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Women In Wellness: Ella McCrystal On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing

An Interview With Candice Georgiadis

Meditation — I teach many of my clients how to employ meditation as part of their daily routine. Different types of meditation work for different people. One client in particular who suffered from chronic pain, would use a walking meditation technique daily and found that this helped calm their mind and set their intentions for the day. Within a couple of weeks they noticed that some days the pain was sometimes not noticeable at all. This is because pain can be exacerbated by stress. Importantly, stress decreases the more one meditates. Neural pathways that link stressful sensations to the medial prefrontal cortex decrease. With time, people who meditate become calmer.

As a part of my series about women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ella McCrystal.

Ella McCrystal is a Psychotherapist, Clinical Hypnotherapist, EMDR practitioner, Meditation Teacher, and Mindset Coach of 15 years, working with a broad range of individuals and groups. Ella also coaches leaders in the world of business, sport, and the arts to find and reach their full potential. In addition, Ella is an Author, online course creator, TEDX speaker…as well as the Owner/Director of The Northampton Clinic. The clinic (the oldest of its kind in the Country — 93 years old) is an Osteopathic and Multi Disciplinary health clinic. They take an empathetic and holistic view to health and healing. They understand how mental health impacts your physiological health and vice versa.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?

During my childhood, I was repeatedly sexually abused my my father. My mother chose to stay with him — even after he pleaded guilty. This neglect of my feelings and safety was just as damaging to my sense of self and as a result of my experiences, I ended up experiencing many common mental health issues. For years I could not allow myself to feel. I had great compassion and warmth for others, but I could not allow those feelings to touch me. Then, those suppressed feelings would explode in the most horrific of ways. This led to serious self harm and two attempts to take my own life. Going through abuse can cause us to live according to our abuser’s “truths.” We essentially self abandon and feel shame or worthless. Experiencing abuse can make thoughts like I’m damaged, I’ll never find someone to love me or I will never be whole, become entrenched. With intra-familial childhood sexual abuse, your relationships with siblings and extended family is also damaged severely. You can end up ostracised and alone. The ramifications of this type of abuse for the victims and survivors are often ever-present.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?

The most interesting story I can recall is of a patient, who following a heart attack (after childbirth) lost her vocal ability. After 4 years of having no voice, seeing countless specialists and facing more surgery (which came with a risk of stroke), came to see me…desperate for help. Her second child had never heard his mums voice, her first child couldn’t remember her mums voice and my client was limited to the point where she couldn’t work. I used a combination of talking therapies, clinical hypnotherapy and EMDR to explore the issues deeply, reprocess relevant traumas and reframe her belief system. After only six sessions with me, the client regained her voice and was able to go back to work for the first time in years. Not only that, her children could finally hear their mums voice. This was life changing for her and the lesson here was that trauma is stored in the body and that when you access the brain (in specific ways), you can heal so many things that cannot be dealt with from a purely medical standpoint.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about a mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

In terms of working in the mental health and wellness industry, I think a good few of us start off thinking we can heal the world through kindness and dedication. My mistakes were often centered around not employing clear boundaries. For example…In my early days, I would answer texts or emails ridiculously late and be super-efficient in my communication with my clients no matter what time it was, where I was or who I was with. At one point, I got very poorly with swine flu and I was totally wiped out for a few weeks. Although I had a practice manager running my diary and informing my clients what was happening, one person in particular got quite annoyed that I wasn’t personally answering his texts and emails. He wasn’t getting my usual speedy responses and he was frustrated. I realised that I hadn’t managed his expectations at all. I had created a rod for my own back. The lesson I learned was that managing expectations and setting boundaries is key to healthy relationships and interactions.

Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?

My main goal has always been to educate people on why they feel the way they feel from a brain/body perspective and to offer effective, uniquely tailored ways that they can heal the mind, body and soul. I want to offer a safe space where people learn, heal and observe their pain, trauma or shame 1. 2. 3. from a place of self-compassion. I do this through many formats including 1:1 sessions, social media, writing, online courses and public speaking. In addition, I use my pain for power and speak openly on intra-familial childhood sexual abuse. I do this because there is a taboo and a stigma on speaking about sexual abuse when a close family member is the perpetrator. We as victims and survivors feel shame and we are often made the scapegoat in the family unit, because our coping methods are often self-destructive and difficult to understand unless you’ve been there. My work is is an absolute privilege and a total honour. I feel so driven to teach people that whatever they’re going through, they can heal and find happiness again.

Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing? Please give an example or story for each.

