In this podcast episode, Dr. Emily Amos shares her experiences traveling through Australia and delves into the complexities of meditation and mindfulness. She discusses the common struggles individuals face when starting a meditation practice, including discomfort and the potential for meditation-related harm. Dr. Amos emphasises the importance of understanding the cycle of behaviour change and the need for support when navigating the challenges of mindfulness practices. She advocates for a balanced view of meditation, recognising both its benefits and potential drawbacks, and encourages listeners to seek professional help when needed.

Key points:

• ​Dr. Emily Amos shares her recent travels around Australia.
• ​Meditation and mindfulness can have mixed evidence regarding their benefits.
• ​Many people experience discomfort when they first start meditating.
• ​It's common for the mind to feel noisy during meditation.
• ​Mindfulness is about being present in the moment.
• ​Discomfort can arise as we implement a sustained meditation practice.
• ​The cycle of change outlines predictable steps in behaviour change.
• ​How support from teachers can minimise meditation-related harm.
• ​Mental health professionals can help address issues arising during meditation.
• ​The importance of reaching out for support when needed.

If you would like to know more about Cheetah House you find that info here: https://www.cheetahhouse.org

Or if you would like to find a registered meditation teacher to work with you can do that via the Meditation Australia website.

------------------------------------

You can find more information on mindfulness and my work via my website- ⁠⁠www.dremilyamos.com⁠⁠

As always, I love to connect with you via social media:

Facebook: ⁠⁠@dremilyamos⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠@mindlifeme⁠⁠

Instagram: ⁠⁠@dremilyamos⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠@mind.life.me⁠⁠

LinkedIn: @dremilyamos

Insight Timer: ⁠⁠⁠Dr Emily Amos⁠⁠

Disclaimer: The information provided on the Mind.Life.Me. podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. The information provided on this site is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional advice or care. Please seek the advice of a qualified health care professional in the event something you have read or heard here raises questions or concerns regarding your health.

To kick things back into gear on the mind.life.me. podcast for season 2 we're talking about what exactly is mindfulness? You've all heard about it, in fact most of you will have probably experienced it... and it's not always been a good experience for many people. So this episode I decided that a good place to start things off is to help explain exactly what mindfulness is and more importantly, what it isn't!

Let's talk about:

• Mindfulness as the practice of being in the present moment and noticing what's going on without judgment.
• Meditation as a formal practice that can help cultivate mindfulness.
• How normal it is for the mind to wander, and the goal of mindfulness is to notice when it happens and gently guide it back to the present moment.
• Bringing intentionality to everyday activities can help cultivate mindfulness.
• Cultivating the skill of being mindful to help in times of stress.

My short course ⁠Mindful Me⁠ is designed to help you to master mindfulness in an easily accessible, online format, available 24/7 with fantastic video lessons, a beautiful course workbook and plenty of guided meditations to help build your practice.

------------------------------------ You can find more information on mindfulness and my work via my website- www.dremilyamos.com

As always, I love to connect with you via social media:

Facebook: @dremilyamos and @mindlifeme

Instagram: @dremilyamos and @mind.life.me

Insight Timer: ⁠Dr Emily Amos⁠

Disclaimer: The information provided on the Mind.Life.Me. podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. The information provided on this site is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional advice or care. Please seek the advice of a qualified health care professional in the event something you have read or heard here raises questions or concerns regarding your health.

I actually recorded this episode many months ago, then left it and did nothing with it for ages. Which is ironic given in this ep we explore the idea that achieving things, changing behaviour and basically being human- is really, really hard. I'm human, just like you. I struggle to achieve what I want to achieve sometimes too- so let's explore this together.

In this episode I talk about:

• Johan Hari's book Stolen Focus
• How the modern world is setting us up to fail in many ways when it comes to our attention and focus.
• How we can actually use the psychology of behaviour change to help us to do the things we want to do.
• Why self compassion (as I always say) is actually the basis for this cycle and what helps us to unlock our full potential.
• What is the 'first step' in changing behaviour?

