Nahid de Belgeonne is here to Soothe our frazzled selves!

This is the 100th episode of the Middling Along podcast! 

In a week of overwhelming world political developments, this podcast feels particularly timely...

This time I welcome Nahid de Belgeonne: Nahid has had a varied career having previously worked fashion, publishing, technology and wellness.  During her perimenopause, she swapped bricks and mortar studios in central London for her online clinic and now lives by the sea.

Her Soothe Programme helps women recover from Burnout, anxiety and trauma and she has translated all her expertise into a book called ‘Soothe, the book your nervous system has been longing for.’  

Nahid talks to me about her own struggles with chronic anxiety, stress-related skin conditions, neuralgia, and almost dying from gangrenous appendicitis because she refused to listen to her own body - and subsequently learning how to ‘rewire’ the brain through movement.  Her in-depth research into why certain things work and why they are good for you led her to write ‘Soothe’ and the programme it is based on. 

 

Listen to our chat to find out more about:

• How we are conditioned to do more, and more, and more…putting ourselves at the bottom of the priority list;
• How if you regulate yourself you also non-verbally regulate those around you - a win-win;
• How important it is to carve out time when your brain is not being constantly stimulated;
• How, if you are wholly engaged with what you are doing, your levels of contentment go up;
• That you feed information to your brain through your senses, interoception - listening in to the signals your body is sending you;
• Why we need to internalize our comfort instead of externalizing it;
• Why we need to be dealing with microstressors as they happen throughout the day instead of saving them all up and trying to ‘deal’ with them at the end of the day. 
• What the seemingly simple act of rocking can do for our bodies and brains.

As Nahid says in the book: “The brain’s job is to keep us alive by budgeting our resources…Your brain is constantly predicting what will happen to you next…”

Our brains are working so incredibly hard in the modern world aren’t they? Did you know that our visual distance gets fixed if sitting all day looking at a screen, which sends alarm signals to the brain. Walking in green spaces is a great antidote, even just for a short period of time - but walking in general is also helpful, the way our eyes move when we walk is also calming for our brains!  

 

Nahid also suggests that we treat your phones as a rare and precious commodity rather than an appendage! The importance of social connections and interactions for a healthy nervous system cannot be underestimated...there's so much more in this episode I'd love you to discover.  

For now, I’ll leave you with my favourite quote from the book:

“...what if ambition, speed and acquisition were not the only human goals? What if we also valued sensing, exploring, learning, the beauty of the process, resting, creating, pausing, resetting, repairing, calibrating, or even compassionately being?” 

 

You can find more about Nahid’s work on her website:

www.thehumanmethod.co.uk 

Buy the book at https://www.waterstones.com/book/soothe/nahid-de-belgeonne/9781800817104 

You can find her on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thehumanmethoduk/ 

You can also find her on Substack: https://nahid