WELLNESS WEDNESDAY

Hi, folks, welcome to Wellness Wednesday, and I am Sally Riggs, psychologist, fellow long hauler and your long COVID Coach. And before I get started today, I just wanted to share with you a forthcoming workshop that we have coming up November 3rd, because I keep forgetting to mention it. And forgive me if I read the name off the screen because it's a long one. And I always forget it, pesky ongoing memory issues. A Mind-body Pathway Out of Overwhelm, and Treatment Decision Fatigue for people with Long COVID. So essentially, we'll be talking about overwhelm and treatment decision fatigue, we will be talking a little bit about some treatment options, but more about the process of how we pay attention to our bodies and make decisions based off of that, rather than up here, which I know you've heard me talk a lot about. If you have been to the workshop before you are more than welcome to come again, if you have not been to the workshop before, please come. And you can sign up at the link underneath this video on this email.

So what I wanted to talk to you about today, Wednesday, I am traveling to Florida of all places for the Polyvagal Institute Safe and Sound Protocol conference. This is the first time I will have been to an in person conference in a very long while. And don't worry, I will be wearing a mask 24/7. But I'm imagining there will be some exciting updates about the Safe and Sound Protocol to share with you. And I realized that this was probably a great opportunity before that, to talk a little bit about my experience with the Safe and Sound Protocol. I know that I have mentioned in various places and videos that it was helpful to me. And some of you who have been on an individual call with me, I may have talked about that in more detail. But I figured why not take the time here to tell more of that story. So that more of you can know exactly why I offer the Safe and Sound Protocol in my practice.

So to preface the story, and again, many of you have heard me talk about this. I started experiencing the really bad fatigue, probably December 2020. I was in the UK at the time for Christmas. And if you remember, we all went into lockdown. And that was the beginning of I think lock down three for most of you. I started then to feel very fatigued, I think the flight over really kicked it off. And then that progressed worse and worse and worse and worse and worse throughout 2021. Slowly, I cut back on work. I didn't take any new referrals. We got to the summer and I was supposed to be going to the UK again for August, I was nowhere near well enough to make it through an airport or on a flight. And so I cancelled, but having taken vacation for the whole of August, I just spent the whole month resting. I tried a little bit of cranial-sacral massage: that made me worse. I tried Reiki: that made me worse. And I really didn't get any better throughout the whole of August despite basically lying on the couch 24/7. And then I had to start back with patients again in September feeling really just as bad as when I took off in July.

And I have a primary care physician, very fortunate here in New York who is very up to speed on long COVID and the latest research. And I booked an appointment with her and I said "This is ridiculous. I'm just getting worse. What is it that I'm missing? What am I not doing? What are your other patients with long COVID doing" and she mentioned an occupational therapy company that many of her patients were using. Now, I know some mixed things OT might imply "Gosh! Is that physical rehab, are they going to get her to do graded exercise". So I did a bit more research and it seemed like the primary thing that they were offering was the Safe and Sound Protocol. And I'd heard of Polyvagal theory but I didn't know a ton about it. I didn't work in trauma pre COVID. And so I did a bit more research and it made a lot of sense. And I did more research. And the more I read, the more I thought, "Oh my goodness, this is absolutely what I've been missing". I definitely have been trying to reset my nervous system and to get back into rest and digest. I have been doing meditation, I have been doing gentle yoga, I have been doing yoga nidra, I've been doing deep breathing. And all of those things were not working. And they were just making me worse, bigger crashes, lots of self critical thoughts. Awful.

But the thing about the Safe and Sound Protocol, it's a passive intervention, you just lie back and enjoy this slightly distorted music, and it does the work for you. And, to say a bit more about the Safe and Sound Protocol. For those who haven't heard of it before. It is a 5-hour auditory intervention created by Steven Porges, who came up with Polyvagal theory in the first place. It is copyrighted. So he, in fact, he sold it to another company who owns the copyright. So you can't just get it off of YouTube or something. And if something that says it's an autonomic nervous system intervention on YouTube - its not the Safe and Sound Protocol. It is only available from authorized practitioners who have bought a subscription. But what it does is it works on the muscles of the middle ear, the music is frequency modulated, according to an algorithm that Steven Porges came up with. And for those of you who did psychology at A-level or in college, university, those basic experiments around Attachment where the mother is chatting to the baby with that lovely nice vocal prosody that we call motherease, and then you tell her to stop, freeze the face, don't talk and you watch the baby, just absolutely melt down and cry and get into a panic, then you tell them to go back to the singsong voice and the facial expression, over exaggeration, and the baby soothes and feels better. And the frequency modulation of this music is based on that Motherese - vocal prosidy that we all hopefully, but not everyone, unfortunately, get from our primary attachment figures in infancy.

And it is designed to build flexibility and improve vagal tone in the autonomic nervous system. And the analogy that many of you have heard me use is where you have an elastic band. And the elastic band for all of us with Long COVID is very small and very tight and very inflexible. So the slightest attempt that we make to try and get out of fight or flight or out of shutdown, the band immediately just pulls us straight back. And if we try too hard, we just snap the band altogether and have a huge relapse, as many many of you I know, have shared with me. And I also was having similar experiences over and over throughout 2021. Whereas the Safe and Sound Protocol, it's a 5-hour start to finish intervention. So it's designed to make a permanent change in your nervous system, whereby if we just a little bit, stretch the elastic band just a tiny bit, not too much. And then we let it go back again, slowly over time, the elastic band gets bigger, but it still maintains its integrity as elastic band of being able to flex and contract. And that's exactly what we're looking to do with our nervous systems build in that more flexibility, and more vagal tone.

So, my journey with the Safe and Sound Protocol: I was told about this company in September, I did a ton of research, I called them for a discovery call. And in all honesty, and this is something interesting thinking about treatment decision overwhelm. I felt so sure that this was the right intervention for me even before I called the company that if they had quoted me 10 times the price, I would happily have paid it. And not that I'm suggesting that you paid 10 times the price for something. But that process that we will talk much more about in these videos and much more about in the workshop that's coming up on November 3rd. We can get to a place in our bodies where we are ready for a treatment and sure of its rightness that that panic that sometimes kicks in when we hear the price isn't there because we've already prepared ourselves ahead of time that we are ready and willing to pay for it. So just a little side to keep in mind around treatment decision and overwhelm.

To be cont...