 Hey, today I'm going to talk to you about climbing because I spend so much of my time talking about thinking about undoing climbing and yet I've never actually talked about it on my YouTube channel, which is a shame because it's a huge part of my getting and staying well. And I recently got the chance to talk about this at a conference and to reflect on some of the lessons that I've learned through climbing to wellness and I thought it'd be really nice to do like a summary of that for anyone who is interested in my climbing or in the use of climbing for well-being. It's a really interesting area actually and I've got just a little bit of funding to deliver an intervention for young people down in Brighton and Hove looking at the role of climbing as a kind of therapeutic measure for young people who are struggling with anxiety and depression and I really look forward to sharing more about that as it unfolds. But today I'm talking about my journey with climbing so I had never climbed until about 18 months ago so I'll start at the beginning. So once upon a time I was very unwell with anorexia and I had been impatient for some time, I had been entirely bed bound for some time and then I had progressed to being in a wheelchair, then I progressed to being on crutches and finally I was able to walk unaided and I was beginning to build my strength up. I was back to a healthy weight or really at a healthy weight for the first time in my adult life and things were going okay. I discovered climbing accidentally actually. My children wanted to go climbing, I took them to my local climbing wall craggy down in Sutton and I discovered that if they were going to go climbing it was going to get very expensive unless I went along and did an induction session and was able to supervise them climbing myself. So I went and did my 90 minute induction and by the end of it I was like when can I come back and do this more, I loved it. So it was bouldering so this is low level climbing without ropes and I quickly started going to their weekly ladies sessions which is kind of a social session that just anyone could join in so it kind of enabled me to access the wall and get a bit of coaching input and I quickly found that I was getting stronger and better and building a bit of a community amongst the climbers too. So what did I kind of learn from this? So the first thing I learned, I did my kind of five lessons and I've got my clicker with me because I'm actually just going to look through my presentation as I share with you. So my lesson number one in my presentation was I am strong and I mean this kind of both physically and mentally but the thing for me with climbing to start with was it really, really helped me to come to terms with this new body that I was inhabiting. So I have been very underweight for a very long time and although my weight had kind of gone up and down over time I'd always been underweight and in my whole adult life it seems I had been chronically underweight and one of the things I had to come to terms with when I went through the most recent treatment was the realization that I had always been when I thought I was aiming for healthy, actually that was still a stone below where I should have been and in fact about stone and a half now that we adjust for my new more muscular body. So I had to gain a significant amount of weight even from where I thought healthy was but even more from where I was in illness. So I had gained a huge, huge amount of weight and although that took me to healthy and I was by no means big I was huge compared to what I was used to being and I felt like I was walking around in someone else's body and it just felt uncomfortable. I found it very, very difficult to adjust to the change. Partly because also it happens over a really quick period of time so it's just difficult. Every time you look in the mirror someone different is looking back at you and it's really uncomfortable and I couldn't get over this feeling that I was just too big and I felt wrong and all that kind of thing. What I found was that with climbing I started taking videos of myself climbing because I wanted to improve my climbing technique and a really good way of doing that is to watch yourself climbing and then you can kind of critique yourself and you can learn about you know what you're doing well and what you could be doing better but there was this really nice side effect from watching those videos which was that I could see myself getting stronger and also I was able to view myself more objectively because I just looked at myself mechanically like objectively as a climber and I'd be assessing my strengths and I could see myself not as someone who was too big or taking up too much space but as someone who was objectively really strong and you know I could see my kind of muscles forming and the fact that there wasn't you know any excess of me in fact increasingly over time I found it hard to think well where had you know how could this possibly be me when I'd gained so much weight where where was I before you know it was hard to understand so I began to be able to look at that it really helped with my body image it really helped me to reset really my opinions of myself and to begin to think of my body as something that was that was strong and to see this is a positive thing of gaining of gaining strength the other thing I found was that climbing helped me to make myself stronger and to kind of exercise good self-care it helped me to eat better I found that I was motivated to eat well before it climbed because if you try climbing when you haven't fueled yourself properly and not just directly before but in the day or two before that as well it's really really hard so bouldering in particular it is quite intense and it involves like big spurts of energy and so to do that it's a bit like you know sprinting you'd find it really really hard to sprint if you haven't had a good night's sleep and you've not eaten a decent amount of food in the preceding couple of days so I began to find that that really helped the other thing was I found if I went and did a couple of hours climbing that I would feel ravenously hungry afterwards and again that was really important because I had never really understood hunger cues in the