Good Life Project - 20 Tools to Tame Anxiety | Emiliya Zhivotovskaya

Episode Date: March 24, 2020

Anxiety is at an all-time high right now, and there are valid reasons for concern. At the same time, most of us have more control over how we experience this moment, psychologically and emotionally, than we realize. There are many practical, accessible ways to reduce anxiety and move away from panic.This is why we asked longtime collaborator and wellbeing advisor, Emiliya Zhivotovskaya, to help us better understand anxiety, and walk us through 20 highly-specific tools and techniques to reduce anxiety and bring yourself back to a place of relative ease and calm, no matter how groundless or anxiety-provoking the world around you may feel in this moment.Emiliya is the CEO and founder of The Flourishing Center, a New York City-based, B-Corp dedicated to increasing the flourishing of individuals, organizations, and communities. She is the creator of the Certification in Applied Positive Psychology, the Bounce Back Better® training on resilience, Positive Psychology Coaching Certification, the Flourishing Skills Group, and is the co-founder of the Positive Educator Certification™ Program. Emiliya holds a Master’s Degree from the University of Pennsylvania in Positive Psychology and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Mind-Body Medicine and is also an adjunct faculty member.  As always, these tools and techniques can be incredibly useful, but we are not in a position to make specific medical or mental health recommendations for any one individual, we strongly suggest consulting a qualified mental health professional to better understand the most appropriate actions to take for your unique needs. Last quick note. Our whole team wants you to know that we so appreciate you, we will continue producing this show to the best of our abilities (though we are moving to a remote recording format in order to honor the need for safety), we love you and look forward to continuing to be of service as we all move through this challenging time together. Here is a link to the references we mentioned in this episode.You can find Emiliya Zhivotovskaya at: Website | Instagram-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey everybody, it's Jonathan. So we are kind of in the embrace of extreme unease right now, levels of fear and uncertainty that for many are leading to the experience of fear, anxiety, panic. And while we may feel like we don't have much control over the circumstances, and there may well be valid reasons to feel that way, if we're concerned that we do not want to belittle or dismiss, the reality is also for most of us, we do have a lot more control over how we experience this moment psychologically and emotionally than most of us realize. This is why I asked my dear friend, longtime collaborator and Good Life Project

advisor, Amelia Zivotowskaya, who we just call EZ for short because for obvious reasons, I asked her to help us understand the anxiety and fear that so many are experiencing these days and sometimes the level of panic and help really equip you and me and all of us with a number of highly specific tools and techniques to bring yourself back to a place of relative ease and calm, no matter how groundless the world around you may feel at this moment in time. As always, these tools and techniques can be incredibly useful, but we are not in a position to make specific medical or mental health recommendations for any one individual, and always strongly recommend consulting a qualified mental health professional to better understand the most appropriate actions

for you to take in your unique circumstance. Now, about Amelia and why I turned to her as our guide today. Amelia is the CEO and founder of something in New York called the Flourishing Center. It is a B Corporation or benefit corporation that is dedicated to increasing the flourishing of individuals, organizations, and communities worldwide. She is the creator of the acclaimed certification in applied positive psychology, which is offered in cities across the U.S., Canada, online, worldwide. She's trained over a thousand practitioners to date. She is also the creator of Bounce Back Better, which is a really powerful training on resilience,

creator of the positive psychology coaching certification, the Flourishing Skills Group, and is the co-founder of the Positive Educator Certification Program, where they bring all of these tools and techniques and ideas into the world of education and schools. Amelia also holds a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in positive psychology. She's currently pursuing her PhD in mind-body medicine and is an adjunct faculty member, holds a master certified coach credential with ICF, as well as over a dozen professional credentials.

That is a long way of saying she really knows what she's talking about. And she is somebody who I have known for a very long time now and have come to trust with all sorts of moments that are really hard to figure out how to navigate through. Not just because she's deeply wise, deeply studied, but she's also incredibly pragmatic. She lives in the world where it's not about talking theory. It is about skills, tools, and techniques that help us feel better in the world that are proven, vetted, and useful. Last quick note before we jump in, you will no doubt notice the quality of the audio in this conversation is a bit different than our usual studio production values. Like so many others, we have moved to remote recording for this window in time in order

to keep producing high quality conversations that will hopefully serve as a source of wisdom and community, inspiration and peace, while letting us and our guests continue to feel safe along the way. So as you hear us begin to mix these newer conversations into our lineup that we have already recorded over the next few months, you will no doubt notice the difference in production values. Our whole team wants you to know that we so appreciate you. We will continue producing this show to the best of our abilities. We love you and look forward to continuing to be of service as we all move through this challenging season together. I am so excited and inspired to be able to bring

this and all of our conversations to you. Amelia is going to walk us through 20 specific tools and techniques. Along with it, she has been kind enough to create a very detailed information sheet with links and resources to go along with this so that of any of these tools that jump out at you where you're thinking that sounds like it would really help, I want to know more and I want to know how to start doing this right away. It will be a resource where you can immediately learn more and start to do the work. So you can find a link to that right now in the show notes. It's a free resource. It's just something that's going to really help you integrate everything that we're talking about today and go

deeper into any of the tools and techniques that sound like they really resonate. So be sure to check the link in the show notes and download your copy of that. Okay, let's dive in. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results

will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. I'm really excited to have this conversation. I have actually wanted to have this conversation with you, Amelia, for a long time.

For circumstances none of us particularly are happy about, we're having this conversation now because we are seeing the conversation around this word anxiety kind of dominate so much of what people are feeling right now. And there's a lot of misinformation. There's a lot of lack of clarity around it. And what I'm really not seeing a lot of is what can I do about it? Is there something that I can actually do? So I wanted to talk to you because you have always been my go-to person for getting out of your head and actually getting into skills and tools that make you feel better. And that's kind of where I want to go in this conversation. But I think it

might be helpful just as an anchor for us to start out to just really talk about just for a few minutes this word anxiety, what it really is. And just on a basic level, what do people really need to know about it? Yeah, what I believe people need to know about anxiety is that it's part of a spectrum of emotions that fall under the umbrella of being afraid, a very human, natural thing to feel fear if you believe that something bad might happen. And emotions, all of them fall on a spectrum. So when we're talking about fear, we can say something on one end of the spectrum as little as, okay, I'm just concerned about what might happen, or I'm feeling a little apprehensive about the situation, to the complete other end of the spectrum, which is you're not just feeling anxious, you might have a full-blown panic attack. And what makes for the difference between where you fall on the spectrum is

everything from the severity of the circumstance you're facing, but it's also something that is under our control. We can actually control where that pin is on the spectrum going from, I'm just feeling a little worried or a little fearful to I'm full on debilitated by my fear. And so fear is human, it's natural. And we want to be able to work with it. Because if you think about the increased experience of feeling fear, what that usually comes with is a desire to want to run away from the situation. And oftentimes the things that we're worrying about are not things that are happening immediately in the moment. We're going into the future. It's all of that what if thinking and what will happen.

And when we're living under tremendously uncertain times, we don't have the capacity to project accurately into the future. And what we're experiencing is people just being paralyzed by their fear. And so it's important to know that worry, fear, anxiety is normal. It's natural. It's a part of your physiological response of trying to protect yourself. But emotions are meant to be signalers to us. They're meant to make us pay attention to what's going on in our environment. So anger is meant to signal to you that someone or something might be causing you harm. Fear is meant to signal something bad might happen. Sadness is meant to signal, hey, you've lost something that's important to you.

And when we don't know how to work with those feelings, we feel like emotions just happen to us, where instead we can actually use emotions and actually dial them up or dial them down, depending on what we're experiencing, depending on what's needed in the moment. And during times like this, what we need is for people to be able to access their creativity, their resourcefulness, and to problem solve. And when we're feeling high levels of worry and anxiety, we actually want to do the opposite. We are frozen. We want to run away. And that's the last thing that we want to have people doing during these uncertain times. Yeah. I remember there is this relationship between anxiety and action-taking, anxiety and paralysis. And yeah, when uncertainty goes up and the stakes go up simultaneously, we tend to want, it makes us feel bad. We feel that the feeling of anxiety

becomes embodied. It literally changes our chemistry and our physiology and our neurology in a way where we feel physically uneasy. And we just want not just the psychological feeling to go away, but the physical feeling to go away. And the thing that I think so much we do so often is we pull back. We become paralyzed. We backpedal in a way. We try and withdraw ourselves from whatever that stimulus is that's causing it to us to feel that way. But if we can't remove

ourselves, which is the current circumstance for a lot of people, we can't make it entirely go away, then we just drop into this state of feeling like we're paralyzed, we're helpless. There's nothing that we can do. And what we also know is that anxiety has this inverse relationship to creativity and innovation and problem solving. So if we're sitting here saying we need to figure out how to feel okay and how to be better, and for many of us, how to keep doing our work, you know, differently, very often at home now or remotely, and we need to figure out how to make our brains function properly, that anxiety also affects that. It affects very often our ability to do that.

You know, that would seem to be the bad news. that anxiety also affects that. It affects very often our ability to do that. That would seem to be the bad news. The good news is it is not, even if the circumstance is not entirely within our control, the way that our body and our brains respond to it is. And this is one of the things I think you've been so brilliant at teaching me about over the years. Yeah. I just want to highlight what you said about the role of wanting to run away from the situation. Withdraw is the natural response for fear. And if we think about this as step one, step two, step three, I think that step one that people want to begin to explore is recognize what you're feeling and know that it's natural. It's natural to want to run away or just go to bed and sleep it away, recognizing that

that's not going to make it go away, but withdraw is the natural response. And I like to teach that worry is like a banana with a banana peel, that the good stuff is the actual banana, but the banana peel is the worry. And I teach people how to actually peel the worry from the problem solving. There's this tendency where we almost think like we need the worry. And when you invite a person to stop worrying, they start worrying about the fact that they're not worrying. And that's because so often we think that we need to worry in order to be aware or alert that something bad might happen. And beyond very, very short-term immediate stressors, like you're walking down the street and you hear a loud sound and you have to

jump away from the curb or something that is threatening you immediately, we actually need to be able to get into more a positive emotion space. The words that we use in positive psychology is that negative emotions narrow and focus us, whereas positive emotions broaden and build us. So whether the negative emotion you're feeling is anger or worry or guilt or shame, what that tends to do is it narrows our capacity to focus. It narrows our capacity to think about what we can do, whereas positive emotions tend to get us into a more creative, resourceful place. And so the ability to turn on certain emotions and turn off emotions is one of the greatest capacities that we have as human beings. In fact, I would say it's our superpower

that is rarely ever taught to us that we can actually choose how we feel. Other animals in the animal kingdom can't help how they feel. When I'm walking my dog down the street and she sees another dog that provokes her, she is most likely to just start barking out of a threat response of protection. She's not going to think to herself, well, maybe I shouldn't bark because my mommy doesn't like when I do that. Animals and other animals in the animal kingdom are entirely reactive with their emotions. We as human beings have this luxury of a prefrontal cortex, the capacity to think and to reason and actually choose our emotional response and to be able to work with what kind of emotion do I need

