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#2939506 11/20/22 11:01 PM
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Kind18 Offline OP
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I find myself, rather frequently, commenting on Newcomer posts (especially in those first few months when people are floundering and struggling with loss of control over their life and acute grief) about the importance of exercise in promoting better mental health outcomes.

So I've decided to write this post just for general help, but also because it will allow me to lazily refer people to it - rather than typing out the same information every time.

This is information I didn't know when my wife cleaned out the house and stole my kids when I was away with work. It helped me tremendously once I understood it. I wish I'd known it at bomb drop!

The human brain is an incredibly complex, and at the same time, incredibly simple thing. Humans are different to all other species because of our highly developed frontal coretex, which is the higher thinking, reasoning, critical thinking part of our brain that allows us to analyse, predict and make informed, intellectual decisions. It is responsible for us developing into modern society, controlling the environment in which we live, and for amazing things like sending humans to the moon in rockets.

Our brain also has another part, called the amygdala. It is small, dumb and primal - and protected us millions of years ago when we were being chased by a lion. It is responsible for our fight or flight instinct. It makes you flinch when a ball is about to hit you in the face, it drops adrenaline and cortisol into your blood stream when you're at risk of being hurt, and increases your heart and respiration rate almost instantly so you can run from danger or stand and fight.

It's a short term, acute system. If you watch a gazelle being chased by a lion, it gets shocked when it realises, jumps up, and runs with incredible speed in the opposite direction to stay alive. But if you were to watch that same gazelle 10 minutes later after surviving a lion attack, it would be drinking calmly at a waterhole, or laying asleep under a tree with a normal, slow heart rate

That's how that part of our brain system is supposed to work - a sudden, huge physiological response to a threat - which disappears just as quickly as it arrived.

The problem for us humans going through a bomb drop and 2-3 year protracted and antagonistic divorce, is that reptilian part of our brain stays engaged for minutes, hours and sometimes days. Our heart rate stays up, we are full of adrenaline, and we become hyper-stimulated because we feel threatened (our normal, calm life is being uprooted).

This leads to sleep disturbance, loss of control of emotions, poor decision making, chronic stress - and bad long term mental health outcomes.

I felt like I'd been hit by a train. I couldn't sleep. I vacillated between desperately wanting to save my marriage, and wanting to set the world on fire. Unless you've been there, you can't understand the grief and uncertainty and pain associated with bomb drop and the aftermath.

My work union has a welfare and assistance arm which helps people going through difficult times in their life. I decided to reach out about two months in, and was put in touch with a counsellor who specialised in helping people in my profession (which has some unique implications with divorce).

I spoke to a counsellor who'd been helping people in my profession deal with life events (namely divorce) for forty years. He was, quite simply, a fount of knowledge.

He cited a bunch of scientific studies which had compared mental health outcomes of medicating, counselling or hard physical exercise.

Every one of those studies showed that daily, hard physical exercise was the best way to manage your mental health and to survive and thrive through an acute life event such as bomb drop and an acrimonious divorce.

Combination therapy (such as exercise paired with regular counselling) had even better outcomes, but exclusively, nothing was better than exercise. He joked I shouldn't tell many people, because if everyone learned this fact, it could very well put him out of a job.

Amongst lots of other advice and tools he provided, he wanted me to make an assurance that I would do 60 mins of hard, physical exercise every day for thirty days. The thirty day rule was because there's a lag time between input and results, so most people stick at it for a week or so, don't feel any better and give up. It takes between 3 and 4 weeks for you to start feeling better, so he wanted an assurance I'd do thirty days before giving up.

So I did. I was already quite fit at the time. I would do lots of hiking in the hills near where I live, and walked to the shops frequently, playing sport with my kids too. But walking for an hour, or meandering along on a bike wasn't what he had in mind. He insisted that it was 60 mins of HARD, physical exercise - like lifting weights at the gym, or running with heart rate >160bpm, or hiking up tall mountains carrying a 20kg pack.

So I got myself a gym membership with my brother, and we started lifting weights. It was inconvenient. He lives a long way away, so we'd meet half way (about a 30 minute drive). I'm a shift worker with irregular shifts, so sometimes I was there at 6am, and other days at 10pm. I felt physically exhausted a lot of the time, and my body ached at work as I recovered. I hit the protein shakes and downloaded a training app to my phone to track my progress.

About two weeks in, I'd had enough. It was really hard to motivate myself to exercise after a 12 hour shift. But I hung in there, because I told him I'd do thirty days, and also because I didn't want to let my brother down after dragging him into it.

After about three weeks, I started to notice some changes. Physical changes and a six pack - yes, but I mean mental health changes. I was beginning to fall asleep much more quickly (mindfulness app helped with this too). I noticed I spent less time thinking about the manipulative witch who was wreaking havoc on my family. Another few days after that, I noticed I was starting to look forward to going to the gym and started bugging my brother to do 75 minutes. A few women from work, out of the blue, said I was looking great.

