you that may not be travel, it may be something totally different. But you can absolutely do it when you have learned your nervous system, when you have calmed your nervous system, and you're starting to feel better.

I am so excited for this course for you, because it really is everything that I have utilized in my recovery. And you can see that is working. It's also everything that I have utilized with all the individual clients that I have worked with over the last 18 months. So if you ever have wanted to work with me individually, but couldn't make the investment at that time, this is going to be a much more accessible way to basically figure out everything that I know, we are offering it at presale on a hugely discounted price. So when it goes live at the end of July, it's going to be priced at $349. And that will be the price going forward. Right now we are selling spots for $299. And if you are in my Facebook group, you can get an extra $50 off coupon. And if you're not in the Facebook group, the button is down below if you want to join and get in there right away and grab your coupon code. Equally, if you're watching this on YouTube, and you hit that subscribe button, you will also get a $50 discount code. So that brings the price down to 249. So that's 100 bucks off a 349 course, which is huge. And we are also offering a six month money back guarantee. So at this point, you have nothing to lose signing up at this price, if you implement the material that is in this course. And within six months, you are not noticing any differences in your nervous system and your long COVID recovery, you can write to us and we will give you a full money back refund. So nothing to lose. I'm so excited. I'm going to be working super hard behind the scenes with my assistant putting all this material together, there's going to be short little videos that are easy to digest, worksheets, assessments, things that you can download to help you with this are all in bite sized chunks and as accessible as we can make it.

So I hope if this is what you have been looking for, what are those polyvagal strategies? How do I do this? This is everything you need to know. If you have any questions, you can pop them in the comments below or hit reply to this email and I will give you an answer. If you're in the Facebook group and this is another reason to join us in that fabulous Facebook group. I'm going to be doing a bunch of lives in there over the next six weeks to answer all of your questions. So I look forward to seeing you there and I look forward to seeing you in this course. And I'm incredibly hopeful for your recovery with these wonderful polyvagal and somatic strategies. I hope you have a tolerable week and I will see you again on another Wellness Wednesday. Take care.