to cultivate in this moment that's going to be most useful for me. How much worry is appropriate in this moment in order to keep me problem solving or maybe a little hypervigilant? But when do I need to dial that emotion back down? Because now I'm safe and I'm home and I'm with my loved ones. And now I need to maybe cuddle or use different skills to bring my nervous system into a reset place because I'm no longer under threat. And so all of that is the type of skill that we want to bring into this moment. In fact, I would say it's the opportunity that this crisis is offering people is to learn how to become even more masters of

their mind, of their body, of their emotions right now. Yeah. Very shortly, I want to dive into a set of tools, body tools and mind tools, which I think are super effective and interesting. There's one other thing I wanted to ask you about, which is it's one thing when we start to react to what's going on around us and spin into places of fear and anxiety when we do it in solitude or in one or two other people, when everybody that you know is in that same place, you know, behavior that when it's just us doing it, you know, would pretty, maybe we have the ability to sort of like step out and say, well, is this rational or not? Or if we don't, those around us, we'd be able to sort of like identify what's going on. But when it becomes groupthink, that changes. Yes, absolutely. In fact, we actually have a number for it. Researchers show that approximately five is a crowd. If you have one person standing on the corner looking up at something, they actually ran studies to look at how many people would actually pause and look up in the

direction that they're facing. And what they found with one person, very rarely did people stop. With two people looking up in the same direction, sometimes people would look up and stop. But once you had a crowd of five people that were looking up at a particular direction or one particular behavior, then you found that the majority of people would at least look in the direction that they were looking,

if not full on stop and look at what they're doing. And so if five is a crowd, think about what's happening with toilet paper madness right now, as many, many people are flocking to certain behavioral patterns. And I think that it calls upon us to get even more centered into ourselves and what we know to be true and not be pulled by the crowd during those moments or not to give in to things that are more emotionally driven and to be able to soothe our own nervous system so that we can tell the difference between what's mine and what's theirs, what's actually needed of me in this moment and what am I just reacting to. Yeah. And I think it's not easy to make that distinction when you're in a state of near panic.

Rational thought is not the easiest thing to access. You mentioned one of the things that makes us uniquely human is our capacity to choose our thoughts, our feelings, our behaviors. It's interesting that you have a frame for this that I had never heard before about whether the appropriate response is to work with tools that involve the body versus the mind. Yeah, I come from a psychology background and traditional psychology uses a lot of talking. Cognitive behavioral approaches look at the fact that our emotions are linked to our thoughts. And so the traditional cognitive behavioral therapy calls it the ABC model, that an activating

event, which is the A, causes a B, a belief or a thought to go through our mind, which leads to a C in how we feel. And so the model was if you want to change how you feel, very often change how you're thinking. So if I can catch myself worrying about the situation, I want to catch my worrying thoughts and then redirect my worrying thoughts to more useful thoughts. And that can work and can work well, but it can work in a slow manner. And at the same time that I was studying positive psychology, I was also studying yoga with you

at Sonic Yoga, studying to be a yoga teacher, and also getting into the field of mind-body medicine, where I was learning these body tools. And I very quickly recognized that while a cognitive approach to calm a person down can work, it often did not work when a person was in severe threat mode. It's like a person's having a panic attack and you're trying to convince them, calm down, everything's going to be okay. Well, if you've ever been highly worried, it's very rare that someone's words that everything is going to be okay is actually going to make you feel better. What we want to do instead, I believe is more effective is during those high stress states is to use the body. It's the same thing we do with children and babies when they're crying. This also ties into how our bodies are physically wired.

So we have an emotional brain and a rational thinking brain. Our emotional brain is our core brain. It is the part of our brain that houses our limbic system and our amygdala. And the rational part of our brain, our human neocortex is the logic reasoning brain. And what happens when we're in a state of stress is that our emotional brain kicks into gear, our pre-verbal brain kicks into gear. And the reason you don't hold a crying infant in your hands out in front of you and just talk to the infant and explain to them that it's just a wet diaper and they're going to be fed in just a few minutes and everything is fine. And instead you brace the baby onto your chest and you rock them and you

soothe them with your body intuitively is we know that an infant has an underdeveloped neocortex, that you're not going to rationalize and reason with the baby. You actually have to use the body to create the calm response. So I advise to people the importance of being able to take your emotional temperature. So the first step is becoming aware. I'm feeling something. I'm triggered. I'm upset. I'm worried.

Whatever it is I'm experiencing. And then you name it. What am I experiencing? And how strong is it on a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 is a full-on panic attack and 1 is I'm calm and relaxed, where am I experiencing this? If the emotion is at a four or a five, it's very likely that you can sit, you can write out your worries, you can rationalize and reason with yourself. But if you're getting into the six, sevens or eights, where your body is physically charged with so much stress, it's hard to inhale.

You're kind of grasping for breath or your mind is racing. Your emotional brain has kicked into a physiological response that it's hard to talk yourself out of or reason with. Or if you're around somebody else and somebody around you is panicking and their emotions are strong, you trying to reason with them while their emotional brain is kicked into gear is not going to work. this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him! We need him! Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series

10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just

15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. So to recap, just because I want to make really crystal clear, sort of like this important threshold is if what you're feeling, the emotion is below a six, then we focus on walking through the mental sort of interventions. If it's a six or above, then that requires something more immediate. And we want to probably focus more on the body-oriented tools. Yep, exactly. Okay, cool. So let's talk about these two different tools. So we have these two categories. We have body tools to help us work through a place of anxiety and mental tools. We actually have, you have been kind enough to

give me an inventory of 10 of each of these, which is kind of mind boggling. So what I'd love to do is go through the 10 body tools and also the 10 mental tools with you really just to sort of introduce people to each one of these things. And I know you have also been kind enough to allow me to share a resource with everyone where they can learn a bit more about each one of these. So to our listeners, please be sure to check the show notes. We will include a link to a free resource where you can actually learn a lot more about all of these things. But Amelia, let's walk through these. And I think because a lot of people are probably feeling right now that they're in a state of six or above in terms of the level of fear or anxiety that may be

feeling and looking for something more sort of immediate slash intervention. Let's kind of walk through these. The first one is exercise. So why does exercise work on an anxiety level? The reason that exercise is so helpful is that we've been evolutionarily wired to experience stress and release a cascade of chemicals throughout our body. Cortisol, adrenaline, noradrenaline are just some of the few that we hear the most about. And the thing about stress is that so often when people are experiencing stress, they don't know how to complete the stress cycle. So the normal cycle would be that you either see a stressful stimulus, or in our case, because when we imagine something stressful happening in our brain, we know that the same very similar areas of the brain light up as if you're actually physically seeing something.

So even if you're imagining a stressful stimulus, your body will release these chemicals. And in the wild, we would use those chemicals up by running away or by fighting back. Yet instead, what often happens to us is that we end up sitting with these chemicals and in our body and we're saturated with them. So one of the best ways to decrease our stress response is to actually sweat it out and to force the body into needing oxygen to, to carry these chemicals out of our body. One of the best, the most powerful ways that we detox our body is actually through our breathing. By our carbon dioxide, carbon is a waste product in our body. And so we're actually looking to move that waste out of our body. And when we exercise, we're causing a need for our body to pull these things up and out of

ourselves. And so using up those chemicals and completing the stress cycle is a simple thing that we can do. And tiring yourself out, tiring a worry mind is all related to the use of the body and using exercise. Yeah. I love that because I think a lot of us don't really realize that a lot of the discomfort that we feel with anxiety is actually chemical. Is that there's a mental trigger or circumstance that changes our state, that floods our body with all these chemicals that in a different circumstance would prepare us to act in a certain way, but they're meant to be dissipated. When they don't get dissipated, we feel physically terrible, but a part of that equation is chemical. And I love this idea that exercise can help effectively kind of like use up the chemistry that's making us feel bad and get

us back into a sort of like a reset, more centered, more neutral state. And I think probably all of us know this intuitively because probably a lot of people feel when they're upset or they're sad or they're stressed and they go for a run or whatever your MO is at yoga that you feel better. But I think it's kind of a fascinating explanation. And also the idea that it works for anxiety, I think is really good to know too. So that's exercise. Yeah. And just something to add about exercise, we've all experienced the kind of release that you get when you get a good cry in. And part of the reason that crying feels so good at times, a nice cathartic cry, is that we actually release cortisol in our tears, that the fact that why they're salty. And so as we're sweating these things out of our body, we're actually physically,

it's like rolling out a towel of getting these chemicals out of our body. Yeah, I love that. Before we move on from exercise, I know that for a lot of listeners right now, one of the things you're going to think is, well, sure, that's great when I could go outside and go for a run or when I can go to the gym and do something. But a lot of people are feeling sort of like constrained or confined. Do you have recommendations around that? Absolutely. We know that one of the most effective forms of exercise is high intensity interval training. And those are the types of exercise movements that spike your heart rate and get you breathing heavily. And you don't need to have a wide track in order to be able to do that. There's a video going viral on Facebook

right now of a guy doing triathlon moves in his Italy apartment on a skateboard. He's swimming from one end of his house to the other, and then he's on a little tricycle and then he's running in place. And so while that would be, makes for a very fun viral video, you don't need to think about those long distance types of exercises, being able to do things like running and running in place, doing jumping jacks, doing things like mountain climbers. We have so many resources available to us online and on YouTube where you can find videos of high intensity interval training exercises that can be done in as little as seven minutes. You can get your heart rate up. You can actually get yourself sweating. And these are exercises that don't require weights. You can use your body weight and you could use gravity as your resistance in order to be able to achieve a

similar type of workout. Yeah. I love that. I think there are so many resources now that we can turn to, to be able to guide us, to move our bodies indoors. It may not be the way you'd love to do it, but we do have access to a lot of great resources there. So second on your list of body tools is what you call self-soothing through touch. One, tell me about that. And two, in this time where people are freaked out about touching anybody, how does this work? So touch is the most primitive way that we can create a sense of calm in the body, safe, appropriate touch. Going back to the image I gave you before of picking up a infant that's crying and we swaddle babies when they are upset, we put them into a cocoon, we

squeeze their body. And doing this uses our largest sense organ, which is our skin, to tell the body, I am safe. Everything is okay. So if you can, in today's day and age, get things like massage or use touch that comes from appropriate touch, let's say within your family, like this is a great time for people to be cuddling, to be physically close to one another. Some of the famous psychology studies on monkeys, when a monkey was given a cloth monkey that could give it soothing petting and touch versus a monkey mom that was actually giving it food,

the monkey would choose the cloth monkey because this was a source of soothing for the body. And so anything that we can do to begin to get that touch in is going to be important. Massage, offer to rub your partner's feet, wash your hands, don't put them in your eyes or in your nose or in your mouth. But if you are quarantined, trying to find those opportunities with your family to say, this is a really great time for us to cuddle if possible, make love, things that we know are physiological needs that we have as humans. And if you are by yourself, you can use self-soothing as well, which gets me to our third tool, which is a new psychosensory therapy that started a few years ago? Before we go there. So if you're in a scenario where even if you're with other people, it makes sense from a safety standpoint, it would not be appropriate to have other people touching you, even if you're in a similar location with them,

or you're just freaked out about it, or you're just concerned, you know, and are there ways to experience the sense of, or the benefits of touch without it coming from other people? Yes. Self-massage and self-soothing touch, which we'll talk about in our next skill, which is having to do with, with havening. So you can definitely use imagination. You could kind of massage your own shoulders and imagine that it's somebody else. But the great thing about the use of the body is obviously it's always better when someone else touches you. And the reason for that actually has to do with novelty and the element of surprise. There's a reason you can't tickle yourself. You can't tickle yourself because you know your own

motive. And so, or when someone, you can run your fingers through your own scalp and give yourself a scalp massage, and that feels really yummy and delicious. Always better when somebody else does it for you, if they know how to scratch the spots appropriately. And that's because there's this element of surprise. However, self-touch is another way that we can soothe the body right now. Many people who struggle with getting into deeper stages of sleep are starting to turn to weighted blankets when they sleep at night because it's that compression into the body that creates that safety response. That's so interesting. I wonder also about things like massagers, whether it's a massage chair or massage device, or we have this arm type of thing where you can sort of do your own back and change the heads on it and things like that. Part of it,

