I welcome every self-healer out there to our channel. My name is Hong Jeong, therapist based in Los Angeles, California. This is our virtual therapy session #3 on how to deal with anxiety. Through our session today, I’d like to offer you a concrete and actionable way of dealing with anxiety. Here is how we are going to have a therapy session together. We are having a session here as if we’re having a conversation and exchanging ideas. I’m going to ask you a set of questions related to your anxiety and give you time or you can pause the video to think about and process your feelings and thoughts. It’d be a good idea to have a pen and paper handy so you can write down your answers. Or you can say it out loud. It’s your choice.
REVIEW: Step #1
First, we talked about the inventory for anxiety called GAD-7. GAD-7 measures the severity of signs of anxiety such feeling nervous or restless, excessive worrying, having trouble sleeping, difficulty controlling worry, etc.
Link to GAD-7: https://www.integration.samhsa.gov/clinical-practice/gad708.19.08cartwright.pdf
Is your score higher or lower than your previous score?
What symptoms have decreased or increased?
Step #2
How would you describe your mood lately?
To be objective, How anxious were you on a scale of 0 to 10 (0 being emotionally and physically stable and 10 being the most anxious you can feel)?
Step #3
In our session, we’ve practiced 5 senses exercise, in order to get out of our mind and bring our attention to the present.
When, where, why and how did you use self-holding exercise?
After using 5 senses exercise, what did you notice physically and emotionally?
Being able to contain anxiety and regulate it in your own creative way is essential when dealing with anxiety. Oftentimes, we’re trying to push away our anxiety. In our mind, we say, “I need to relax and I should not feel anxious...this is so bad...what if this happens?.”
In a moment of anxiety, it is normal to think negatively. It is because anxiety is caused by perceived danger. There is a difference between factual danger and perceived danger. Through evolutionary time, the human brain is well developed to conserve and preserve for our own protection.
It’s important to have balance in our body and mind. In a moment of anxiety, we often get caught in our negative or unpleasant sensations in our body and negative thoughts or upsetting thoughts.
Anxiety happens too quickly and too much. Sometimes, we suddenly get anxious and do not know what triggered a sudden anxiety attack or sudden intense feelings. Pedulation is a great healing tool in terms of slowing things down. Again, self-regulating is about buying time to notice what’s happening in our body and mind. Our nervous system is good at protecting us from any danger or threat. It is similar to staying hyper alert in a war zone.
Pedulation is a concept that emphasizes moving back and forth between activation of stress and positive resources. What I mean by activation is body being on high alert, also known as the fight or flight response. In a moment of anxiety, our body starts pumping adrenaline or energy and we start focusing more on discomfort in our body and anxiety triggers in our mind. When this energy in our system gets overflows.
It is important to monitor our body, in order to keep our body from overly activating. When we are caught with our own thoughts or worrying, we do not allow our physical sensations to be fully felt. The energy in our body is meant to be released somehow however, it can get stuck in our body like a broken record in activation. So every time we get triggered by something, our nervous system reactivates the stuck energy, meaning we go into fight or flight or freeze response again. When our body is overwhelmingly activated, it feels like we are reliving that trauma moment again.
Healing starts with allowing your body to sense and process life force energy. The key point here is to work with only small or tolerable bits of overwhelming experiences at a time. So that your system does not get overwhelmed.
When children feel scared about something, they go to their parents. When they feel safe again, they go back and try it again. We have a natural instinct to find connection with others for our own safety. It requires incremental steps. It is like releasing the pressure from a pressure cooker. You do not want to open a pressure cooker when there is a lot of pressure inside because it can explode. Pendulation can help us build tolerance with stress and release the life force energy from our body.
Let’s first build your internal resource. So when you feel overly activated, you can go to your internal resource.
Our brain is designed to think and analyze because it is our survival instinct. Let’s start off with imagining unpleasant hypothetical situations such as losing your belongings, losing a job, and losing a loved one. Interestingly enough, our brain is not very good at distinguishing between imagination and reality. In other words, imaging a calm place such as walking on the beach can be just effective such as actually walking on the beach. Or imagining yourself at a calm place can be more effective than actually being there. In today’s exercise, we are using our imaginative ability to regulate our system.
The name of this imagery exercise we are doing is called, “safe place.” Having a sense of safety in your body and body is the main objective of this exercise. What’s so useful about this imagery exercise is that we can practice it anywhere and anytime. All you need is your body and mind. During a busy time at work or before making an important phone call, I take a mental vacation by imagining my safe place. Then, I start feeling grounded or regain a sense of safety because it pendulates my awareness away from stressful things internally and externally.
Step #1
Find a safe place. It is important to find a place you can concentrate on your internal system. You can simply sit down somewhere. In public, I usually go to the nearest public restroom and practice this exercise while sitting on the toilet. Again, environmental safety is essential.
Step #2
Close your eyes and scan your body from head to toe. During body scan, I encourage you to notice tension and relaxation or comfort and discomfort in your body.
Step #3
Close your eyes partially or fully and Imagine a picture of a safe place. I’d encourage you to think about a time when you felt calm and safe. It could be a recent time or a long time ago. For example, my safe place is Kauai, one of the islands in Hawaii. There is a beach, called Poipu. The picture coming up in my mind is that I was walking on the beach and seeing the horizon. Other examples I’ve heard from my clients are hiking in the mountains, driving in the woods, riding a bike, laying down in bed, etc. Your safe place only belongs to you.
Step #4
Run a mental movie of your safe place. You can think about what you see, hear, touch, smell, and taste. Let’s notice all the sensations as if you are in your safe place again.
Step #5
Notice your emotions and sensations in your body. You can point out the location of the physical sensations when bringing up the picture of your safe place.
Step #6
Enhance those physical sensations with tapping.
Step #7
Notice your previous discomfort or tension in your body again.
Step #8
If you continue noticing unpleasant sensations in your body, repeat steps 3 through 7.
You’ve done a good job today. I appreciate your participation. Life will continue throwing curve balls. Your body, especially your nervous system will give you energy to respond to these life curve balls. Sometimes, we can feel overwhelmed by our own energy because we do not know what to do with them. It happens and we all experience that. We need to work with our body energy because we’re living in this body. So I’d like to stress the importance of creating time and space to simply notice your body energy. Then, we can naturally regulate our mind. When our body feels all worked up, our judgement often gets clouded. My final thought is practice, practice, practice. Without practicing this imagery exercise, nothing I said here will help you. I’d encourage you to practice your own safe place 3-4 times a day. Can you do it? Say YES!!!
I hope you find our session helpful.
If you need assistance with dealing with anxiety, please schedule a 20 minute free consultation with me.