So now finally, we're going to get to the point of doing something about your anxiety. I wanted to make sure I got this into Week 1, because it's something I want you to keep working on all the way through and all. I'll come back and talk to you about it as we go. Just to preface this a little bit, now and a lot of the things I'll tell you in the next chapter will be about, how to manage your anxiety and reduce the actual things that get you anxious in the first place. But this one, this is really about you are now really anxious, and you want it to stop. You need a break. Is there a way for you to literally from being in an anxious state already to essentially turn it off. This is the analogy I use when I talk about this. When you're cooking and you've got the fan going and the fan's humming along, eventually you can even forget it's there. You don't notice that everybody just starts talking louder and such. It becomes this thing in the background. But as soon as you press the off button, it suddenly disappears, and it's like, ''Oh my goodness, silent sounds nice.'' Right now we all have anxiety humming along in the background all the time like that fan. For all the reasons I described to you in the previous video, that's not healthy. It's not healthy to have that continue to happen. So if we can turn it off now and then, and especially if we gained confidence in our ability to turn it off through practice, as I'll highlight in a moment, then that's something we can use. That's something when we're starting to feel too emotional, too stressed out, and we just need to regain some control. This is the thing that you can use to do it. It's going to be called guided relaxation. Let me just walk you in and get you there. So here's the first premise. So many people when they're anxious, their natural response is to say, ''Stop being anxious, why you so anxious?'' The more you tell yourself not to be anxious, the more anxious you become. Think if you're giving a public presentation in front of people and you are anxious, you can't command yourself to stop being anxious. You have to almost forget about the anxiety and instead focus on its opposite. So let's go back to the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic is the one that deals with short-term threat. The other one deals with long-term survival and its key is relaxation, it kicks in when you're relaxed. So if in states of high anxiety, you could become good at making your body relaxed, using your mind to relax your body, then that's how you turn off anxiety. I think I just said it probably as well as you can by focusing on relaxation. The opposite of anxiety, you empower relaxation, and that kills anxiety better than you can do directly. So let relaxation do the work, you focus on getting relaxed. Now, how do you do that? Well, there's various approaches to achieving relaxation and it's going to be important all through this course. I'm going to talk about some of them in Week 2 Video 2. You can distract yourself. You can literally pull yourself out of this soup of threat that we find ourselves in and bring your mind to a different place, and that can do it. So I'll talk about some of the ways you can do that and special things like laughter and singing, and how they might be especially powerful on this regard, but let's hold on with that one. For now, I really want to contrast these two, a passive approach to relaxation versus an active and mindful one. So a passive approach would be something like putting on some meditation, music or whatever music, for example, that naturally relaxes you. So laying down and listening to some of that relaxing music is one way to relax. What I want you to realize with that way is it's not one that requires a lot of thought. It's a passive approach. So you're literally hoping, for example, to drift off to sleep or something like that. So you're not really attending to the thing that's producing the relaxation. You're hoping it'll do its thing in a background way, and just drift you off. By the way, nothing wrong with passive approaches to relaxation. I highly encourage you to engage in those as well. But I want to contrast those with what I'm going to talk about, which is a much more active and mindful approach to relaxation. In the guided relaxation I will talk to you about, you are paying a lot of attention. You are learning, it's like learning to play guitar or learning to dance or whatever you might want to think about learning. You have to have your mind there. You have to think about what you're doing and this is something that you are going to take command of. So your conscious mind is going to be the one pushing things into relaxation. So we need to train the conscious mind how to do that. That's what guided relaxation is about. So I'm in vague. Let's get a little more specific. There's a basic premise to guided relaxation, which is this. To bring some state into being, it is important to know that state intimately. So imagine the Star Trek when they still go into the teleporter and beam to some other location. Except in order to beam to that other location. Imagine you really had to know that location. Well, you couldn't beam to someplace you've never been. You have to bring that location to mind in order to get from here to there. That's what relaxation is. So often we use passive relaxation methods so that by the time we're really relaxed, our mind is completely relaxed, and it's not paying attention to what the relaxation actually feels like. It's drifting off to sleep. We want the conscious mind to be aware of what relaxation feels like. We want it to become intimately aware of it, to know that state well, because once it knows that state well, then it can get there, it can push the body to be in that state. Let me go back to the [inaudible] that's slowed their heart rate down, that [inaudible] may not know what their heart rate is at any point in time, but they know what it feels like when their heart rate is slower, and they can slowly push their body towards that feeling. By doing that, they are relaxing their heart rate. With you, I want you to become intimately aware of what relaxation feels like and to gain that knowledge. When you gain that knowledge, then similarly with your conscious mind say, "Where am I now? How does my body feel? Can I move my body from this anxious state to that state that I know well and bring it