I think, is the surprise, but I guess part of it is also sort of related to the stimulation, which probably also also I would guess changes your chemistry as well. Absolutely. As you're breaking up that connective tissue and knots that you might have in your body or places of tension, just in general, breaking up the connective tissue in your muscles will be calming. If there's a body-mind and mind-body connection here, that if I told you to lift your shoulders up towards your ears and clench your jaw as tight as you can, your brain chemicals are going to release a stress response because they're saying, hey, we're getting tense. It must mean we're getting tense for a reason. There must be a stressful situation. Likewise, getting deeply relaxed, like taking a bath or being in a sensory deprivation tank tells our body, hey, we're really calm and really heavy and really relaxed here.

Something good must be happening that I feel safe to be able to relax. So when you're actually utilizing any element of touch, whether we're just using the sense organ for just relaxation and self-soothing of the body because we are physically being touched or because you're breaking up some of the tension places that you might have tension in your body, in your back or your hips or your neck or your jaw, that will help to create a relaxation response throughout the body. Got it. Okay. And that kind of leads into the third one here, which is something that is called havening, which I know I have heard you talk about and rave about for a couple of years now. What is this and how can they help?

Havening is a psychosensory therapy that was created a couple of years ago by two doctors here in New York. And it came out of a curiosity that they had around things like EFT and EMDR, which we'll talk about in a little bit as well, as strategies that were creating a sense of calm in the body and helping people move through traumatic experiences and memories that they were having. And they took what the science was showing about those modalities and added on the use of touch. And so havening, when you go to see a havening practitioner, they're looking at people who have amygdala-based disorders, meaning experiences that have to do with the amygdala being triggered, whether it be a phobia or anxiety or a panic attack or just a traumatic experience or strong negative emotion. And a havening practitioner would work with you to use different tools to combine physical touch to unpair that emotional response with the memory that you're having. However, in these times, we can do a great deal with the use of self-havening because self-havening is

when you take the three different touch modalities that these researchers have identified, and you do it on yourself. And it is a form of self-soothing or petting of oneself that can create a tremendous amount of calm. And they're very simple to do because if you have permission to touch someone else, you can do this to them or you can actually mirror it for them and have them do it to themselves. And so during these highly stressful times, I've been havening myself like crazy. I've been encouraging people to haven themselves. And the word havening comes from the word haven to create a safe haven. And so we use touch to down-regulate the nervous system. And what the researchers identified is that when you literally pet yourself in a particular way,

at a particular pace, that soothing sensation begins to translate into a delta brainwave frequency. And that delta brainwave frequency is a slower brainwave frequency that tends to be associated with sleeping or getting into a more trance-like state. And that's very different than a beta brainwave frequency, which is what we tend to have when we are worrying or when we are, when we're stressing about something. Especially a high beta brainwave frequency is what happens when we're ruminating about something. So we use touch, self-touch in particular during self-havening to create a calming response within the body. And then you can actually pair that self-touch with a brain tricking activity. So I'll go over the three different types of movements and there's, we'll obviously make the resources available to listeners, but the three movements go stroking the side of your arms from your shoulder down to your elbow. So you're crisscrossing your hands across your chest so that your right hand touches your

left shoulder, left hand touches your right shoulder. And from your shoulders to your elbows, you're just stroking downward. And then rather than rubbing back up, you just lift up your hands and stroke downward again. So it's this downward movement of stroking the side of your arms that for many people, especially when you are more stressed out, the more stressed you are, the more instantaneous you'll start to feel what just 10 arm strokes can do for you of calming the nervous system. The other one is you can do the same stroking sensation across your palms, wrist to fingertips and wrist to fingertips, like you're washing your hands, which most of us are doing a lot of. It's just washing our hands in a slow like manner.

And the third has to do with taking your hands across your own forehead. So you're taking it from the center of your forehead to your temples, forehead to temple as a kind of stroke that you do as if you were trying to iron out the wrinkles on your forehead. And these three different types of movement have been tested to show that when stimulated, they will start to release a delta brainwave frequency. And that delta brainwave frequency, and that delta brainwave frequency then converts to something called GABA in the brain. And GABA is inhibitory, whereas acetylcholine and cortisol are excitatory, they get us revved up, GABA slows us down. And so what I love about havening is it's basically teaching people how to work with their own pharmacology inside of their brain that we

can actually create certain hormones, oxytocin by cuddling and feeling connected to something bigger than ourselves, and then using our touch to actually create a sense of soothing. So that's great because this is something you could do during the day, but also it sounds like something really, really easy to do before you go to bed to help you fall asleep or sleep better as well. Yeah, absolutely. And so much of our stress response actually relies on how we're sleeping at night, because if you're stressed throughout the day, then you are likely to not sleep as well at night, have a hard time falling asleep or staying asleep. And then waking up not well rested and depleted then creates this continued stress cycle. Then you might be turning to more sugary foods, which stress your body further. So it definitely is just put it all together for you in a simple resource so that you don't have to sort of madly scribble notes here.

Next up, you talk about something called butterfly taps or crisscross hands. What is this? So these are some of the other physical exercises that we could do. And when you're crossing the midline of the body, you're activating the left and right hemispheres of your brain. And so very similar to the havening where you're crisscrossing your arms across your body. You're activating the left and right hemispheres of your brain. And so very similar to the havening where you're crisscrossing your arms across your body. Here, you're crisscrossing your arms across your body and you just start to tap one hand and then another. So it's like you're flapping one butterfly wing after another. And we'll give a little video linking to this, but

this is again, another simple exercises, the simple exercise that you could do to start getting the brain out of this worried state. A lot of what we're doing is we're using the body to trick the brain into a more calm place. Got it. And thank you. Awesome. So we got a video resource for that. This next thing is something that I've heard that has become so popular. Really, I feel like over the last five years or so, this thing, and people call it different things,

right? Some people call it tapping. Some people call it EFT. I can't remember what that stands for. Tell me what this is and what the idea is behind it and how it might help with anxiety. Yeah, EFT stands for emotional freedom technique, and it's often referred to as tapping. And you're basically tapping different points on the body while repeating certain affirmations. And this is something that I think has become so popular because so many people can instantaneously notice the benefits of it.

It's something that has had quite a bit of research behind it, but it's also very hard to research because you can't separate out. It's hard to run a placebo of it, even if you're having, other than having people tap random points, which has also been shown to be somewhat effective. But it is a set of exercises that you do, tapping in a particular order of points while also repeating affirmations. Now, half of the benefit of EFT and other exercises like these body exercises that we're giving you is actually remembering to do it. So if you can catch yourself in the heat of the moment and actually get yourself to say, let me use one of the techniques that I have learned on this podcast and put it into action, that already is putting you ahead of the curve because so much of our tools for how to overcome worry have to do, and anxiety, have to do with interrupting the response of something stressful triggers me and my body is releasing this. So anytime we start to redirect

ourselves to a new behavior, whether it be tapping, whether it be a butterfly stroke, whether it be soothing and stroking the side of your arms, sometimes you could even do something as silly as do the hokey pokey and turn yourself around. If that's an exercise that you have associated with something that might make you laugh and actually interrupt the pattern, you're going to begin to see benefit. These tapping places are actually tied to meridians, which are known within Eastern medicine as points of energy that we can stimulate within our body. And when you're repeating these affirmations along with the tapping movements, essentially you're tricking your brain into a new pattern.

And after just a few rounds of this, you're going to experience benefit. And some people would argue that it doesn't matter what you do for a certain number of rounds. If you sing something like a song for three or four rounds, you might find that you actually feel somewhat better as well. And that's because you're using your body to actually shift your physiology. Yeah, I love that. And I confess to being somewhat of a skeptic of this modality for a while. I'm friendly with some of the people who really popularize it. And I was always questioning them. I was kind of like, really, does this really do anything? And I have experienced this benefit. And I know so many people now that have gone into it skeptics. It's not the type of thing where it only works if you believe it.

You just do it, and it actually can make meaningful change. And there's no downside in giving it a shot. So why not? And it tends to, what I love is it tends to, and I guess a lot of these things too, they're things that tend to change your state fairly rapidly. They're not necessarily long-term solutions, but they're things that you can keep repeating and doing over and over to keep sort of like resetting in a better way. And there's no cost to them. There's something, they're relatively easy to do. There's not an accessibility issue with them. Okay. So for number six, you talk about something called forward folds,

which is fascinating because we both have a history in the world of yoga as practitioners and as longtime teachers. And there's a whole category of postures or asanas that were sort of generally known as forward fold or forward folding. And as a teacher, you would come to learn very quickly, this had a very identifiable and repeatable physiological and psychological response. So tell me more about what this is, what you mean by that, and how it works in the context of what we're talking about. Yeah. So all the things that we're talking about that relate to our body tools is using our body to downregulate our nervous system so we can calm the anxiety, calm the worry response

of the body. When we do a forward fold, whether it be me inviting you to stand up, put a slight bend in your knees, and then bend yourself over your hips to try to touch the floor, you would be folding your body in half in a forward fold. Or let's say I invited you to take what we would call a child's pose, where I would have you kneel on the floor and extend your hands out in front of you and allow your body to fold onto your thighs, letting your forehead touch the floor or a pillow or a blanket. What happens when we fold our body is one, it gets you activating your vagus nerve, which comes through the whole front of your body. And very often it brings more of your body

lower than your heart. And so your heart does not need to work as hard in order to pump blood into your body. If I wanted to get your body stimulated or excited or upregulated, if I wanted your heartbeat to start going faster, the simplest way for me to tell you to do that is I would say lift your arms up over your head and leave them there. With your arms up straight up over your head, your heart is going to speed up just because it has to work harder to pump blood up. If you bring your arms down and you fold your body forward, your heart rate actually slows down because it doesn't have to work as hard to keep your muscles receiving the blood flow. So when we fold forward, it starts to stimulate the parasympathetic response, the relaxation response in the body. So a very simple calming

routine for yourself, a really great one to do at night before you're about to fall asleep, is to spend a little bit of time, sit down on the floor, extend your legs, and take a gentle forward fold over your legs, or take a child's pose. Or if in the middle of the day, you need to take a break break or you're feeling stressed out, you can even sit and then put your hands on your desk and fold forward, resting your head onto your hands. Or from a chair, you can actually fold forward by spreading your legs just a little bit so there's room for your body to fold in between your legs and let your body just sort of hang down.