past I had such a kind of messed up relationship with food and hunger that I never really known what hungry felt like and I mistake it for nausea and stuff but finally with climbing came this ravenous hunger where I had to feed myself well and I began to understand you know have a better relationship with my body so yeah climbing made me tired and hungry I learnt to feed myself I learnt to rest myself and yeah there was lots and lots of positives there but yeah also I could watch videos of myself and I could see that I was strong and it was so satisfying is still so satisfying feeling myself getting stronger and stronger and I do feel a huge amount of pride when I think of the fact that you know less than two years ago I was completely bedbound by anorexia literally didn't have the strength to sit up in bed and now I can you know hold my entire body weight on my fingers and pull up from my fingers and do like really quite fun technical climbing so yeah that makes me proud and has been a great lesson and the next lesson I learned was that there's not like a right way and a wrong way of doing things so as many of you know I am on the autistic spectrum as well as having had anorexia which tends to go with kind of very black-and-white thinking and I have always had this very black or white thinking kind of past or fail good or bad right or wrong and it's been really really important for me to learn that actually there's lots and lots of different ways of getting to our destination and climbing is a really good way of discovering that because when you go to a climbing wall or you go climbing outdoors which is so fun just booked my next climbing holiday hurrah when you go climbing basically even if you're climbing indoors on a wall where there's kind of a preset route there is always so many different ways of getting to the top so for me because I'm really short often I will have to take a different approach than like if I go climbing with my husband who is six foot four so there's over a foot between us and we'll take a completely different approach his way isn't right or wrong my way isn't right or wrong they're just different and that's been a really important lesson and something I try and discipline myself to do sometimes is if I am climbing a particular route to actually try different ways of doing it so once I cracked it one way I think oh could I miss a hold out or could I do it a slightly different way can I start with my hands in a different place or you know something like that I find it really helpful and that's been quite a good kind of analogy also for recovery for me as well and we like to think of you know recovery as being a straight line and the perfectionist tendencies that often come with people who struggle with eating disorders can mean that we expect that to be every day making progress for this to be completely linear and exponential and it just isn't like that and I've had to learn that there are shades of gray that you know some days will be better than other days and that sometimes will fall and we need to pick ourselves up and then climbing has helped me to kind of really practice that the you know some days I have a good climbing day sometimes I have a bad climbing day but it's all kind of adding to my ability to climb you might try the same route a hundred times before you get to the top that doesn't mean it means any less when you get there and every time you go up that route you learn something different as well and the other thing I found was that like with climbing I have learned that I can't just copy what someone else does so I might be looking at a route that I'm finding particularly hard and I really want to get to the top and yeah it can be really helpful to ask my pals and say how did you do it you know what did you find to be a helpful way of doing this move and have you got any ideas about how to get past this bit and they will often have suggestions and they might often have suggestions for what they think will work for me as well if it's someone who knows my climbing ability but actually again there's no right way and wrong way and the only way to actually find what's going to work for you is to go and try and to be prepared to not always get it right and to be flexible and to try different things and that's been so important and again it's a really as I say really important analogy was recovery because we can sometimes look at how someone else is doing it and I can say well you know they're doing this they're eating this they're doing these things and that's great if it's working for them but that doesn't mean it's going to work for me so I need to hold myself to account for you know in the case of what works for me rather than what works for someone else both when it comes to my eating disorder and how I manage my autism increasingly I'm beginning to think about that more carefully and but yeah also in the climbing wall just because this climb works this way for this person doesn't mean it's going to work that way for me and the other thing that's important is I sometimes do things a slightly unusual way so I'm known for being a little bit of a contortionist when it comes to climbing I'm small and I can fit into little places and I also have incredibly strong fingers and so I sometimes can pull off a move that might not be the way other people would do it and and their way might look neater might look better might look more fun but it might work for them and not for me and it's okay even if my way is a little kooky both on and off the wall and it's also just been generally really good for my problem-solving and this is one of the things that I always try and encourage people to think about when it comes to taking kids climbing and why this is such a useful sport because actually you you sit and you look at the problem you're trying to solve we actually call them problems and yeah you look at that that climb you want to do that problem you want to solve and you sit and you think about how you're going to do it and you plan for it and you try and work out where the difficult bits are going to be and how you might approach that and then you go and you you give it a go and if it doesn't work first time you try something different so it's been great for my problem-solving