  1. Meditation — I teach many of my clients how to employ meditation as part of their daily routine. Different types of meditation work for different people. One client in particular who suffered from chronic pain, would use a walking meditation technique daily and found that this helped calm their mind and set their intentions for the day. Within a couple of weeks they noticed that some days the pain was sometimes not noticeable at all. This is because pain can be exacerbated by stress. Importantly, stress decreases the more one meditates. Neural pathways that link stressful sensations to the medial prefrontal cortex decrease. With time, people who meditate become calmer.
  2. Journalling — I had a client who found talking about her trauma very triggering. But journalling was something she could do. She found 10 minutes every day to express and release thoughts and feelings. By doing this she became mindful and was able to gain perspective. Journalling enabled emotional catharsis and helped her to regulate emotions, gain clarity and that helped her to develop confidence and self-identity.
  3. Affirmations — The practice of affirmations are an often misunderstood and underused life hack! The human brain is very complex indeed. We have billions of neurons in our brain. Furthermore, the brain has several important structures which can change size and shape depending on how much you use them. Neuroplasicity shows us that we can rewire, reshape and reorganise our brain according to what we want to achieve or how we want to live. The structure of your brain can be predisposed from birth but it is not a fixed structure. Everything you do from habits to lifestyle choices can all alter the structure. Essentially your brain is like a muscle and if you use your muscles in a specific way, they will change shape to accommodate the new practice. Of course, if you stop using the 3. 4. 5. muscles eventually they will lose tone and strength. That’s the same for the brain — you have to keep up healthy habits to have a well-functioning brain. Repetition is recognition. Neurons that fire together wire together. Affirmations are one of the habits that can tone the brain. By creating and repeating positive ‘self’ statements, people can overcome low self esteem, build self belief overcome self sabotage. The repetition of these positive statements can help to retrain the brain! By changing your thought patterns, you can ultimately change the way you act and think. A client of mine used daily affirmations to build self belief around career progression. After employing affirmations and other complimentary tools, they became the managing director of the company they started in as a post boy.
  4. Intuitive eating — Many of my clients have come to see me with disordered eating and what they perceive to be weight issues. They feel they have failed at trying to manage their weight or eating habits. My first job with these clients is to coach them that they are not the problem. In fact our relationship with food and disordered eating is often deeply rooted in our pain, trauma or the way food was used in our relationships growing up. This has to be explored. In addition, diets, restrictive eating, weight loss advice or any other health advice that tells you what, when and how much to eat, starts to erode our relationship with food. After exploring the individuals reasons for their eating patterns, I then look at how they can build a healthy relationship with food. This needs to be at the foundation of any changes they make with their eating in relation to their health. We look at everything including anything from weight changes due to a medical condition or menopause, diabetes management, cholesterol and any potential food intolerance. Having a multidisciplinary health clinic I can team up with fellow practitioners to assist the process. Importantly, when advice goes against eating things you enjoy, it is human nature to rebel and of course your relationship with food suffers. So many diets go against our primal drive to seek out food that we enjoy when we are hungry. On these type of diets, your body’s biology will make it impossible for you to stick to the plan for any length of time. Remember, we are born knowing intuitively how to feed and move our bodies. Intuitive eating encourages noticing and acting on internal body cues to rebuild body trust, as well as encouraging awareness and mindfulness of external eating drivers that may be problematic. A client who came to see me after years of a cycle of ‘perfectionism eating’ and binge eating was absolutely lost and suffered with poor self esteem. Her eating style manifested as restrictive, highly focused on the perfect nutrition and perfectly timed for digestion…then swung into losing control and bingeing. After exploration, one of the tools we employed was intuitive eating. This was life changing for her. As part of a individual and unique apprised, intuitive changed her relationship with eating and her body. She did lose weight but most importantly, she stopped seeing food as something she could fail at.
  5. Cold showers — This is a brilliant tool to help reduce anxiety and boost your immune system. Why and how? Well, exposure to cold causes our bodies to release a brief rush of “stress hormones,” including cortisol, norepinephrine and adrenaline. This leads to a shutdown of nonessential bodily functions, which include inflammatory responses, among others. When this happens briefly and on a daily basis , the benefits are immense, much like with exercise which is a “good stressor.” Studies have found that health benefits of cold showers can include reduce inflammation, relieved pain, improved circulation, lower stress levels, and reduced muscle soreness and fatigue. A client of mine that came to me experiencing anxiety and fatigue employed cold showers as one of his tools. He found that going from hot, then gradually decreasing the temperature of the water every thirty seconds until it was cold, and then staying in the cold for one minute (eventually building up over time) was a good place to start. As part of an integrated plan, he noticed his anxiety decreased and that he felt more energised.

If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?

It would meditation for sure. We all know that the world and society are changing at an exponential rate. It’s apparent than now, more than ever before we are more over-worked, and under-pressure than ever before. There are so many stressors! We are time poor and we are burdened with financial worries. We are trying to juggle relationships, family, work deadlines, social lives! All these are having detrimental effects on our health and well-being. We are becoming more susceptible to cardiovascular disease, insomnia, headaches, ulcers, fatigue, digestive problems, poor memory, anxiety, depression! There are many studies that show meditation triggers a relaxation response in the brain and body, that opposes the physiological stress response (fight or flight). Importantly, meditation is non-invasive, requires almost no effort, and really only takes a few minutes time each day to reap its rewards. The many benefits of meditation are thoroughly backed by science and can be seen plain as day on a brain scan. Here are a just a few of the benefits:

  • Improves productivity
  • Increases one’s ability to cope with demands and pressure (i.e. stress)
  • Lowers blood pressure
  • Reduces anxiety
  • Reduces fatigue
  • Improves rational decision making
  • Improves digestive function
  • Improves sleep patterns
  • Increases immunity
  • Increases ability to control cravings

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?

  1. Be mindful of people pleasing
  2. Take time to do the things you love
  3. Trust your instinct
  4. Don’t try to do it all
  5. Have clear boundaries

All of the above are imperative to managing our own wellness, thus enabling us clinicians to do the healing work without becoming burned out or triggered.

Sustainability, veganism, mental health, and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?

Mental Health, but more specifically educating others how to understand their brain and body; and how to use an integrative and energy based approach to manage and prevent mental health episodes. My clients are often surprised to learn that their brain is like a super computer. Once they start learning about why they do what they do, think how they think and feel how they feel, they feel enlightened, seen and heard. The integrative tools they use can essentially be customised and they become the experts of their own minds and bodies. They feel empowered and they can overcome the obstacles they thought they would never be able to conquer. They can reach their goals and live a life that they had given up believing was possible. This is the power of education and therapy/healing.

What is the best way for our readers to further follow your work online?

Instagram @ellamccrystal

Thank you for these fantastic insights! We wish you continued success and good health.

Women In Wellness: Ella McCrystal On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.