You also will get some bonuses in here, such as a little bit of traction to your spine and to relax your shoulders and your neck if you've been typing for a long time or sitting at the computer for a long time. But this is a very simple way to kick up that relaxation response by moving your whole body into a specific position. Yeah, I love that and have experienced it many times. And it's so accessible to pretty much anybody, which I really love. So number seven, you have written down as singing or chanting. Tell me about this. Yeah. So there is a nerve in our body that is the nerve that's responsible for the relaxation response.

It's called the vagus nerve. And vagus comes from the word vague because it's this nerve that wanders throughout all the different parts of our body through the front of our body. In particular, it innervates the most in our gut and also innervates in our heart. And the way that the two nerves pass in and up through the brain is the one goes, they each go through the neck on the sides of your neck. And when we sing and when we chant and make any type of sound that reverberates in our throat, we actually can stimulate that vagus nerve. The sound, the mantra or sound OM is an interesting one because anything that makes the M sound, the

gets that vibration going in our throat. And that vibration can actually help stimulate that vagus nerve. And this is a simple thing that we could do. But obviously, when you are singing or, let's say, chanting something that's a prayer, that's something that actually has meaning for you that can relax your body, you're going to get an even stronger relaxation response. But sometimes singing and just like, or screaming or making sound is one of the most simple primal ways of moving one energy out of our body because we are making sound, but also when we are chanting and humming,

that vibration is actually going to create a relaxation response by stimulating our vagus nerve. Yeah, I love that. I saw some research last year, actually by somebody who, from what I recall, is a mentor of yours, from your study of mind-body medicine, Dr. Pepper, who, yes, it's a real name and a real person, who does some really fascinating research. And the research was compared, they called it toning. So what you're describing as singing or chanting, he is sort of like a more sanitized, you know, like calling it toning, because that kind of includes all these different things. And they compared toning for three minutes with, I believe it was a control group that did nothing, just sat quietly, and then things like meditation, or mindfulness, or breathing. And they

found that toning actually was equally, if not more effective at creating really fast physiological changes in state that were longer lasting and for a lot of people, much easier to access. So it's really neat to see some of the research that's starting to emerge. Yeah, absolutely. So next up, a lot of people are going to like this one, baths. And in particular, you also talk about not just sort of like the water, but the sound of the water. Yeah. So again, using the body to downregulate the nervous system. So hearing water creates a hearing, especially the sound of the water breaking is important for the release of ions and how that impacts our brain. So it can be very, very calming to also let the warmth of the bath warm your body and relax those muscles.

Obviously you can throw in salts as well to help with that relaxation and use the role of sense as well. Our sense of smell is the, one of the most primal senses that we have, and it directly goes into our brain and creates a sense of relaxation when you, when you work with different scents. And so this is a powerful way and a simple way to create a relaxation response. Also, if you just lay in a warm body of water with your eyes closed, just the process of being prone and laying down within itself is helpful. Laying there with your eyes closed, doing your best to relax, tells the body, things must be safe if I can lay here and close my eyes. One of my mentors, Dr. Gayatri Devi, wrote a book called The Calm Brain. And she posits that perhaps one of the benefits of Freudian psychoanalysis, obviously,

there were probably many other benefits, but she said one of the main benefits is if you can lay on a couch with your eyes closed with a complete stranger for 35 to 40 minutes and just talk about anything that's on your mind, that's going to create a relaxation response in your body because part of you must say, well, I must be safe if I could lay here for this long and just talk. And so anytime we just take the time to lay down, but also use the power of the water to relax our muscles is powerful. If you want to get a little Wim Hof with it, you can actually spike your nervous system and spike your stress response by taking an ice cold shower immediately after your bath as a way of actually doing what's called

hormesis, a very short burst of stress actually create a deeper sense of calm afterwards. So that's bonus for those of you ninjas out there that like to follow the Wim Hof cryotherapy side of things. But we can use our body and we can use the sound of water. Also, if you're standing in the shower, letting the shower run over your head, over the crown of your head is another way to get those relaxation brain frequencies going. I know a lot of havening practitioners that will do shower meditations where they combine feeling the water hitting their head along with some of those affirmations and use that to create that sense of calm. Yeah. I love the idea of potentially experimenting to combine some of

these things because a lot of them really are pretty easily combinable. I'm not a bath person. I don't know why, but I love standing in a really hot shower with a strong water current. I think the combination of the heat, and I think it almost goes back to the touch. You get the stimulation of the water sort of like pulsing on your skin with the heat and then the sound of the water. Those three things together have always been one of my go-tos. But number nine here is probably the single thing that I turn to most often. I have almost a decade-long mindfulness practice. The thing that I think probably even preceded it and I've experimented the most with and

has really been one of the things that helps me bring me back into a better place most rapidly is breathing exercises. In the world of yoga, we learn this as pranayama, which translates roughly to the thing that allows you to constrain or contain or manipulate the body's energy. And in fact, I have found that if you breathe in a certain way, it makes you super anxious and super alert. But if you breathe in a different way, it actually calms you down really rapidly. And that's been one of the most powerful things for me. Yeah, myself included, except I will tell you that at the peak of some of my stressful life events, I think one of the more stressful events I've ever faced was when my mom was slowly dying over the course of three years. She had

fought ovarian cancer for about 10 years. And there was a point in time where I normally, as a yoga teacher, I would be able to calm myself down pretty quickly using my breath. And then I actually found my breathing exercises weren't doing it, weren't cutting it. And that's where I needed to go to using my body and getting a combination of things. I think I went to go see at the time a craniosacral therapist and a massage therapist, and also did some water therapies and other things because I needed a little bit more. And so this is where we say, if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And however, I would say that breathing is not like a hammer. It is like one of those Swiss army knives that has like 15 or 20 different tools on it. Learning how to leverage our breath

is probably the single most powerful tool we can work with within our body. That's our capacity to control our own nervous system. And it's basically as simple as the fact that every inhale you take stimulates your sympathetic nervous system a little bit more. And every exhale you make stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system a little bit more. And very simply put, these are sort of like the gas pedal and the brake pedal in your body. And so if you want to give yourself more gas, it means you need more sympathetic response, which means inhale more than you exhale. So that sounds like, do a few of those, you'll get lightheaded. And like already, I just got a little bit warmer. It's like Lamaze. Yeah. And not a good thing to do if you're already anxious. Exactly. Exactly. I probably stressed some of you out just listening to it.

And if you want to create more relaxation, it means you need to up your parasympathetic nervous system, which means make your exhale longer than your inhale. So we can train ourselves. The key when you're first starting off with pranayama is that you want to find a natural, calm enough place to start these practices, because for some people, they jump in too much too fast, they'll start doing, you know, trying to inhale for five and out for 10 too quickly. And what happens is, is they actually stress their body a bit more, it can create the opposite response. So just start with where you're at. And the simplest way would

be to just inhale and exhale and count what is your natural breath pattern for how long you naturally want to inhale for and how long you naturally want to exhale for. And if you are slightly anxious or prone to anxiety, you're naturally going to have a shortened exhale. And so then all you're going to do is extend, try to make it a little bit longer, a little bit longer and work yourself up to a place where you're doubling the count for your exhale compared to your inhale. Yeah. I love that. It's funny. I think the average person breathes something like 16 times a minute. And with my current pranayama practice, it's been this way for quite a while now, I'll bring myself down to two breaths a minute.

And on occasion, I've shared this with people and they look at me like really weird. How can a human being actually live on two breaths a minute? It's fine to do if you take months to allow your body to adapt to that. So you're not actually triggering a stress response by your body thinking something's really wrong. So you have to be really gentle and really gradual. But once there, I mean, being in that state for me is kind of semi-blissful. One other thing I'm curious on asking about is very often, so I do that every morning. I do have a morning pranayama practice, which is right after meditation. And for me, I'll very often place one hand over my chest and one hand over my abdomen. And even if I'm not doing my pranayama, there's something that happens to me, that simple

change. Literally, I put my left hand over my chest or my heart and my right hand over my belly button. And within, I want to say 30 seconds, there's sort of like this wave of calm that sweeps over me. I almost always do it at the same time as my pranayama. But I'm wondering if beyond touch, if you're aware of something else that might be going on. Yeah, you're stimulating the vagus nerve. So our vagus nerve stimulates, it innervates the most in our gut, which actually is our last,

our 10th tool for people, which is soft belly breathing. So it's a great transition into it. But over your hand, the hand on your heart and over your solar plexus, you're bringing warmth, you're bringing that energy, and you're going to get a greater vagus nerve stimulation. This is another reason, again, another, I guess we can make this an 11th tool if we'd like, but just laying face down while sleeping with your head, sleeping face down isn't so great for your neck positioning. It is actually more soothing and more calming to lay face down on your belly because when you're getting that weight to your chest and to your stomach area, you're going to get more vagus nerve stimulation. This is why many massage therapists will start with people face down when they're giving a massage and then flip you over is because your nervous system will downregulate much faster when you're laying on your belly. That is fascinating. I always knew I felt both the physiological, like the physical and the mental effect really rapidly, but I never realized that was probably what was underneath it. So cool.

So this is great. So you brought up this soft belly thing. Tell me, so that's really number 10. What do you mean by soft belly and how does it work? Yeah, this is when we combine visualization and affirmation with the use of our body and our breathing exercise. So I've been mentioning this vagus nerve a lot and mentioning that the vagus nerve innervates the most in our stomach. And so this is why there's a strong integration between our gut health and our emotional health and our mental health and the importance of good, healthy nutrition, because our food will actually impact our mood. But in terms of breathing in the field of mind-body medicine, we do a very simple practice where you put your hands on your

belly and sort of like your call to do one hand on your heart, one hand on your belly, you can put both hands on your belly and you're actually breathing and trying to send the breath into your abdomen. When we're sending breath into our abdomen, we're more likely to be using our diaphragm to try to get our breath lower. And the affirmation with this is slow and low, trying to slow your breath, but also get it low into your belly. And when you are actually imagining and visualizing your stomach softening, it actually can up that vagus nerve response much stronger. So relaxing into the belly, breathing in, you can actually breathe in either slow, the word slow, and as you breathe out, imagining the word low, or you can breathe in the word soft and then exhale the word belly.

