Instant Physical Relief for Fear

Tags

anxiety, breathing, diaphragm, instant relief, panic, physical technique, relaxed diaphragmatic breathing

A lot of these early posts will be laying foundations for further work, but I do not want to wait to share an awesome technique. This one is so utterly simple, you may be tempted to blow it off. Don’t. It is powerful enough to melt through panic attacks and bypasses your brain, so it does not matter if you are too scared to think. It can be used any time, for any level of fear, and feels good.

Relaxed Diaphragmatic Breathing – How To

1. Take a slow, gentle breath, making sure to poke your belly out. Put your hand on your abdomen and feel it pressing outward. (Your diaphragm is the muscle that separates your lungs from your stomach area and is used in breathing.)
2. Push the air back out slowly and steadily.
3. Repeat at least 5 times.
4. Check in. How are you doing?
   1. How much tension is in your face and body? Are you immediately holding your breath or hyperventilating? If the answer is “yes,” breathe another round (or several).
   2. Also take a moment to pay attention to your thoughts. Imagine that they are separate from you and you are only listening and observing, as if your thoughts are a river. If they’re bouncing around, not particularly linear, or stuck circling round and round, you should keep breathing deeply.
5. Keep going until you sense relief (your brain settles out, you can breathe normally, and you feel calmer).

There’s no reason to save this just for especially nasty occasions. It is really effective with mild anxiety as well.

Your Courage Wishlist

Tags

Comfort zone, courage, Fear, Lana Del Rey, tools, wishlist

I was always an unusual girl. My mother told me I had a Chameleon soul, no moral compass pointing to north, no fixed personality; just an inner decisiveness that was just wide and is wavering across the ocean. And if I said I didn’t plan for it to turn out this way I’d be lying.

Lana Del Rey – Ride

Don’t…take this seriously. Be frivolous. Extravagant. It is brainstorming time and the rules are that you can’t say “no” while you’re coming up with a list of things you want to do. If you absolutely must, you may weed out later. Fear can shut you down. This is about getting out of the box and giving yourself a star to aim for.

Write down anything that you’ve held back, whether from feelings of mild resistance or outright terror. If you need some kind of random number for structure, try seventeen. It doesn’t hurt to go over or under, but you want to have enough wishes to play with.

When you’re done, and you’ve given it a minute or two to settle (there may be some stragglers to the party), rank items by intensity, zero to three. Note the number next to the action. Zero means “This doesn’t scare me at all. I could start right now.”  One translates to “I have a little resistance.” Three is for “This is really hard. It will take a lot of effort or time to build up to this.” Two is a catch-all for anything that falls in the middle or when you are unsure. If you have anything on your list that literally makes you panicky, put a 5 next to it and mentally set it aside. There are some specific, very effective strategies for dealing with these that will be covered in future posts.

Look your list over. If it is mostly threes or fives, try to come up with some more not-so-scary wants. One purpose of this list is to create “weights” for your bravery training. You’ll need plenty of lighter weights while you build up your strength.

You may need to loosen up a bit. Humor is great for this, so taking a break to watch ridiculous kitten videos, read Calvin and Hobbes, or whatever makes you chuckle, works well. When you come back, think of actions a five year old version of yourself might add. Write them down.

Why use your own list instead of a premade set of exercises to “enlarge your comfort zone?” Several reasons:

1. People who make these kind of exercises base them on their own comfort scale, or on practice with other people. They will be poorly balanced for you. Some things may be too easy, some too hard, or just a bad fit for your personality.
2. “Enlarging your comfort zone,” is pretty abstract, even euphemistic. Confronting fear can be challenging. You want to have the emotional electricity to help you carry you through it.
3. The Payoff. If you do the work to pass through fear, you get what you want!

More on how to use the list soon.

Introduction

Tags

intro, what it is all about, why

Why create this blog in the first place?

The aim of this blog is to literally encourage you, to cheer you on as you take healthy risks and to give you practical, immediate tools to manage fear and anxiety so you can take action. The more bravery you exercise, the larger your world becomes. As your courage grows, so does your experience of life, becoming more vivid, more deliciously juicy, more free. You deserve that. We all do.

Courage is accessible to EVERYONE. This blog is for anyone who:

• …has ever been held back by fear.
• …wants to know there are others in similar predicaments, and some who’ve made it out.
• …is already on their own courage journey, but wants additional insights.
• …is ready for a hero’s utility belt full of specialized tools to handle the myriad types and intensities of fear.
• …is unsure, but curious, and might be ready soon.
• …is tired of being stuck!

This blog is not a good fit for people who are:

• …more interested in contemplating abstract, philosophical questions about bravery than in practicing courage in their everyday lives.

• …primarily looking for profiles of heroic people. These stories are wonderful inspirations, but what we fear and what we face is as individual as we are. Comparisons are often unhelpful.

Now that we know where we stand, let’s jump right in!