GUEST BLOG - 7th July 2014 - Jo Johnson

Can you shrink your Smirch?

Jo Johnson is a consultant neuropsychologist with a special interest in MS. Here she explains the thinking behind her forthcoming book, Shrinking the smirch, and introduces a new Facebook group where people can share practical tips for living with long term conditions

 Shrinking the Smirch is a new workbook for helping people cope with physical and mental health challenges as well as everyday stress. 

The workbook asks you to imagine that the source of your troubles is an imaginary creature called a smirch. A smirch means a smudge that makes your life less good than it could be. Here is Kevin, my smirch, in the workbook there are many different shaped and sized smirches, they are all different.

This sounds like a strange idea but externalising your mental or physical health challenges is not a new idea. Perhaps Winston Churchill's Black Dog which represented his depression is a good example of this.

Shrinking the Smirch firsts asks the reader to imagine what your smirch might look like and what it makes you think, feel and do. The book includes a yearbook of examples from other people. 

The smirch has lots of equipment it uses to trouble humans, like contact lenses to make everything look rubbish and a fatigue pipe to exhaust you, but it's most powerful weapon is its smirchiepod, an ipod to play tunes that upset. Popular tunes include ‘You will fail,’ ‘You are less good than others,’ ‘Everyone else is coping,’ ‘You will only get worse,’ and ‘What on earth are they thinking?’

The workbook asks you to notice your own negative spirals that lead you to behaviour that is not helpful like withdrawing, over-thinking, emotional eating or too much wine. So at the beginning of the workbook, the smirch has the most power and a large bag of accessories and the reader has an empty bag.

Shrinking the smirch then takes you through twenty shrinking tips drawn from approaches like CBT, ACT and mindfulness-based approaches to help you reduce the smirch's impact on your life. Each of the twenty tips include something to put in your bag to help you shrink your smirch. Chapters include ideas for managing tricky thoughts and feelings, time and fatigue management, as well as some commonsense ideas about diet and exercise and mental health. Thus by the end of the book, the reader has a bag full of strategies and the smirch, whilst still there, is much smaller.

Whilst its tone is intended to be fun it tackles many of the serious themes that crop up for people with anxiety, depression and other psychological symptoms. The last section allows you to create a personalised revenge plan of the ideas in the book that you feel will most help you.

Shrinking the Smirch can be purchased from amazon or Speechmark RRP £16.00 and is written by Jo Johnson, a consultant neuropsychologist and illustrated by Lauren Densham.