And in mind-body medicine, this is used a lot as a strategy to create a deeper calm response pretty rapidly. And with all of the techniques that we're sharing today, once you start to establish a practice with these things, your body will learn to be trained to drop into those places really quickly. I would bet, Jonathan, that you could be kind of going about your day and then you drop into your two breaths a minute practice. And within just a few minutes, your body goes, oh, I know what I'm doing. I know what I'm supposed to do right now. We're supposed to be calm right now. It's that training of your nervous system that we can create by taking on these practices. Yeah, for sure. And in fact, I think it's probably a matter of seconds

at this point, but again, you know, even in the early days, you know, to be able to feel my body kind of reset if I'm stressed out or anxious or whatever it may be in a matter of a minute or two or a couple of minutes, you know, that's a really powerful, it's a really powerful skill to be able to have. It's kind of like something to, to know that you have that available to yourself, no matter what your circumstances are. I think for all of these tools is just really powerful. And especially the idea of being able to,

to work with them and potentially combine them and see sort of like, what are the tools that work best for me at any given moment in time? What are the ones that work best together? What's most accessible to me at any given moment in time? What can I do most easily myself versus through someone else? Super helpful. Okay. So that wraps up our 10 body-oriented tools to help you move through, work through anxiety. And they can be used individually, intertwined, engaged, compounded, whatever really works for you. But as Amelia shared with us earlier on, there's this threshold where when the emotion actually is what she described as sort of a five or below, that sometimes there's a different type of tool that can be more of your go-to.

And she calls those mental tools. And just like we had 10 body tools to share with you, Amelia is a huge fan of under-delivering. I actually had to call a much bigger list down to 10 tools so that we didn't have a six-hour podcast today. But we want to share 10 mental tools with you to tap and get you to a similar place, but differently. And again, these are tools that may also be used in combination with some of the body tools that we talked about above. Before we jump into the 10 different tools, Amelia, is there anything else that you feel is sort of important in the set? Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

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Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. We want to continuously cultivate the checking in with yourself and checking in with your body. So that is how you're going to know, am I in a place where I can just talk back to my thoughts the way we're going to talk about it now, or do I need something different? And so the more times we're checking in with ourselves throughout the day, where am I at? What do I need? Where am I at? What do I need? The better. And that will be a good way to tell which tool you're going to draw in from your toolkit.

Love that. It's kind of funny, as you were mentioning that, I was thinking about how some people set their devices or their wearables to kind of like vibrate or have some sort of little alarm or some sort of buzz to remind them to get up and move their body so they're not just sort of like sitting all day, every day, nonstop. I almost wonder if you could do that to a certain extent during this window with that check-in that you just were mentioning. Do you feel like that would be useful or would that start to get to a level where it would actually be too much? No, I think that would be tremendously useful. And in fact, that brings us to our first mental tool, which I call catch the chatter. You have to catch the chatter in order to know what you're working

with. So the same way I wouldn't feel comfortable, let's say something was wrong with my computer, taking out a screwdriver and trying to take my computer apart and trying to fix it because I have absolutely no clue what the parts are all about or what I'm actually taking apart. I'm not going to go dive in and work with what's broken in my computer. I can't work with my thoughts if I don't have the capacity to catch my thoughts. So catching the chatter has to do with being able to pause and ask yourself, what am I thinking about? Or what was I just thinking about? Some of us are very aware of our thoughts. And you can use the image of a radio dial. Sometimes you have to dial up

the volume in order to hear what's actually happening in there. For some people, they're so aware of their thoughts, it's actually going to be a matter of quieting it down. And when we talk about putting systems in place to help you catch the chatter, you can begin to work with both. So one way to do this is absolutely to set what we would call in psychology a primer, which is something outside of yourself that's going to remind you to pause and to actually stop and notice what was I thinking about, which could be a smart device or a wearable that gives you a prompt. It could be a post-it that you put on your computer. It could be every time you walk into a door, you ask yourself,

okay, what am I thinking about in this moment? And when you write down the thoughts, what happens is it can really quiet down the chatter. Oftentimes the things that go through our mind feel like they're overwhelming and it feels like it's just so much. Some people might relate to this experience where you feel like you've got so much to do on your to-do list and the ideas are just overwhelming you. And then you sit down and you actually write your list down and then you write the list down and realize that it's got to be more than this because it seems so much more overwhelming. But once it's written down, it doesn't seem so big. And that's

because when the thoughts are just in our mind, they're constantly oftentimes looping. And that's because when the thoughts are just in our mind, they're constantly oftentimes looping. And it's not that we're just thinking lots of different things throughout the day. You tend to find trends. So catching the chatter, writing it down, becoming aware of your mind is going to facilitate the remaining nine mental tools that we're going to be offering you. And it's really the doorway in to start to work with repair, upgrade, rewire your thinking. Yeah, I love this. As you were mentioning that also, I was thinking, well, what is the thing that people don't have to be primed

to check many, many, many, many times a day, but actually are already in the habit of doing, and that is their mobile device, their cell phone. So I was almost thinking, what if I actually create a little video that said, what am I thinking? Or whatever the appropriate prompt is, or not a video, but an image, and made that the lock screen on your phone. So literally every time you picked it up, you would see that. And that would become, every time you looked at your phone, it would prompt you to just pause for a heartbeat and notice where your thoughts are. This is a skill set that I know differently as meta-awareness or from the world of meditation and mindset training. And I agree with that. I think it's the master skill for all the other

mindset skills because it helps you become aware of where your mind is at a given time. And that sort of unlocks the ability to work with it. Yep. Absolutely. So let's move on to mental tool number two, and that is talk back to the thoughts. So we've identified some thoughts now and you're saying, let's start a conversation. Yes. Let's start a conversation. The simplest reframe or conversation that we can have is to separate you from the part of you that is thinking.

So often we have this thought that might be, I'm angry or I'm scared or I'm frustrated. And in order to actually work with our thoughts, we have to separate ourselves from the thoughts and the feelings that we're having. So the simplest reframe, and anytime we start to reframe, we are redirecting our brain. Whether we are redirecting our brain because we feel ourselves getting stressed out and you use a physical tool that I gave you before, or you're finding yourself chattering and you're going, okay, I got to use one of my tools, you're pattern interrupting. So the simplest one is catching yourself saying, I'm scared, I'm overwhelmed. And you say, a part of me is blank. A part of me is scared, or I am feeling scared as opposed to I am these things.

When you are it, when you are insecure, how do you change that? When you are overwhelmed, it feels harder to change. So we can start to get ourselves into this habit. And a lot of it has to do with our English language. If you think about, for example, in Spanish, if you were to say I'm hungry, they use the word tengo hambre, which means I have hunger. It's very different to say, I have hunger versus I am hunger. So we are conditioned through our language oftentimes to receive our emotions and our thoughts as things that are a part of ourselves, which make it feel harder to change.

But if we can start to do this very simple catch and redirect, then we start to gain control over our thoughts. And this is a simplified version of what's used by cognitive behavioral therapists, which is we're separating out the trigger, the thing that's happening, what we would call the facts or an A, an adversity, from the B, beliefs we're having about the situation, from the C, the consequence, which is how it makes us feel. And so we're going to start to create the separation from here's what's happening. Here's what thoughts I am having. And these thoughts are not me. These feelings are not me. They're experiences that I as a human I am having. And these thoughts are not me. These feelings are not me. They're experiences that I as a human being am having.

And when I can create that initial separation, then I'm able to actually work with these things. Yeah, I love that because it takes it from being an identity level thing, which we often have really, it's a brutal challenge to try and change that because if it's a part of our identity, that's a really big shift to make to a feeling thing, which is, it is something that I, it's not sort of a core part of who I am and my identity, but it's something that I'm experiencing. And that shift is really powerful because it makes it so much more changeable or sort of like subject to change, which I really love.

So let's jump into number three, which is about recognizing the thoughts that are part of your brain that's trying to protect you. Tell me more about this. when we're experiencing fear and anxiety, this is the emotion being able to signal to our body, pay attention, something bad might happen. And if we continue to treat emotions as signalers, what emotions are, are a chain reaction of peptides and proteins being released within our body. They're chemical reactions. And we have receptors within our brain that catch those chemicals that we experience as an emotion. There's no one part in your brain that's responsible for excitement and another part of your brain that's responsible for anger. It's the same chemicals. They're just going through different receptors. And so recognizing that we're physically wired to experience these things for a reason, and

fear is trying to protect you. Worry and anxiety are your brain's attempt to try to protect you, and it doesn't really know the difference between what is a actual fear or what is a projected fear. It's important to know that when we look at the areas of the brain that light up when a person is imagining something to when they're actually experiencing it, there's a very high overlap. Scientists predict as much as an 80% overlap in our brain when we're imagining a worst case scenario to when we're actually physically experiencing

that worst case scenario. So imagining yourself running out of food and not knowing what to do, that can actually trigger your body to start physiologically reacting the same way that it would if that was actually physically happening in front of you. And so recognizing that physiological reaction is there to try to protect you, even though there may not be immediate threat, there usually isn't an immediate threat. So many people do what I call second degree emoting, meaning we get angry that we're angry or we worry about the fact that we're worrying as opposed to just being able to recognize,

okay, I am experiencing this emotion. This emotion isn't me and I can let this pass. It's okay. And rather than fighting the emotion, being able to say, thank you, brain. I know you're trying to protect me and this isn't helpful right now. Thank you, brain, for getting me the worst case scenario of what happens if I can't pay my bill six months from now. I really appreciate you. I got the message. I'm okay. And so strange as it might be, appreciating your brain for worrying can actually calm it down

because again, it's just trying to protect you. And so often people try to ignore their worries or they try to push them down. And if you imagine if the last time you were in a swimming pool and you have a beach ball inside of your hands, you can push the beach ball underwater and keep it submerged underwater, which I would say pushing your worries to your unconscious.

But then the minute you get distracted, like you're taking a shower or you're trying to fall asleep at night and you relax your hand, that beach ball is going to pop up to the surface. And a lot of what keeps people up, not able to fall asleep at night is because all their beach balls that they've been trying to submerge all day long are just popping up to the surface. But when we start to do these different cognitive or mental tools that we're working with right now, we're actually deflating the beach ball so that they're not needing to pop up. And rather than resisting the worry or giving into the worry, instead just

saying, thank you, brain. Thank you for doing your job to try to protect me. I'm okay, can actually calm the brain down. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting. It's almost counterintuitive, but when you describe it, that makes so much sense. And I kind of love, it's like hashtag deflate the ball. Yeah, totally. You know, if we can do the work to make that happen, I think it could be so powerful. That's super helpful. So number four on your list is something you call what if-ing. Talk to me about this.

Yes. This is actually my dear friend and colleague, Rini Jain, runs one of the most brilliant online programs for children, teaching children how to manage fear and anxiety. And she teaches children about the two different parts of their brain, their emotional brain, or what's the limbic system, and the rational brain, which is the human part of our brain and our neocortex. And she says that one of the things that happens is we get ourselves caught in a case of what if-ing.