and kind of my resilience and my willingness to to get up and and try and try again as well the next thing for me was that climbing taught me to have fun so this was the first real hobby I've had in a very very long time historically I had felt this need to be productive all the time I haven't been very good at doing things just because they were fun or because they were good for me or because I enjoyed them and in climbing I found this kind of organized structured way of being able to go and enjoy myself and it was something that I enjoyed so much that I found myself actually making time for it the other thing was that I found that in climbing I found something that could really help me to reset so it's been really helpful for me in different ways at different stages of my illness so early on it really helped me when I was trying very very hard to overcome feelings of wanting to self harm or when I'd be feeling suicidal and actually I could go and I could climb and I was able to push all the other thoughts out of my mind because when you're climbing you're so very very kind of heavily involved in that it's very much a mental and a physical workout and you've got like you're kind of stimulating so many different senses as well so you're very much involved it's like a really really physical form of mindfulness it's so for me that was that was fantastic and yeah it can help me as well if I become overwhelmed so if I have spent a lot of time around people which can cause me to burn out I do suffer a lot with social burnout I find if I go and climb is literally like pressing the reset button for me and then I find that I'm able to yeah engage again the better afterwards it yeah lets me sort of really clear my mind and get rid of the anxieties that have sort of built up and put me back on a really sort of level playing field and I also find that climbing is nice because I can go to climbing walls anywhere in the country and there's kind of a very clear set of rules to how climbing works so both literally in terms of you know there are different gradings and there's rules that you will have in terms of safety and rules of kind of you know social engagement at the wall but then also there's lots of stuff around I've got lots of social scripts around how if I would like to climb with other people I kind of know how those conversations need to go so you sort of you go and watch other people who are climbing something that is sort of you know difficult but sort of perhaps achievable for you within a few climbs you watch them doing it you ask if you can have a go and you kind of join in and I found that this works really wherever you go that people will often really welcome you in if you're climbing at a similar level with them and you're willing to have a go you're willing to fall off in front of them that seems to be quite an important social glue and so yeah you can get this kind of sense of belonging community wherever you go and for me I think this speaks to my autistic tendencies that it's really easy to engage because you have a thing to talk about you're not having to worry about small talk which is complicated you're talking about the climbing and you can talk about the technique and the strategy and everything now you don't have to talk about other stuff if you don't want to you can focus in on the climbing no one minds how much or how little you're contributing kind of to conversation and there's really clear kind of rules of engagement around turn taking on the wall and that kind of thing so yeah it's really great I feel like I can go any to any wall and just slot in with the people there I know how I fit like much easier than if I'm at like a networking event or a party or something like that I find that much much harder so like at the wall I understand the language I understand how to be so that's really really helpful and it's yeah like I said it's really really good fun too so it's been really easy for me actually to prioritize time to climb because I love it so much but I also know that it enables me to be more productive in the time when I'm not climbing because it helps me to really reset and it's something that I can use as a tool to help me to manage the things that I want to continue doing work wise because I love them and I see the big impact I have when I go and do things like talk at events but which take a huge toll on me and I know well that's fine then so next week for example I'll be going and climbing in Colchester because the next day I'm speaking at an event locally and I know that because I've gone and climbed I'll be in a good place mentally I'll be going from the Department for Education to a big conference the climbing in between will help me reset and I'll have fun too so yeah easy to kind of prioritize that form of self-care because I love it and it's so much fun and lesson four is about failure as a pathway to success so I've alluded to this a little bit already about that how there's lots of different ways of solving a problem and we've got to be prepared and to fall off now I have a bit of a thing when I'm climbing that if I go to the wall and I find that by the end of my session I haven't really fallen off much I feel like I haven't tried hard enough when I'm not falling that indicates to me that I'm working just within my comfort zone and that I'm not going to progress as a climber and actually again it's a really good lesson for me in life when I find that I'm just kind of coasting along and everything's fine and easy that often indicates to me that it's time for me to begin to challenge myself a little bit more that's been helpful with things like for me introduction of different food groups into my diet so I had had a hugely restrictive diet in the past as the combination of anorexia and autism really like narrowed my world and I've gradually gradually gradually over a very long period been introducing more food groups and yeah now I know that if it's been some weeks and actually everything's feeling okay then it might be time for me to think about okay can I begin to push the boundaries a little bit and bring in another new food type and yeah in the same way as I challenge myself with my climbing I like to challenge myself with my food so I fall off a lot when I