At the end of the thirty days, I was hooked. My counsellor rang for a follow up, and I relayed my story. I could tell he was trying to hold back his smugness of "I told you so".

He went on to explain that hard, exhausting physical exercise is very important for shifting you brain from being controlled by the amygdala (the primal, reptilian bit which controls flight or flight) and re-engages your frontal coretex so that you start making measured, intelligent decisions and responding to interactions with your wayward/walkaway spouse without emotion driven behaviour.

This didn't fix my sitch. Exercising hard every day wasn't a quick fix for my relationship problems. My ex was still a manipulative, controlling PITA who dragged me through court and played chess with my kids and our money. IMHO though, I won the court battle and had a much better outcome on kids and finance as a result.

The most important thing though, was this exercise allowed me to regain control of my life, my thoughts, my physical health, my sleep and my confidence. It was more helpful than a counsellor, more helpful than anything I read on this forum, and got me through the hardest time of my life. I'm now on the other side with a new partner, a new house, lots of time with my kids and succeeding in my job like I have never done before. Meanwhile, my ex got dumped by her AP, kicked out of her rental and is living on someone else's lounge room floor.

So - here's the rub. If you're here for any reason, but particularly as a newbie who's landed at DB after an unexpected BD - you need to get your butt off to the gym. And you need to exercise HARD and LONG, and you can't give up under ANY circumstances for the first thirty days. Get a friend/relative to exercise with to improve your accountability.

It won't fix your crazy WS/WAS. It won't fix your relationship. But it will fix YOU, and it will switch off your reptile brain and get you sleeping, thinking carefully, and making calm, rational, intelligent decisions with the higher functioning part of your human brain.

You've got this! cool

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Excellent post!


Feelings are fleeting.
Be better, not bitter.
Love the person, forgive the sin.
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Kind18,

Great post. I've seen you chiming in and helping out Newbies quite a bit lately and it's fantastic. Keep it up...you're making a big difference to people in crisis.

Originally Posted by Kind18
If you're here for any reason, but particularly as a newbie who's landed at DB after an unexpected BD - you need to get your butt off to the gym. And you need to exercise HARD and LONG, and you can't give up under ANY circumstances for the first thirty days. Get a friend/relative to exercise with to improve your accountability.

It won't fix your crazy WS/WAS. It won't fix your relationship. But it will fix YOU, and it will switch off your reptile brain and get you sleeping, thinking carefully, and making calm, rational, intelligent decisions with the higher functioning part of your human brain.
^THIS.


Me:39 Ex-W:37
M:7 T: 9
S:6 D:3
BD/IHS/Confirm EA/PA: Feb '20
OM1 affair ends: May '20
W/OM2 & moves out: June-July '20
W files for D: Jul20
OM2 confirmed: 9/2020
Divorced: May '21
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#2942429 01/18/23 11:05 PM
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This is part 2 in my series of ramblings - a follow on from my post about exercise here:

https://www.divorcebusting.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=2939506#Post2939506

A lot of Newcomers who arrive on this board seem to share a lot of traits. One of those traits, is that we are worriers and over-thinkers.

During divorce, when a WS or WAW decides to blow up everyone’s life, we often take the role of caretaker and peacekeeper. We (mistakenly) see our role as smoothing and fixing. One of the ways the human brain fixes things is to imagine different possibilities and how they may play out. We identify barriers or scenarios that may stop us from reaching our goal, and so we try to mitigate these - that’s part of the reason we come here, seeking advice.

In the sphere of separation and divorce, there can be extreme levels of grief and despair. Divorce Busting encourages us to think about how we act around our spouse, what we say, what we do and more importantly, what we DON’T say and DON’T do to get things fixed up.

Combine this with a fearful, peacekeeping mindset or personality - and we can disappear down a rabbit hole called “rumination”.

Rumination is like worrying, except it’s focused only on possible negative outcomes and excessive time wise. While the possibilities that are played out are indeed possible, there slowly becomes an unhealthy imbalance between the amount of time spent worrying about something and the chances that it would ever actually happen.

Consider the following possibility: When you drive to the supermarket, someone may crash into your car and kill you.

A healthy response to this, is generally to accept that the chances of that occurring are exceedingly rare and to continue to live your life, unconstrained by it.

An unhealthy response, would be to spend minutes or hours or days repeatedly thinking about it, to the point where you are too afraid to drive your car ever again.

Particularly in the early stages after bomb drop, rumination can become a real trap for the LBS. Ever increasing time is spent worrying about what one said or didn’t say, and then projecting how that may play out on the eventual success or failure or the relationship.

It becomes insidious. It is generally worse when tired, and at night. For a space of many months, I had very little sleep because after going to bed, I would sit in bed and think about my ex, what she had said, what she had done, what her lawyer’s letter said, upcoming court dates… it went around and around in my head.