What if this happens? What if that happens? What if this goes on indefinitely? What if I lose my job? What if I lose my job? What if I lose my customers? What if I get a disease? What if I'm passing something along and I don't know that I'm passing it along? Uncertainty is going to cause our brain to go into a series of what if thinking. Now, we talk about these separate brain regions. And obviously, at any given moment, we're operating many, many different parts of our brain. And I want to just simplify it to say that when we are hijacked or

when we are triggered, we have more energy being fed to certain parts of our brain than others, our emotional brain versus our rational brain. And she says that when we get hijacked, our emotional brain, which is supposed to be responsible for what is happening in the moment, starts taking control and take responsibility for what if-ing. Now, the capacity to what if, the capacity to think about the future, is actually a uniquely human experience. We are the only animal in the animal kingdom that has a sense of future orientation. And the reason for that is because we have this neocortex, this human part of our brain, the frontal lobes that enable us to reason

and to think. And we know evolutionarily that once our ancestors actually developed the capacity to have a sense of future and have a remembrance of the past, we started to worry about the future. So we can actually mark the birth of what if-ing with the creation of the neocortex. Our neocortex, when we are in a state of calm, uses what if-ing appropriately. It uses it to be creative, to be future-oriented, to build, to create, and to innovate. And that is a very important and powerful thing for our neocortex to do. And our emotional brain is responsible for what is-ing, what is in this moment. It is the part of our brain that is keeping control of your body temperature, regulating it at every given moment.

It is the part of your brain that is helping you orient where is your body in space so you don't get vertigo and you don't feel like you're falling. It's the part of your brain that in this moment is digesting or breathing and your heart is beating. All of that is coming from your emotional brain, your limbic system, your reptilian brain, your core brain. And so when you catch yourself in a state of stress, what if-ing, one of the ways that you can actually claim this back and say, I have to come back to what is-ing, one of the ways that you can actually claim this back and say, I have to come back to what is happening in this moment and give your brain the opportunity to do what it's wired to do, which is our emotional brain is meant to help us work in the moment and help us problem solve.

And in order to get that problem solving back on gear, we have to get our neocortex involved. So as before I gave this metaphor, which is, I think of it as a banana where the peel is the worry and the banana that you eat is the problem solving. And we want to peel away the stress so that we are what if-ing from a calm place. And when we are what is-ing, we're able to be in the present moment and let our emotional brain do what it's wired to do. Very cool. That makes a lot of sense. Let's dive into number five. So your number five is designate worry time. Tell me about this. This is creating a container for your worry. So what do you do with a brain that's filled with lots of what ifs? The same way that you might try

to contain a child's temper tantrum by sort of knowing that it's going to last for a short certain period of time. And you're going to say, ready, set, go, like get it all out. We want to give sometimes your brain an opportunity to get it all out because trying not to think a thought, research has actually been shown that when we try not to think about something, it actually depletes us and uses up more energy than it would to actually have the thought. So offering your thoughts a container where you say to your brain, okay, brain, you have 20 minutes. And over the course of 20 minutes, I want you to give me every what if, give me every worst case scenario, every worry that you have. And you actually say that this is the time where I'm going to worry. And maybe you designate 20 minutes of worry time

every day for the next week. And when you find your brain offering you worries outside of that window of time, you say, thank you, brain, but right now is not worry time. I've had lots and lots of clients have great success with this particular exercise because throughout the day,

they're just able to say, thank you, brain. You'll get to share that to tomorrow. You can imagine that your brain, your capacity to focus is like a stage and there's only so much room on that stage. We're already facing a lot of overwhelm in how to navigate this time because so much of our attention is being ripped in lots of different places. A lot of people are just multitasking and they're finding themselves switching tasks a lot, pulling up their phone, looking for the most recent update from the news, checking their email. All of these things are filling that mental stage. And when we get caught up with anxiety, it's like the stage just gets filled up with only the microphone being hogged by worry and giving it a container can actually give you

back the control of stopping it from happening in those moments where you don't want to be worrying. Love that. Yeah. I mean, I think it makes so much sense to me to just sort of say, let it all out. Again, it's like another approach to deflating the beach ball, right? Yeah. Sort of like, but instead of just spreading it and peppering it saying, this can be all day, every day, let's just create a window for it, create a container for it, pour it all out. So it's sort of like, it's just out there and we process it rather than bottling it all up. And we create windows.

We sort of like designate sacred time around it to not go there. So your number six is I will handle it. I've handled it before. I'll handle it again. What does that mean? This comes from the brilliant work of Susan Jeffers, who wrote a book called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. And I've been giving you guys a little bit, lots of tools,

but let me give you a little bit of a background about me and my own relationship to anxiety and worry because Susan Jeffers' book, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, actually transformed my life. I was raised by a chronic worrier. I swear my mom had a PhD in worry. I also have most likely inherited a heightened threat response genetically because I am a child of Holocaust survivors. My grandparents,

my grandmother was a Holocaust survivor. And we know that we had that threat response within us. But on top of all of that, my mother had what I would consider to be the worst thing that could ever possibly happen to a parent happen. My mother and father had my brother pass away when he was 24 and I was 14 at the time. And so already being someone who worried all the time about her kids, having had had the worst possible thing happen to her, made her then worry about me more than she had ever worried before. So I was raised with a type of experience where if I didn't pick up my mother's call, I would have 17 missed calls from her. And then when I did finally pick up the phone, I would hear, did you forget you had a mother? As with this guilt and this frustration that I didn't pick up her call because of how much she worried about me all the time. And then after saying no mother, I thought I was born by immaculate conception. I would then need to calm myself down from how much stress I got from her. So my tendency was

to be a high level worrier and to have to deal with my own anxiety responses. So everything I'm sharing with you guys, I've used in my own life. And Susan Jeffers' book really was a turning point for me because she helped me understand the truth about worry, which is that anytime you're growing, anytime you're doing something new, you're gonna experience worry. So is everybody else around you.

Anytime there's uncertainty and lack of control, you're going to experience worry. And she helped me understand that we don't worry about the things that we think we're worried about. We don't worry losing our health. We don't worry losing our job. We don't actually even worry truly about losing somebody else in our lives that's important to us. She says all worries funnel down into just one fundamental worry. And when you can deal with that one fundamental worry, you can actually deal with all of your worries. And so that basic worry is that we wouldn't be able to handle it. Something catastrophic would happen, and I wouldn't be able to handle it. Something catastrophic would happen and I wouldn't be able to handle it. And we can't talk back to our worried thoughts the same way that we can talk back to our judgment thoughts. Our judgment thoughts, we're judging ourself and the situation, and we can actually use evidence to reframe what we're thinking to ourselves. You can't give evidence for something that hasn't happened yet. So I can't promise you that things are going to be all right. And when you have a

person who's having an anxious experience or they're worrying, and you just try to calm them down by saying things are going to be all right, well, very rarely does words soothe the nervous system or, and you can't promise that. And you can't promise that, you know, everything is going to have this type of outcome. The only thing you can promise is that you will handle it. You will handle it some way. And she has an affirmation that she says, you can talk to your mind and say, I'll handle it. I've handled it before and I'll handle it again. And that one of the most powerful things that we can do for ourselves right now to bolster our sense of resilience is to think back about all the ways

in which we have been resilient, all the things that we didn't think that we were going to get through that we did get through. And guess what? You wouldn't be here listening to this right now if you didn't somehow handle it. I've handled it before. I'll handle it again is one of the only true talkbacks that we have for worry. And the more frequently you can start to redirect yourself to that affirmation the more you're actually you're physically changing your brain what we know about neuroplasticity is that our thoughts and our behaviors are often habitual so we don't even realize the patterns of thinking that we get ourselves into and if you're a high level worrier or you're prone to anxiety, you have deep neural grooves and synapses that are frequently firing to a specific pattern. But as you start to really internalize this, I'll handle it. I've handled it before. I'll handle it again. Every

time you redirect your brain, you're creating a new neural pathway and you're repatterning your brain with this new tendency. And over time, you're building your own self-efficacy because it's so important right now during uncertain times to find something to trust in, to find something to believe in. And whether that be a higher power or your own resourcefulness, your body needs to know that it can trust that it is okay. Somehow we'll get through it. So that's that insight from Susan Jeffers. And that statement has been etched in my brain. And very frequently, that's what I'm repeating to myself when I'm finding my thoughts really going to worst case scenarios, what if thinking.

So here's my question around this. If you don't believe it in the beginning, will it still do its job? And I guess the second part of that is, will repeating this over and over and over and over eventually start to train your brain to believe that it is so? There is something to be said about fake it until you make it. Or a better way of saying it is fake it until you become it. Repetition can be helpful. I actually would recommend what our next tool is if you find that you don't believe it. You kind of need a stronger tool.

You can still work with this particular affirmation, but you have to give it detail. So if I'm saying I'll handle it, I've handled it before, I'll handle it again. But a person goes, well, I don't know if I handled it before. What they're really saying is I'm not sure I'm satisfied with how things were handled before. So I'm not buying that, Amelia. I could have done this differently. I should have done this differently. That's usually the only time that they'm not buying that, Amelia. I could have done this differently. I should have done this differently. That's usually the only time that they're not buying that affirmation. Because from my perspective, you're standing, you have a heartbeat, you're breathing, you

got through it. Now, could you have gotten through it in a different way? Maybe. And this is where forgiveness needs to come into play where you can make peace with your past this is where you can remind yourself it ain't over yet and like so often my favorite quote by steve jobs he says you can't connect the dots forward only backwards so you can help yourself believe that thought a little bit more by actually writing down what are all of the things that you have handled. And so you really got to go to the detail in order to be able to start

internalizing that affirmation a little bit more or remind yourself that perhaps it didn't go the way that I wanted to in the past, but maybe that has happened for a reason. Maybe I wouldn't be here today if those circumstance had not happened the way that they did. So you can deepen that one exercise through detail. Or you can start to repeat it and over time you'll get there. But I have to be honest, I'm not a huge fan of that approach because so often it's just a slower approach. I would say you have to repeat it a few thousand

times. Maybe I don't even have an exact number because it would be different for different people depending on how resistant you are to accepting the affirmation. But when you actually give yourself more details about it, then I think that you are able to actually internalize it and you'll get there faster. That makes more sense to me. And it feels like it leads kind of logically into number seven, which I have in my notes is worst case, best case, most likely. Tell me what this is. Yeah, this is a great intervention or exercise for people who tend to be prone to high level worry or panicking. And this is the type of exercise that's one of those

more detailed exercises that I would put into practice if simply saying, I've handled it before, I'll handle it again, doesn't work. It means that you've got a part of you that's more prone to catastrophizing. And catastrophizing, when we teach this to kids, we teach it as snowball thinking, that one worry leads to another, leads to another, leads to another. But the worry gets stronger, the feeling of worry gets stronger as you go along. So this exercise is really good to help the brain stop that tendency. And if worries get really strong for you, I would actually do this one and write it out.

And then it will make the other things that you talk back to your thoughts in real time a little bit easier. And so it goes like this. You recognize the fact that when you are going from one what ifif thought to another to another, or this will happen and then this will happen and then this will happen, it's important to know that the experience of the worry will get stronger, will get even more powerful with every thought that you have. And what often happens is these aren't realistic thoughts, but they almost feel real. And the reason they feel real is because your brain puts them into a step-by-step fashion.