My short course ⁠⁠⁠Mindful Me⁠⁠⁠ is designed to help you to master mindfulness & better manage stress in an easily accessible, online format, available 24/7 with fantastic video lessons, a beautiful course workbook and plenty of guided meditations to help build your practice.

------------------------------------ You can find more information on mindfulness and my work via my website- ⁠⁠www.dremilyamos.com⁠⁠

As always, I love to connect with you via social media:

Facebook: ⁠⁠@dremilyamos⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠@mindlifeme⁠⁠

Instagram: ⁠⁠@dremilyamos⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠@mind.life.me⁠⁠

Insight Timer: ⁠⁠⁠Dr Emily Amos⁠⁠

Disclaimer: The information provided on the Mind.Life.Me. podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. The information provided on this site is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional advice or care. Please seek the advice of a qualified health care professional in the event something you have read or heard here raises questions or concerns regarding your health.

It’s been a little while since I released a podcast episode, so I thought this was a good time to talk about giving ourselves permission to be ‘good enough’. As a long suffering perfectionist, I’ve often struggled with this concept… as a doctor, I’ve struggled with it even more. I mean, who wants a ‘good enough’ doctor?!? So in my musings this week I’ve tried to capture a lot of the concepts and issues around actually allowing ourselves to be ‘good enough’.

• What does it mean to give ourselves permission to be #goodenough ?
• Does giving ourselves permission to be ‘good enough’ mean we stop trying to do better?
• How does giving ourself permission to be ‘good enough’ relate to behaviour change psychology?
• How can we apply the principle of ‘good enough’ and use to to drive our practice of self compassion?

As always, you can connect with me in a variety of ways:

My website: www.dremilyamos.com

Where I teach online courses as well as online meditation and yoga nidra classes.

On Instagram: @dremilyamos

On Facebook: @dremilyamos

Disclaimer

The information provided on the Mind.Life.Me. podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. The information provided on this site is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional advice or care. Please seek the advice of a qualified health care professional in the event something you have read or heard here raises questions or concerns regarding your health.

This has always been a big background thing for me, none of us probably talk about it enough though- how the fear of making a mistake can drastically temper our dreams and actions. Fear of making a mistake can be debilitating in our decision making in the present moment, stopping us from even doing anything. This episode I'm talking about  

• How this concept not only affects those of us who work in healthcare but also the perfectionists and worriers of the world (even more so if you happen to be all three!). 
• How our fear of making a mistake in the future can seriously affect our behaviour today. 
• How this future based thinking (and fear) relates to mindfulness and learning how to be in the present moment. 
• How to take the first step towards making a decision and committing to an action, despite the fear of making a mistake. 
• How this fear of making a mistake can even affect us as parents! 
• How much time we can regain in our lives by learning how to be more aware of this tendency and choosing to reinvest this energy into being more mindful. 

The beautiful article by Dr Jonathan Ramachenderan I refer to in this episode can be found here. 

You can find more information on mindfulness and my work via my website- www.dremilyamos.com 

As always, I love to connect with you via social media: 

Facebook: @dremilyamos and @mindlifeme 

Instagram: @dremilyamos and @mind.life.me 

Disclaimer: The information provided on the Mind.Life.Me. podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. The information provided on this site and podcast is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional advice or care. Please seek the advice of a qualified health care professional in the event something you have read or heard here raises questions or concerns regarding your health.

After last episode, we know a bit more about stress and how it cycles through our body- so how does that affect other things? Like sleep for example? In this episode I talk about: How our body sleeps. What are the hormonal drivers of sleep and how do they relate to stress hormones? How stress can affect our sleep and what we can do about it. How mindfulness works to change our relationship with our thoughts and improve our sleep. As always, my 7 Days of Mindful Self Care mini course is absolutely FREE and a great way to help kick start you towards slowing down and learning how to rest.

If you're enjoying the podcast I would absolutely love for you to review and share it with others to help spread the word about the importance of mindfulness and self care in all of our lives. Please don't get to the point I did and burn out before you do something about it- make these important changes today.

My short course ⁠⁠⁠Mindful Me⁠⁠⁠ is designed to help you to master mindfulness & better manage stress in an easily accessible, online format, available 24/7 with fantastic video lessons, a beautiful course workbook and plenty of guided meditations to help build your practice.

