Anxiety: Practical Tips To Help You - episode 2

Tracey Moggeridge, Mindfulness Practitioner & Coach presents 'Mindfulness practices'

Transcript

0:05

- So a couple of other practical things that you can do that centres around mindfulness, that's really helpful for those in the moment. Parts of the day when you are feeling that your anxiety might be creeping up, or even if you just want to bring a little bit of calm to a situation that you're anticipating might not be that great. You can do a couple of things. One is called a physiological sigh.'If in doubt sigh it out.' So if you're having a moment in the day when you are feeling agitated, you can't focus or your head is too busy, sighing does two things. It helps us to meet the balance the ratio of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the lungs and the bloodstream. Too much carbon dioxide can actually leave us feeling tired and it can impact on our productivity and our cognitive function. But it also tells our nervous system that everything is fine and to stand down from being on high alert. So the practise here is just to take an inhale(instructor inhales and exhales) and let that go. And inhale,(instructor inhales and exhales) and sigh it out. You can even actually physically just sigh.(instructor sighs) And I would do that two or three times. And what that does is actually allows for a place of calm to actually creep in. Another thing that we find is if you're suffering with anxiety that actually, you know, the anxiety can feel very restless, fidgety, sitting still can be really hard to do. And one way that we can actually tackle that is by something that a lot of performers apparently do before going on stage, and shaking it out. So you might want to sort of just shake out your hands for count of seven to eight. Just give them a really good shake. You might want to do one hand at a time, and then just sit there and notice how that feels. Then you might do the same with your whole arm. First, your left arm, your right arm. I'm sitting down so I can't demonstrate this, but you might want to shake your left foot, then your right foot. And again, taking a pause in between. Just getting a sense of what's here? How does it feel? What sensations are you noticing? You might even wanna just shake your shoulders a little bit, or your head and your neck, obviously being careful here. What does it feel just to actually give your body a really good shake? And this is often a fantastic practise if you are spending a lot of your time desk-based, or if you're starting to notice that you're carrying that knot in your stomach. Anything that allows us to process anxiety in a physical way is a really good activity to try.