So it might sound something like, I'm not going to be able to go in to work. And then my team is going to realize that they don't actually need me. And then I'm going to get fired. And then I'm not going to be able to find another job in today's economy. And then I'm not going to be able to pay my bills. And then I will have to move out of my apartment. And then I'm not going to be able to find another apartment. And then I'm going to have to move back in with my parents. But then my parents might be sick and so on and so forth. And it's like one thought leads to another.

And then if you just get caught up in that thought of catastrophizing, you might find yourself at that worst case scenario of I die alone on the streets by myself. And I'm doing my best to sort of act this out for you guys. It makes more sense when you actually are doing it in real time or you're walking a person through this in real time, but it's basically the process of indulging your worst case scenario thoughts by basically letting it out and saying, and then what happens and then what happens and then what happens, but we don't stop there. And this is really important because sometimes people will just practice letting their worst case scenario thoughts out and they realize their worst case scenario thoughts out

and they realize their worst case scenario thoughts are a little ridiculous and then they feel better because they got it out. Some people feel worse. And so this is where you need the other two parts of this that I'm going to walk you through in a moment. And so the key is, is the odds of you living alone on the streets by yourself, given the fact that you're being asked to work from home right now, have no logical relationship. Logic says, if A, then B. If it is sunny, then it is warm out. That has more of a logical progression than the first thought and the 10th thought that you're having.

But because our thoughts go in step-by-step fashion, somehow a person is going to think that it's reasonable, that it's a reasonable thought that I'm going to die alone on the streets by myself. And the what is-ness is that you're just being asked to work from home. And so it's really important to help people see that their thoughts are unrealistic. So we do worst case scenario thinking by writing out all of those worst case scenario thoughts and we say to our brain, and then what happens? And then what happens? And then what happens?

And then we say, given the fact, and you just go to the very first thing that's happening, which is I'm being asked to work from home, how likely is it that I'm going to have to live on the streets? The likelihood is 0%. There's no actual relationship, direct relationship from point A to point K, right? And so I have people actually go through everything that they wrote down and give me a percentage likelihood for that. Then we go to the best case scenario. And the best case scenario is like unrealistically best case scenario. This is like fantasy thinking, Oprah, everybody gets a car, Disneyland fantasy type of thoughts. And so you start with the thing that's the trigger, which is I'm being asked to work from home. And then you go to, okay, unrealistically best case scenario. Then what happens? I love working from home. And then what happens? Then my boss tells me I never have to work from an office ever again. And I can always choose where I work from. And then what happens?

And then I get promoted. And then what happens? I win the lottery. And then what happens? I buy my own island. And then what happens? And so you're basically trying to go to these kind of fantasy, crazy best case scenarios that are unrealistic. And then you go back and you do the same thing. You say, given the fact that I'm being asked to work from home, what is the percentage likelihood that I'm going to win the lottery? And you go 0%. And you do that for all of them. And the reason we do this is we basically teach our brain, you're kind of brain training it as though it's in a lesson with you. You're basically saying these unrealistic best case

scenarios have the same percentage likelihood as these worst case scenarios. But because we're human beings and we're wired with a negativity bias in our brain, we very rarely are having a hard time falling asleep at night because we're thinking about these wild best case scenarios that can happen. We're having a hard time falling asleep at night because we're thinking about all these worst case scenarios. And so you train your brain to recognize, hey, neither of these are actually real. And by engaging that fantasy thinking and kind of ridiculous thinking where you're almost laughing, where you're laughing at your brain, like, gosh, that's ridiculous, me buying my own island. It actually gets your brain out of that emotional limbic system response, which enables you to then get to the centered most likely scenario where you

go, okay, given the fact that I'm being asked to work from home, what is most likely going to happen? What's most likely going to happen is that it's going to require an adjustment period. And then what happens? And other people in my company are going to be adjusting as well. And we're going to have to work together. And then what happens? And then we're going to be at this for, you know, a couple of weeks or a couple of months, we don't know how long. And then what happens? And then eventually, we're all going to get to go back into the office and figure out what's going to need to happen then. And so on and so forth. And you're going to what's most likely going to happen. And I've done this exercise with hundreds of people. And what they experience is that after you go to the worst case scenario and the best case scenario, you are better able to problem solve with actual scenarios that are likely to happen, which is the kind of problem solving you want to have. You don't want to be problem solving worst case scenarios because you can't. One, they're highly unrealistic,

and they're very hard to actually do something about. You want to be problem-solving on most likely scenarios, but we have to get our brain focused on being able to do that. So once you do the most likely scenarios, you can go back and you can do those percentage likelihoods. Given the fact that I'm being asked to work from home, what is the percentage likelihood that eventually things will go back to normal? Pretty high. What is the likelihood that I'm going to have to have a adaptation time to get used to this? Pretty darn high, right?

90%, 95%. Then you can set up a game plan, but you want to be planning for most likely scenarios, not for those worst case scenario catastrophic thoughts that come from being in a state of anxiety. So this is so interesting to me because I did a variation of this and I would do it on a fairly regular basis as an entrepreneur, somebody who's founded a bunch of things because I have lived many times in this state of perpetual high stakes, uncertainty and anxiety. The follow up this brings up for me, and I'm sure it's on some people's mind also, is what if that worst case scenario, what if the likelihood of that is not zero? What if the likelihood of that is 10%? How do we handle a scenario like that? One of the things that I found, because this is a different scenario, but if I was starting a company and I knew the average company has a very high rate of failure. So my worst case scenario

when I'm founding something is actually a high likelihood, but maybe it's even 10%. What I found really helpful to me is a combination of adding the question in, well, how would I recover? And then literally map out, write out, okay, so if this happened, this is how I would get back to a decent place. And also bundling it with number six above, which is those sentences, I'll handle it. I've handled it before. I'll handle it again. I found this sort of

blending those two and adding that one additional question, at least in my experience, when in fact, you do have the potential for tough scenarios and the percentage actually is meaningful, that that can be something which really helps me sort of step back into a place where it doesn't change a circumstance, but it changes sort of the way that I experience it. Yeah, absolutely. I would say that that's a beautiful example of the way in which you're using your banana, pun intended, where it's you're using the worry as a signaler to you, hey, pay attention to something here. And going through those worst case scenarios, like you said, 10% is not an extremely high percentage, but it's still valid. It's still there. And you want to use

that to inform the actual banana, not the peel, which is problem solving, which is what that most likely center, the purpose of doing worst case, best case, most likely is so you can get access to your neocortex, your rational thinking brain, so that you can actually problem solve. And so the talking back to say, I've handled it, The next step after I'll handle it is what are my options? And those tend to come naturally when we are in a calm centered problem solving place. That's when we're using our neocortex to what if, but when your emotional brain is what if-ing, then you get worst case scenarios that are paralyzing, that don't make you want to step up to the plate. They make you want to run away

and they keep you problem focused rather than solution focused. So I love the strategy that you put into practice because it's you being able to redirect your mind out of worry, out of threat, and using the fact that your worry is signaling to you, pay attention and use it for problem solving. Yeah.

And as you're saying that, I'm also realizing that what I would very often do if I was sort of like got myself into a tough state was I would use one of the body tools first. It's funny that I think I'm sort of like realizing out loud that this was my process now that you've given me language for it. You know, I would go for a run. I would do yoga. I would mountain bike, whatever it was. I would use something physical to take me from a seven down to a four and a half. And then once I was a four and a half, that would give me easier access to these mental tools that we're talking about. So it was sort of like a two-step process for me. access to these mental tools that we're talking about. So it was sort of like a two-step process for me. Yeah. I love that. One of the words that I use

to describe what I do with people is I say, I help people use their stick shift, actually shift gears. So often what happens is people get stuck in a gear that they can't downregulate from. And oftentimes you have to pass through neutral. You can't just go from fifth gear and just drop down into first gear. You have to slow it down. You have to slow it down, slow it down. I mean, you could, just the car kind of freaks out on you. And so being able to have a connection to your body, we have this mastery of being able to drive our own car, drive our own emotional response and recognize that we have a lot of people who try to talk back or talk back to their thoughts and then try to calm themselves down using the mental tools.

And as we said, the body is just, it's an easier way to self-regulate once you're in those higher gears. Yeah. Love that. So let's dive into our final three here. Number eight on your list for the mental tools is mindfulness, which is as a sitting practice, as a sort of formal practice, has been in my life on pretty much a daily basis for around 10 years now. Tell me what you mean by mindfulness. Are you talking about mindfulness meditation? Are you talking about a state of being or some blend of the two or something else?

Yeah. So the seated practice, which I have also is a huge part of my life. I have often turned to you, Jonathan, as my pillar of ultimate self-regulation in that I know that you've got a daily seated practice. For me, I've been practicing mindfulness since I was 18, but meditation has been, when I was first introduced to meditation, has always been a hard thing for me to have a daily practice around. And so I will say that I have a, the relationship I have to my meditation practice, which is actually sitting on the cushion, focusing my mind is what I do on the cushion is what I do off the cushion where on the cushion, my mind wanders, I bring it back. My mind wanders, I bring it back. The way that my practice has been is I wander from the practice and I come back. I wander from the practice, I come back. And the difference between mindfulness and meditation is meditation are practices that support a more mindful way of being in the world. is so that we have a habit in place that we're able to take off the cushion into the day-to-day

things that we're experiencing. Mindfulness within itself is a state of being present in the moment in a very specific way, in a way that is nonjudgmental, open-hearted, and connected to what is happening in the moment. And one of the most famous books written on mindfulness is Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now. And the simplest mental tool of utilizing mindfulness, whether you're doing it as a practice on the cushion and you're training yourself to have your mind wander and bring it back, have your mind wander and bring it back or off the cushion is just to realize that you are out of the moment.

And when you realize that you're out of the moment because your mind is going to the future or it's thinking about the past, just recognizing that you're out of the moment brings you into the moment. And if there's any opportunity that I believe that we as a species are facing right now, I think it is to embrace the thousands of year old art of training mindfulness because we have no other choice right now. Every Eastern tradition has mindfulness and meditation as a core component of it. Every spiritual and religious tradition has contemplation, time for silence,

focusing of one's thoughts on prayer, on different things as part of the practices. And the reason for that is because it helps us firstly soothe our nervous system and bring us into a more calm place so that we can activate our neocortex so we can problem solve more effectively. And it's us training ourselves out of that emotional brain that wants to hijack our thoughts, have us worry about the future, have us ruminate on our past. Rumination is, for some people, is a form of self-flagellation, just beating themselves up. I can't believe I said that. I can't believe I did that.

