"Motivation is what gets you started. 
​Habit is what keeps you going."

- Jim Rohn

The X-Effect Program: 6 Habits To Improve Your Wellbeing

The X-Effect Program runs over 8 weeks (90 minutes per group session).  We use the highly effective X-Effect approach to help you to integrate healthy habits into your daily routine.  Our philosophy is: Information is good, but Implementation is so much better!

• The first session introduces you to the programme and begins the X-Effect process, by selecting some areas of your life which you want to change.   
• Each of the following 6 weeks focuses on 6 habits, which have been selected by us, based on our clinical experience and research into healthy habit formation.
  
• Week 8 is a roundup of the previous 6 sessions, with an opportunity for participants to decide what other habits they would like to work on and to get advice from our group facilitator.  

Sleep

We spend roughly a third of our lives sleeping (or, at least, we should!).  The negative impact of poor quality sleep cannot be overstated.  It has been clearly shown to affect our mood (anxiety, depression, stress, anger), cognitive functioning and productivity - as well as our ability to recover from illness and manage our weight.  

Session 1 of the X-Effect Program focuses on bedding down good sleep hygiene habits, as well as looking at techniques to help you get to sleep.  This module is particularly important if you work shifts.  

Conscious Breathing

It may seem absurd that we should need to make a habit of something which we have been doing every moment of our lives - since the day we were born - but, conscious breathing is very different from the involuntary process we all experience on a day-to-day basis.

Session 2 of the X-Effect Program focuses on integrating the daily practice of conscious breathing (starting at just 1 minute per day).  We look specifically at the 7-11 breathing exercise, which stimulates the Parasympathetic Nervous System (essentially, the opposite of our Fear Response - Fight or Flight).  
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Daily Exercise

Moderate daily exercise, has been shown to have huge benefits both for physical and mental health.  Something as simple as a brisk 30 minute walk every day has been shown to trigger weight loss and improve mood.  

Session 3 of the X-Effect Program focuses on setting realistically achievable goals for daily exercise, as well as looking at the physical and mental health benefits.  

Positive Psychology

For years in counselling, we have been focusing on ways to improve willpower - as it is a key element of the behavioural change process.  Recent positive psychology studies into willpower have shown that one of the most effective ways of increasing self-control is through gratitude.  

Some of the benefits of gratitude include: 

• Focusing your Reticular Activating System (RAS).  This is a bundle of nerves attached to your brain stem, which filters everything going into and out of your brain.  By doing this, we can reduce the way our minds can overreact to harmless (perceived) threats.
• Pre-Frontal Cortex activity increases.  This part of the brain controls impulses and is involved in problem solving.  Increased activity results in greater resilience.
• Gratitude has a healing effect on relationships.
• ​It can help to improve our self-esteem. 

Relationships

"If there is no enemy within, the enemy without can do us no harm" (African proverb).

Our relationships (including our relationship with ourself) can have a hugely beneficial impact on our wellbeing - or a negative impact - depending on how they are managed.

Using the psychoanalytical tool of 'Transactional Analysis', we develop skills around healthy communication with others.  

Managing Negative Thoughts

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" (Shakespeare, from Hamlet)

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is grounded in the philosophy of Stoicism.  The Stoics believed that our thoughts, beliefs and feelings about situations were the real cause of our suffering - not the situations themselves.  

In this module, we explore CBT techniques for managing Negative Automatic Thoughts, thereby reducing stress and improving our wellbeing.