Scenarios played out became more and more unrealistic and far fetched. If at the next court date she says “xyz”, and then the judge says “abc”, and then we get an adjournment, and then I could respond with a letter from lawyer that says “def”, she might think about that time when I …. and it would go on and on, and around and around in my head.

One problem with DBing is it causes us to be hyper focused on NOT doing the wrong thing and making things worse. You can see this all the time in people’s posts, where they’ve had some sort of in person or email/text communication, and they come to the board wanting validation for exactly the right words to say to prevent things from getting worse.

What eventually happens, is a focus away from self regulating and a flood of long time periods worrying and ruminating on things.

LBS become somewhat paralysed by fear. They continually play out thousands of possibilities in their brain in an attempt to understand what has happened and to fix things in the future. These unhealthy and excessive, fear driven thought patterns - that’s rumination.

We’ve all been there… sat down on the couch with the TV on, started thinking about our relationship woes… and then suddenly, you look at the clock and 2 hours have gone by.

Rumination is unhealthy. It’s emotion based, often comes from the more primitive and reactive part of our brains, and is a self fulfilling prophecy.

Consider the earlier fear paralysis of never driving your car again. People who unhealthily worry about it and stop driving, will start walking to the shops. And they won’t have a car crash… so over time, the fact that what they worried about (dying in a car crash) hasn’t happened … that will reinforce that not driving was the right thing to do.

Deep rumination can take over our lives after bomb drop. You may find yourself playing out relationship scenarios for hours at a time, thinking about your ex (what they’re currently doing or thinking or saying) for large chunks of time every day.

So how do we combat the rumination cycle?

One way is distraction. Here at DB, we often call it GAL. Going out of our way to place priority on our own lives and happiness reduces the amount of time and opportunity available to sit around ruminating about far fetched possibilities and over analysing everything our partner has ever said or done.

Another, very effective method is to consciously limit rumination time. This was really helpful for me.

The first step is recognising that rumination, generally, is not helpful to our situation or mental health. The second step is recognising that it’s not something that can simply be turned off.

So what you do, is allocate a fixed but short amount of time, every day, to unhelpful rumination. For me, I would drop my kids at school, drive home, have a coffee - and then plonk myself on the couch at 9am, set a 10 min alarm - and let my brain run wild.

I’d think about every word she had said and what it could possibly mean. I’d imagine ridiculous, fictitious scenarios, such as my ex had been cheating on me for our entire marriage. I’d draft imaginary responses to my ex’s lawyer, calling out her sh*t behaviour, her lying, her cheating and her immorality. I’d imagine standing in a court room, where an angry judge, having read my letter about her, rained down judgement on her, giving me full custody and exposing my ex to her family and friends for the person she was.

Then my alarm would go off.

I’d snap out of it, get up off the couch, and start my day. My thoughts and feelings had been laid out, all sorts of wacky possibilities about us divorcing or getting back together had been run through my head, and I was ready to shelve my rumination and return to the real world.

It was incredibly effective. And the main reason it’s effective, is because for the rest of that day, when my brain turned to her, or our divorce, or what we used to have - I knew that I’d done my ruminating. What she was doing right now would briefly pop into my head, and my brain would say “Ugh, not this again. You’ve already done your thinking about that, and nothing got fixed. You can think more about that at 9am tomorrow.”

And I’d get on with my day. My days and nights sitting, thinking and worrying about her became hours. Then it became minutes. And eventually, this fixed, limited ruminating time allowed me to snap out of this fear paralysis and start being normal again.

So here’s the rub - if you find yourself in a deep hole, thinking about your ex 24/7, paralysed by fear over what to say/how to behave, not sleeping at night… you’re probably stuck in the rumination trap.

And it’s completely normal!

The way out, is to focus on your GAL activities and to assign a short, fixed time every day to worrying about your relationship/divorce/legal proceedings and imagining all sorts of crazy scenarios and possibilities. Do it, and then get on with your life and day.

Eventually, it will help you realise that very little of what you say/do/don’t say/don’t do will be responsible for the success or failure of your relationship. One day, you’ll have the self respect and confidence to not respond to your ex through fear.

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Really good stuff. Thank you, Kind18.

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Hello Kind

I’ve merged your two open threads. Please utilize one thread until it reaches 100 posts.

Thanks

DnJ


Feelings are fleeting.
Be better, not bitter.
Love the person, forgive the sin.
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So well laid out thank you Kind


M:52 W: 51
T:27 M:25
D26 S24 S21 D20
BD:2022
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Thanks for this advice Kind. It's tough getting through that rumination phase. I struggled with overthinking things and trying to rationalize the thoughts, feelings and actions of a person who is not rational. It's a process for each of us and hopefully your tips help speed that process for us LBS's.


M:39 W:39
T:22 M:18
S:19 D:18 D:5
BD:7/2022
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