Feeling heightened anxiety with the early bushfire season? Help is available

As vast plumes of smoke from the Coolagolite Road bushfire billowed into the sky across the Bega Valley last week, trauma therapist Colleen Weir's phone began to ring. Ms Weir said past trauma could flip people into heightened emotions like "hyper arousal" where people could feel panic or fear, or the opposite "hypo arousal" where people could shut down. Widening your 'window of tolerance' Ms Weir's advice is for people affected by trauma to practise the "window of tolerance", a method first coined by psychiatry professor Dan Siegel. "It's about being aware, making sure safety plans are well and truly in place, and knowing you can enact those," Ms Weir said. "We've devised presentations to give people a simple way of understanding what's going on in their brain," Ms Norman said.