climb like quite spectacularly I'll pop a video in so you can see I'm kind of renowned for it at my local wall and there's often a moment where everyone goes oh and then there's a okay she's laughing it's fine and the thing I love when I watch videos of myself falling I'm always laughing as I fall like I think I have the most fun when I'm falling off and it's it's really great and it took me a while to get comfortable falling in front of other people and that's a really common thing for people when they start climbing it's kind of you know you feel embarrassed you want to be showing like hey I'm amazing and but actually in the end I think that as climbers we often have most respect for people who are willing to have a go at something whether or not they're they're gonna succeed it's about the trying I think that we yeah as climbers we often really respect people who try really hard and it's not always so much about getting to the top I mean there's always a big whoop if someone gets to the end of a project that they've been working hard on actually there's a lot of like happy spirit and supportiveness even if you're not actually making it to the top and being prepared to try something that I knew I wasn't going to do perfectly has been great as well for me in terms of just addressing that perfectionism so those kind of unrelenting standards and perfectionism has been a big issue for me and that whole thing about black and white thinking kind of pass or fail right or wrong has been a real issue and again in climbing I've really begun to learn that actually something can be a work in progress sometimes actually I'll have a climb that I've been working on and it will get taken down and replaced by new climb before I ever managed to get to the top and again that's the sort of thing that when I first started climbing I just couldn't have handled and now I really embrace it I think it's great if I've got a project that's so hard I never managed to achieve it and I have to roll over and start a new project when the wall gets reset actually I think that's a really great sign of of progress for me the other thing I found is that by being willing to try stuff that is beyond what I can really achieve I learn so much so I actually coach quite often people climbing now too and I'm always trying to encourage them to try stuff that is beyond their comfort zone and to try a climb that they just know that they can't get to the top of because you don't have to get to the top to learn something even if you can only do the first one or two moves you're actually building up your sort of repertoire of skills and understanding and your muscle memory just by trying those moves and actually again it's the same for me in life I don't have to be able to do something perfectly in order to go and give it a go and yeah step outside my comfort zone and sort of be prepared to try the other thing for me on a very practical level in terms of managing my mental health is that falling I have found to be really grounding so one of the things for me when I was really struggling with my post-traumatic stress disorder is that I struggled a lot with not feeling real and dissociation and lots of that sort of thing and for me self-harm was something that helped to ground me it made me feel in the moment and now and it didn't mean it was pleasant but it helped me to kind of stay present and falling does that for me too so if I am climbing and then I fall like literally I guess you'll get hit the ground you're great it's grounding you're kind of very in the moment and again for me that can be quite helpful too that doesn't mean to say that I would ever climb recklessly and there's certainly been times when I turned up to the wall when I've been in a very very difficult state mentally and actually our centre manager is fantastic and he will often say can why don't you sit have a cup of tea calm down then we'll go and climb and that's the right way to do it because you know you want to be taking care when you're climbing it's obviously you know there is there is potential danger there so you want to be climbing when you're at a relatively good place but again as I say for me that that kind of the falling really makes me feel very present and I guess that's also partly why I find myself laughing I'm in the moment I'm right now I'm right here all that matters at that moment I'm falling is me in the wall and that climb that I'm trying really hard to get to the top of the final lessons lesson number five in my presentation was I can and this is something that's been really lovely to discover is that I often didn't do things for fear of not being able to do them and the number of things I never tried because I thought I couldn't and climbing has really helped me to develop much more of a growth mindset and I've realized that I can do stuff so lots of people when I talk to them about climbing then they say I'd really like to do it but I don't have any upper body strength or I'm quite weak and I always then reflect on the fact that when I started climbing I'd literally only really just started walking again and but actually with some determination with a willingness to try and a willingness to fail along the way and actually I have become much much stronger like 24 hours has passed since I started recording this video and now life got in the way in the middle anyway I was kind of finishing up I was talking about how I can being the lesson the fifth lesson I learned from climbing and how I can apply that to life and the final thing that I found really helpful as part of this I can is the positive impact that a little bit of coaching can have and I found that because I was new to climbing I was keen to learn and really happy to take on board the advice of others which can be harder maybe to apply to other domains of my life but a really nice example from climbing would be I've been trying to learn to dino so dinoing in climbing is basically when you make little jumps and so there'd been this this particular problem that I've been trying to do that involved a jump at the start and I thought I couldn't do this I thought the jump was too far that I was too small I didn't have the skill or the power or the height needed to make this jump so I asked how we one of