------------------------------------ You can find more information on mindfulness and my work via my website- ⁠⁠www.dremilyamos.com⁠⁠

As always, I love to connect with you via social media:

Facebook: ⁠⁠@dremilyamos⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠@mindlifeme⁠⁠

Instagram: ⁠⁠@dremilyamos⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠@mind.life.me⁠⁠

Insight Timer: ⁠⁠⁠Dr Emily Amos⁠⁠

Disclaimer: The information provided on the Mind.Life.Me. podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. The information provided on this site is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional advice or care. Please seek the advice of a qualified health care professional in the event something you have read or heard here raises questions or concerns regarding your health.

Holding space is a term used for creating the space within ourselves to process thoughts and emotions. It may seem self explanatory, but if it were so easy, why do so many of us struggle to hold onto uncomfortable feelings?

Instead we distract ourselves from them with extra stimulation (if you haven't already listened to the Stimulation Addiction episode do it after this one!) or we end up discharging our own emotional pain onto others inadvertently.

In this episode I talk about:

• What holding space actually means?
• How we can learn how to do it for ourselves?
• How we can teach our kids how to hold space too?

I also talked about a couple of resources in this episode that I'd love to share with you:

The Colour Monster- by Anna Llenas

Passing Clouds- by Kate Oliver

I also mentioned my upcoming Mindful Me: Mindfulness & Self Compassion training that you can sign up for via my website.

As always, you can find me via my website:

https://www.dremilyamos.com/

or social media:

Instagram: @dremilyamos

Facebook: @dremilyamos

Disclaimer

The information provided on the Mind.Life.Me. podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. The information provided on this site is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional advice or care. Please seek the advice of a qualified health care professional in the event something you have read or heard here raises questions or concerns regarding your health.

Episode 8

In the last two and a half years I've spent a lot of time reflecting on my own path to burn out and the lessons I've learnt from it. I've taken some of those lessons and built upon them to have a bit of think about why it seems that so many of us are struggling with chronic stress and burn out? The last few years have been (and continue to be) really challenging, but is it just that?

This episode, I talk about:

• My own experience of burning out and what I feel contributed to my path there.
• Some of the hard lessons I've learnt in my recovery- including the importance of rest.
• How learning how to complete the stress cycle is the key to dealing with chronic stress.
• The danger of saying "I can't" and having a fixed mindset.
• The difference between growing capacity and respecting our limitations.

Mentioned in this episode, is my 7 days of Mindful Self Care course that you can sign up for absolutely FREE here.

As always, I would love for you to connect with me via social media as well:

Instagram: @dremilyamos

Facebook: @dremilyamos

Disclaimer

The information provided on the Mind.Life.Me. podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. The information provided on this site is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional advice or care. Please seek the advice of a qualified health care professional in the event something you have read or heard here raises questions or concerns regarding your health.

This episode was a lot fun to record. Katie Cortes is a midwife, sleep consultant and mum of 4, so she knows a thing or two about the ‘perfect mother’ myth. Like me, she loves a good chat and could easily solve the worlds problems over a cup of tea! Together we’ve taken it upon ourselves to decide not only- where this myth comes from? But also what we can do to banish it from our lives?

So if you’re a mum of little or big kids, join us as we chat about:

- letting go of the guilt.

- learning how to be kind to ourselves as we ‘learn on the job’ as mums.

- how we can recognise ingrained patterns of behaviour in ourselves that might contribute to the ‘perfect mother myth’

- how vulnerability and self compassion can help our kids to side step the guilt we’ve internalised.

- where self care comes into it all.

You can connect with Katie via her website https://katiesbabies.com.au/ or on social media via Katies Babies

As always, I would love for you to connect with me via social media as well:

Instagram: @dremilyamos

Facebook: @dremilyamos

Disclaimer

The information provided on the Mind.Life.Me. podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. The information provided on this site is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional advice or care. Please seek the advice of a qualified health care professional in the event something you have read or heard here raises questions or concerns regarding your health.