Spiritual-Neuroscience
One might think the stepping back so many of us are experiencing in this quarantine could naturally promote mindfulness. But sometimes a house full of people with unstructured time can also mean more noise and stress. When we start feeling stressed, there’s a quick, simple mindfulness practice that may help. This is a mental exercise to decrease the reactivity we have throughout the day. This one can even be humorous, if you’d like.
What we’re going to do is label things with neutral statements. This is something that you can go ahead and practice now, while you are hopefully feeling calm. The more you practice, the more you will be able to bring this in when you are reactive, in an effective way. So right now, I want you to look around the room, or other place that you are in, and describe things in the most neutral way possible. Neutral meaning there is no emotional content. So, for example, “the couch is green”, “the lamp is on”, “the window is open”, etc. If you notice any emotional reaction- like “who the heck left the lamp on or the window open”- don’t engage with it, just go on to another object and try to make more statement that feel neutral.
Sometimes it is helpful to go even more general when what you are noticing starts to bother you- so instead of noticing objects in the room you would state- “I am in a room”. “The room has 4 walls”, “the room has a ceiling”. “The room has a floor”. “You could go all the way out to I am on planet earth”. “I am in the milky way”. So long as what you are saying is true and you don’t have an emotional reaction, you are calming your nervous system. You are activating part of the frontal lobe in a way that takes energy away from the reactive part of the brain and you don’t have room for reactive thoughts when you are making these neutral statements. So try this for a few moments now.
This can be a great exercise to use when you notice yourself getting reactive to circumstances. Let’s say your kids are arguing and it’s causing you to feel stress. You can make neutral statements about them such as “She has brown hair”. “He is wearing black shoes”. This is where it can make it even better by making it a bit absurd- “there are sounds coming from the hole in his face”, “that one is breathing in and out”. Sure these sound a bit ridiculous but if it can make you laugh, it can be even more helpful in decreasing that reactivity. Even if, at some point, you have to jump in and do something about the argument, taking a couple of minutes to make these neutral statement in your mind can help you do so from a centered place. And if it’s too hard to feel neutral about the situation in front of you, it’s fine to step back and make it more general. For example, thinking “we are in a room”. “There are lights in this room”. “This building has electricity”, etc.
Practice these now and when things aren’t so rough so you can really get a feel for the effects. It may seem too simple but it really can work. You could try to spend a minute or 2 on each of these, 5 times today. You could set an alarm or plan times to do them. After you’ve practiced, you’ll be able to bring them in as desired or needed, to handle the stress and be able to enjoy moments of this quarantine from a more relaxed state.
If you’d like to know more about how you react to difficult situations and get a free recording and tips to empower you to shift the way you feel, take my Free Quiz
Be Well,
Alicia Ruelaz Maher, M.D.
Spiritual-Neuroscience.com
Spiritual-Neuroscience
What has been your biggest struggle as we completed another week of quarantine? The main issue my patients seemed to struggle with, this past week, was feeling unmotivated to do more with this time and then guilty about that. Besides the obvious benefits of forgiving ourselves for this time our nervous systems seem to need to adjust to this new reality, are there tools to feel less guilty, that could even lead to more motivation? Thankfully, there’s an enjoyable one, that really seems to help. I call it the Self Gratitude Exercise.
Once we appreciate the good of who we are, it will be much easier to be compassionate when we are, inevitably, performing less than we’d like to. For this, we’re going to do a streaming gratitude practice towards ourselves. Streaming gratitude is where we make one gratitude statement after another- not spending too long on any particular one or giving it too much thought.
The statements all begin the same: in this case, the statement will begin with “I am grateful to myself for___” and then you’ll fill in the blank. It’s important to structure the statements in this way so that the brain isn’t thinking completely spontaneously- as it may tend to go off on negative tangents. When you fill in the blank with something true, your brain won’t reject the statement that you are grateful to yourself and you will slowly transform to feeling self gratitude and love.
To start, I want you to do this for 5 minutes. If that seems impossible, you can say 10 statements, or some other parameters, but the key is that you decide before you start. Otherwise, we tend to quit when we run out of easy things to say rather than pushing ourselves to keep going to the point of actually shifting the way we feel. Usually, it will take at least 5 minutes of doing this exercise to shift the way you feel about yourself.
So, try this now. Start saying “I am grateful to myself for ____” and fill in the blank with such things as characteristics that you like about yourself- like kind, thoughtful or funny; things you’ve done (no matter how small), things you accomplished in the past, decisions you’ve made that you are proud of, things you’ve done for others, or just that you’ve kept going and are trying things like this exercise to feel better.
Commit to doing this practice each day, 10 statements or more, and then 5 minutes, any time you are starting to feel down.
If you’d like to know more about how you react to difficult situations and get a free recording and tips to empower you to shift the way you feel, take my Free Quiz
Enjoy you this week!
Alicia Ruelaz Maher, M.D.
Spiritual-Neuroscience.com
Spiritual-Neuroscience
The news of the world can often be stressful but nothing seems to be hitting home quite as much as this quarantine. With all of the uncertainty, are you having long days of anxiety and even longer nights of nightmares? Or maybe nightmares are just an occasional problem but you’d still like a way to prevent them?
Let’s practice a little imagery rehearsal for good dreams. Imagery rehearsal is a technique that is used, especially in people suffering from PTSD, to transform dreams to a positive experience. We’ll do just a taste here and I encourage you to look into it further if nightmares are something you’ve been struggling with.
To start, think of a stressful dream you’ve had. Really go into the details of it in your mind. But when you get towards the end, instead of the stressful outcome you’ve previously experienced in the dream, I want you to imagine a better outcome. The great thing about dreams is that anything can happen. You can even imagine magical powers, or a person or superhero that swoops in to save you. You can imagine that you can snap your fingers in the dream and instantly be in your favorite place. Just think of something that would feel satisfying to you and reverse the negative feelings caused by the dream.
Have an idea of your new dream during the day and then ‘rehearse’ it. This means imagining the dream as it usually happens and purposefully imagining the more positive outcome, over and over as one would rehearse a play. Really get into the feeling of how powerful, or relieved, or safe, you feel in this new rendition. Once you’ve practiced this in your mind during the day, do so right before bed.
There is a part of your mind that is conscious during sleep and will remember what you’ve told it to do. It may take several nights of rehearsal but the outcome can be very powerful to change the dream.
Once your stressful dream, or nightmare, is no longer an issue, you can use this practice to just create enjoyable dreams to experience, or to give you ideas or solve problems at night. It can be such a powerful experience to realize how much you can use your brain as a tool to feel good, even during the seemingly unconscious act of sleeping.
If you’d like to know more about how you react to difficult situations and get a free recording and tips to empower you to shift the way you feel, take my Free Quiz
Sweet Dreams!
Alicia Ruelaz Maher, M.D.
ScienceForTheJourney.com