our regular route setters and yeah great climber who is often at our local climbing wall craggy for some advice on this and he has kindly included little dinos for people like me to have a go at and he also gave me some great advice so there was one particular climb I was trying to do this dino again and again and again and not getting it and he said to me this is nothing to do with your height this is nothing to do with your ability and it's it's completely about you thinking about the sequence events so he didn't say he said do you know don't think about you know the the size of the gap or anything like that it's about trying to move your body at the right time and in the right order and it's not that you can't reach it it's that you're not approaching it quite you know with quite the right sequence and and the other thing he said was it's a psychological barrier so it was about me actually having the confidence and knowing I can rather than thinking I can't that's true of a lot of stuff in climbing actually I often find that both for myself and for other people who I will coach that the thing holding them back isn't their ability it's not their height or their strength or their techniques sometimes it's just in their mind and that's particularly true when we're working higher up the wall and we're anxious about the height and that kind of thing as well but yeah overcoming that psychological barrier so this was particularly satisfying on this little dyno that I did and having not been able to do it not been able to do it I then went back to it knowing well actually you know how he says I'm able to do this I know I can I just need to think about the sequence and then I managed to get it and it felt so good so yeah I can it's been a really nice learning from climbing and again it's given me as a say the confidence to try things in other aspects of my life and not to think that I have to do something perfectly in order to be able to enjoy it so that's been a great lesson so as you can gather from the whole video I love climbing I found it to be incredibly fun and also incredibly worthwhile a really good way of getting and staying well and something I can use really regularly as part of my weekly routine in order to keep myself well and in order to help myself manage on more difficult days or in order to get myself to a really good starting point when I know I'm going to be facing significant challenge so if I know I'm going to be doing loads of social interaction I might go climbing on the way so I start as calm as possible at the beginning so it's been a great sport for me I'd love to hear about how you get on with your particular sport or chosen hobby or activity and how that impacts on your well-being and if you're a fellow climber I'd really love to hear about your journey with climbing and if it's something that you found has been supportive to your mental health as well and I think one thing I should add is that when we think about sport and well-being we know that there are really good proven links and there's lots and lots of evidence about the you know the positive impact that sport can have on things like depression and anxiety however when we are in the depths of those difficulties it can be really hard to physically get out and engage in the thing that we know will be good for us and that can be incredibly tough so you know if you're someone who's watching this and you are wanting to do this you know it would help you but you feel completely unable then I guess I just want to sort of yeah share a bit of solidarity really and hope that you can take some steps towards doing those things on a day that is a little bit kinder to you and be forgiving of yourself on on the days where it feels not possible to manage that I often can find that having a supportive group of friends and having a routine can help so for me knowing that every Tuesday evening there's a group of people that I would climb with knowing that on a Thursday there's a group of women that I climb with and knowing that on a Saturday my husband will climb with me helps me to keep it as part of my regular routine but I also have a whole bunch of buddies who if I need to go for a climb I can text them and say you know anyone up for a climb I really feel you know in need of a go and that can really help because sometimes it is it's it's nicer to do it alongside someone if you're having a tricky day and as I say the routine also just knowing that it's regularly going to come up and you're going to do it at the same time can make it much easier than trying to each time it be a spur of the moment thing and get your ideas together. The other thing is just on a really practical note I find having everything already to go so that if I do decide that yes I can get out and I can go climbing like I just literally have to pick up my bag and it's ready to go rather than having to pack it and organize it because sometimes it's those little practical things which can be the difference between us getting up and getting out and not doing so knowing that you know all I literally need to do is make the decision and pick up my car keys and pick up my climbing stuff which is already to go makes it so much easier to get to the wall. I hope this was interesting I hope you enjoyed the videos of my climbing I do I do love love love my climbing and yeah it's always great to be able to share that passion with others and I think particularly as someone who found my sport you know much later in life I hope that kind of encourages some of you if you haven't found your thing yet to maybe give a few different things to go and hopefully have some fun along the way. Okay see you in the next video I guess do let me know your thoughts your ideas your comments let me know what other things you'd like videos about and if you would it would be fantastic if you would be happy to subscribe to my channel I'm trying to release new videos on a Tuesday and a Friday and be more consistent about that your subscriptions it mean a lot to me I notice them as they come in I am you know aiming for the 10,000 so I can go use the YouTube space in London so you know only like 10% of the way there but I'll get there if you keep subscribing thank you so much and see you in the next video bye