I can't believe I said that. I can't believe I did that. I can't believe I said that. I can't believe I did that. Mindfulness training helps us be in control of our thoughts. And so whether you're taking the practice to first sit or stand on a cushion and just notice your thoughts and focus on a single point, like your breath or on a single object or a single word. I use my breath, I think you do as well, Jonathan, as a practice. And then when you notice your mind going to other

places, you can simply say the word thinking, or I'm back, and just bring yourself back into the moment. The more times we do this, we actually build our self-regulation muscle, our capacity to override our knee-jerk responses so that when you are out about for a walk, when you're with your kids, when you are trying to focus and your mind is out of control, you can bring yourself back into the present moment in a more powerful way. Yeah, no, I love that. And this has been such a central part of my life. It has helped me through so many stressful windows and become something that's also just made me so much more aware. My experience of the practice is it trains you in three skills. One is focusing attention. Two is what's known as open monitoring, just being more present and aware of what's actually happening to and around you in the moment. And the third is dropping. And that's what you were

talking about. You start to become aware of all the huge volume of things that you start to spin in your head. And as you become more aware of it, it gives you the ability to realize that that's what you're doing and then choose to let it go and choose to let it go to keep dropping it and dropping it and dropping it until it becomes more and more of an automated process, which has been just hugely helpful for me. And again, we will, you know, as with everything here, as I mentioned, we will include in the show notes a link to where you can get more resources for all of these 20 tools. So, so many great ways to drop into that practice. I have also found one more ad here, and then we'll move on to the last two, that for many people who are beginning a mindfulness practice, that a guided mindfulness practice tends to be a much easier way to access it.

And there are so many different ways to do that now. So- Yeah. Let me actually add on to that one before we move on. One of the cool things you can do with definitely having a guided mindfulness practice, there's lots of them you can download. I had a lot of success with recording my own and listening to my own voice through a mindfulness practice, because when you're listening to something, when your mind wanders, it's nice to have something to come back to. And I've had a number of clients as well find that they can drop into a greater sense of mindfulness just by recording themselves and listening to it because your mind chatters in your own voice. So hearing your own voice can actually help with the process.

That's really funny that you said it because I'm thinking that in the studio now over six years or so, we give our guests the option of, we are recording remotely now for a window of time, but normally it's always been in person in the studio. And I always wear headphones because I have to monitor the sound, but we give our guests the option of wearing them or not. And some people love it because they love the sound of their voice in their head. And some people hear it for a heartbeat and then almost rip the headphones off because they can't stand the sound of their voice in their own ears. So experiment. You're going to have a preference, and it may be really strong one way and really strong the other way. But I think the bigger invitation is to experiment, sort of like whatever works best for you.

So let's start to bring a full circle here. We've got two left. Number nine of the mental tools is the five senses and nouns. Talk to me about this. Yes, this is one of my absolute favorite ways to teach people how to drop into the moment. So often you hear the word mindfulness and it seems sort of esoteric or spiritual. And now mindfulness is being brought into schools, into organizations. So it's gotten a lot more scientific, especially as more research has supported it, but people can still kind of make a big to-do about it. It's like, how do I do this thing called mindfulness? When you think about it, it's dropping into the moment. And the easiest way to do it is to ask yourself, what do I see? What do I hear? What do I smell? What do I taste? And what do I touch? When you

are in your senses, you are instantaneously in the moment. So when I find myself having a lot of mind chatter and I'm feeling really anxious and my mind is kind of going rampant, and let's say I'm walking down the street and I just can't focus because I just got thoughts all over the place. I will start thinking to myself, what do I see? And I just start to take it all in and I'll just name things I see. Right now I see computer, I see microphone, I see computer stand. I'm just really, that drops me into the moment. I'll ask myself, what do I smell? What do I hear? Use your senses as the simplest way to drop into the moment. You could do this if you're doing mindfulness meditation as a practice, tuning into your

senses. It's a nice way to drop in, but it's a powerful way to take mindfulness out of the cushion and into the world. Asking yourself these questions helps us in the process the same way that if you're trying to savor, let's say you're saying, I want to savor a meal. You can ask yourself, what do I smell? What are the flavors that I'm reaching for? When I engage in my coffee drinking meditation, I try to make that first sip as sensual as I can. And I ask myself, what am I smelling? What's the temperature of the cup? When we tune into our senses,

that instantaneously drops us into the moment. Another variation, it's kind of the same technique. And I was trying to sneak 11 in here, Jonathan, I'm not going to lie. I know you made me cut content. And I put these two together as a sneaky way to just get another one because this one is just so good. So we define mindfulness as a nonjudgmental, open-hearted awareness of what's happening in the moment. And when our mind is in this anxious place, we can drop into the now and calm that anxiety by pointing and naming. And sometimes if you're doing this by yourself, you can point and people won't think you're crazy. And if you're in New York City and you're up and about, you can point and walk around and people won't think you're

crazy. Other parts of the world, maybe you don't point when you're doing this, but it's the process of naming what you see as just the noun and not the adjective. So you train yourself by taking the adjective out, the descriptor out. You're just focused on what is around you and what you're noticing. And this is a trick. It's a brain hack that I give to many of my clients and many of my students as a quick way to drop into the moment. And one of my favorite voicemails I've ever gotten from a client was a fast-paced New York City walking voicemail. And my client's kind of out of breath and she's going, Amelia, Amelia, I had the worst day at work today. And I left the office and I remembered what you said. And I just started walking down the street and I knew I needed to calm my thoughts down

because I thought I was going to like jump out of the window because my boss was driving me crazy. And I just started to name what I saw. And I usually tell my clients, do this for at least three blocks and you will find you'll feel better. And she's like, and it worked. I'm walking down the street and I'm going person, traffic light, car, hot dog stand. And she gives me the things that she needs. And she's like, and I feel so much better. And the excitement that she felt was not just the fact could take control of her own brain. Prior to being taught these skills, we think our thoughts just happened to us. And the best you serious and you have to learn to tell the difference. But this process of just naming what you see and not even saying, you know, pretty shirt, you can just say shirt gets you training yourself to be in the moment. And it focuses your mind in a way that is a simple exercise. And when you redirect your thoughts, you're actually calming that stress response. I love that. And I love how you snuck in too. So let's bring it all the way home,

which is actually appropriate because I kind of threw in the last one here, which we'll call 10.5-ish, which is this thing that I call certainty anchors. And it was an observation that I had a decade ago when I was researching a book that I wrote on certainty about how people seem to be able to sustain a certain amount of calm equanimity in the face of long-term high stakes uncertainty, where there was no way to change the circumstances. They just had to live in it and they had to be able to function and be creative and problem solve and not get completely crushed by the nature of the experience. And what I noticed was that pretty consistently, there was this pattern where many of the people who were able to do this, actually,

they created a huge amount of ritualization, but not in the work, not in that area where they would fly without a tether, but in all the mundane everyday parts of their lives. So they would eat the exact same thing for breakfast every day. They would wear the same shirt, the same clothes. They would go to the same place at the same time. There was a huge amount of all of the things that, basically any opportunity that they had in their lives to have something happen on a consistent daily basis that no matter what else was going on, no matter what the source of high-level uncertainty was, these things would still happen. It wasn't linked to those things. They would make them ritualized so that they would just automatically happen every single day. And I realized what they were actually doing

was they were dropping what I would call these certainty anchors. They were creating moments throughout every single day where they knew something that was grounded, that was certain, where they could touch stone and find a moment of peace. Those would always be there. And it allowed them a certain amount of stillness, of equanimity in the context of a much bigger life that was very often perpetually untethered and groundless and highly uncertain with high stakes. And that really helped them kind of be okay in the world. And what I realized was that I had looked at this in the context of very often high stakes, high scale, creative or entrepreneurial endeavors, but it really is a broad skill set in the context of an uncertain world as well. I'm curious whether you've seen this, whether you

have experienced it. And if you have, I'm curious whether you have seen this, whether you have experienced it. And if you have, I'm curious whether you have any insights into why it might work. Absolutely. This is, I love how you call it a certainty anchor, because what it's doing, what anchors do is they ground us, they plug us in, they tune us in. And we as human beings are wired with a need for autonomy or a need for control. And in a time of chaos, uncertainty, and unknown, controlling the things that you can, not to the point where you're OCD about it, but taking a firm enough grip on things that you can begin to put into place and create

structure is such an important thing to contain the chaos. And in addition to my passion for positive psychology and mind-body medicine, I've spent over a decade in the philosophical study of tantra. And tantra is essentially the weaving of masculine and feminine energy. And we can talk about this polarity, the fact that everything in life has a yin and a yang, right? So the yin is the feminine energy and the yang is the masculine energy. All that is yin and feminine is stuff that is always changing. And all that is yang and certain. And chaos, nature, upheaval, change, and anything that's mercurial is feminine energy. And so we are in pure feminine energy right now in this place of uncertainty. The masculine energy is all about that which is unwavering, that which is not changing. And we often turn to time and space

as the masculine energy. And so I do a lot of certainty anchors. And one of my teachers from tantric philosophy is David Data. And for the past week, I've heard David's voice in my head a lot. David has a saying where he says, find the walls and feel the floor. And that idea of feeling the fact that there are walls around you, you are safe, there's a container around you. What is the thing that is very certain in this world? Again, it's not guaranteed because you can go up into outer space and then you lose it, but gravity is certain. Feel the floor underneath you. Feel that you are anchored. Feel mother earth underneath you. So these are the types of things that can help center, anchor, and ground us. And so I love that you talk about the behavioral

patterns that we can put in, that we can begin to have control and have certainty in an uncertain world. And there are times where if I'm in a place of stress or worry, I literally say to myself, Amelia, feel the walls, feel that there is structure around you. There are strong things that are protecting you. Amelia, feel the ground underneath your feet or feel that whatever you're sitting on right now has something that eventually connects you to the earth. And those are powerful things to ground, especially in this time of chaos where many of us are grounded. So if you're grounded, you have to stay in. You're not being punished, but you are being grounded. Then ground during these times. Find those certainty anchors.

Yeah, love it. I love that reframe on it too. It's helpful for me to understand it. So we have moved through sort of a description of what we're feeling when we're feeling anxiety, when to understand, when it's appropriate to use any one of or in combination the 10 body tools and also the 10 mental tools. And sometimes when you kind of use them in combination in ways that work best. So this has been incredible. I have learned so much. I hope you listening have found this useful. I know this was a super, it was very in-depth and kind of long episode, but we did this because we wanted to really go deep and get practical and give you useful tools to start navigating all this and start to work with them to find ways to be better in the world and in

whatever circumstances come your way. Amelia, any sort of parting thoughts before we bring this all the way home? Just that we, or I, I'll speak on behalf of myself, am sending you all so much love and so much self-care and self-compassion and patience during this time and to reach out if you need support. And I'm happy to connect with anyone that has any questions about these tools or if I can be a resource in any way, just know that I'm here, I'm grounded, staying grounded and happy to be of service to the people or organizations out there that are needing to be resilient during this time. Yeah. Thank you so much. This has been

incredible. As I mentioned before, be sure to check the show notes. There will be a link either to a document or a page somewhere that has full listings of all the 20 different tools and skills and resources so that you can review them, start to figure out what you might want to start to work with or explore and also learn more about the different things. So excited to be able to share this with you. Thanks, everybody. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked

yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share, share the love.

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