there?" That's what guided relaxation is about. So here's how it'll work. I've created a little audio file for you to listen to, and I would recommend you listen to this as often as you can. Certainly anytime you're feeling really anxious, great time to listen to it. Also before bed is a great time to listen to it. You may drift off if you do it before bed and not get the same conscious, understanding of what the state was like because you may actually slip into a more passive mode and miss that. Still it'll probably help you get a good night sleep and that's good. So before bed is fine, but also anytime in the day. This isn't just something to help you get to sleep, this is a skill that you're working on. You'll hear the details on the auditory tape, but before you do, let me just give you a sense, because again, it's not voodoo by any extent. It's a very sensible approach, and the way it'll work is, I'll just walk you through relaxing your muscle groups. So I'll essentially asks you to lay down, get comfortable, and then starting at your feet and walking your way up through your body, I'm going to pick muscle groups like, let's say your feet, I will say, "Clench your feet. Clench them as hard as you can, make that muscle like it was a fist with your feet and clench it harder and do it till it hurts, like pain." You're feeling pain in that muscle in your foot and then relax it and when you relax it, feel what it feels like. Become intimately aware of that state, feel that state and what's a relaxed foot really feel like? You've probably never thought of it that much before, but you will feel it and you will get a sense, "Oh, okay, that's what a relaxed foot feels like. " Then we will just slowly move up your body, your calves, your thighs, your buttocks, your core, we'll move up through your body and each step of the way I'll give you some instructions about tightening the muscles in the relevant groups, tightening them as long as you can, and then relaxing them and critically feeling what that feels like. By the time we're done, we will have gone from your feet to the tip your head and you should be laying there and your whole body should feel truly and utterly relaxed. Most importantly, your mind should be very aware so that you can look at your body, but it's really feel your body. You can feel what that relaxation feels like and I want you to do that. That's a big part of it, is feeling what those muscles feel like when they're really relaxed and they will feel very different than they do when they're really tense. Again, becoming intimate with that, become aware of what that feels like because that will be your destination. We all have this picture of a beach that we would like to go to someday, that will be your beach. Once you have the picture of it, you can move towards it in a better way. The more you know it, the better you can move it towards it, which brings me to the final point in this, which is practice. You don't learn guitar by having someone tell you something and then you do it once. You have to do it over and over again. When I say practice, I don't just mean by laying down and practicing, that's great. That's what you want to do a lot of early, let my voice walk you through this process. But as you become more and more intimate with this notion of what relaxation feels like, then I would like you to practice it in your daily life too, like when you feel, like maybe [inaudible] you just watched the news and you feel really tense, you feel anxious after watching the news. Turn the news off and maybe don't put my audio on, just sit on the couch and do it yourself. Put your mind into that state and maybe early on, it might actually involve clenching the muscle groups and doing exactly what I do but without me. After a while, you won't even have to clench the muscle groups. You'll be able to just go into that state and move into that state. But again, it all requires practice first along with me, then without me, but maybe again in a formal approach like I'm using. Then eventually, you just want it to be something that you just have available. So I want to leave, just before we get into this, I want to leave you with a couple of examples of why this is useful. Obviously, it's useful for just if you've had too much anxiety dealing with this Covid stuff and you have to get away, this is a way to get away. But also, I mentioned that things like emotions are raw. What if somebody says something to you that's snarky and you start to feel your emotion, you're ready to give it to them, but you know this isn't going to be a good outcome? Imagine you're isolated with this person. That's when eventually you'll be able to go relax. Feel that relaxation come down, let me not be emotional. Let me prevent that emotional reaction and instead be a level person and just respond with logic or rational ideas. That's the kind of tool it can be, it can be sitting there and it can help you relax. So here's the final thing I'm going to add to my guided relaxation, let me go through. I'm going to add what we're going to call a trigger word and since I used the word beach, and that's one of my favorites anyway, we'll use the word beach. So as I go through the guided relaxation, and when I say feel that relaxation, I will occasionally just say the word beach. I'll throw that in there, beach and then you will connect that word with the feeling. Then when you're in one of these situations where you feel emotion rising and you want control, you say that word. That word summons the feeling of relaxation for you. It brings you back there. So the word beach, you just say the word beach and you can bring yourself back there. If you get to that relaxed state, fantastic. You can't be anxious and relaxed at the same time. So by learning how to relax, you are learning to shut off anxiety. Again, the most important, there's no other tool that can so directly answer the challenge as learning to relax in this way. That's the end of week one. I really do want you now to start using this tool and learning this approach to relaxation. We're going to come back with week two, and I'll talk about some of the other aspects of this Covid virus, some of the psychology that's relevant to it and some strategies you can use to manage your feelings of anxiety in different ways than through relaxation. I hope you find this all useful. I will be back to you in week two. Bye.
