Transform Your Mind and Mood: How Gratitude Rewires Your Brain for Happiness
Doing this practice regularly not only shifts your mood, but it actually changes the neural pathways in your brain.
Doing a gratitude practice regularly not only shifts your mood, but it actually changes the neural pathways in your brain.
At first, and especially if you’re new to this sort of thing, you may find you have resistance to this. You might think “how can this even work?” Or you might feel it’s too new age or woo woo — not practical or action-based.
I thought this too, when I first heard Oprah talk about it many years ago. “How can I feel grateful for things when so much needs improvement?” I thought.
But what I know now is that the practice of gratitude, or learning to see all the small things that are actually working well in life, is actually a practice that not only shifts my mood to feeling calm and peaceful, but I’ve begun to see almost effortless expansion in many areas of my own life.
I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “What you focus on grows.” Well this is putting that Universal law into practice. When we start to see what’s going well and put our focused attention on those places, regardless of how small or seemingly trivial these areas are, we’re priming our brain to look for the good in all areas.
Don’t get me wrong — some days, trying to come up with anything that I can feel gratitude for can feel hard. It’s on these days that I go to little things, like “my spicy chai latte from Meraki Cafe was so good,” or to a memory with my kids when they were little at Sandy Point beach in Massachusetts. Your brain doesn’t know if you’re being grateful for something big like winning $100K or a happy memory from the past. In fact, your neural circuitry sees it all as the same thing.
THREE practices
If you’d like to ease into this practice before you commit a large amount of time, I’ve included two different practices — one is a mini practice that you can do throughout the day if you like. The other is a longer morning or evening practice.
Do this when
You want to shift your mood or raise your vibration
You want to add a self care practice into your life
You want to attract more love, abundance and peace into your life
You feel fearful, worried or anxious about the future
You want to regulate your nervous system (For some background information about your nervous system, click here.)
Benefits
You’ll feel more peaceful and expanded
You’ll have a clear experience—both emotionally and physically— that you’re being supported
It brings you into the present moment (and out of the future or past)
You’ll physically change the “worry and anxiety” neural pathways in your brain to “trusting, loving and calm.” The longer you write and bask in the feelings of gratitude, you reinforce these neural pathways. You actually train your brain to look for good vs. what’s “wrong” and stressful.
Practice #1 (short and sweet)
Write down 3 things that happened in the past hour or two (or write a memory from the past) that you’re grateful for. It can be as simple as “My coffee was good,” or “I love how the sun felt on my face when I walked outside.”
You can set your phone alarm throughout the day to keep bringing your mind back to noticing or searching for “the good.” Practicing in this way begins to change the neural pathways and reinforce them.
Practice #2 (longer, possibly morning or evening)
Journal for 10-20 minutes about 3-5 things you’re grateful for. Allow yourself to really FEEL the gratitude and and linger in the feeling. ABSORB the feeling. The longer you can remain in the “felt sense” of gratitude, even if you’re thinking about something or someone from many years ago, the more neural pathways you’re creating and practicing/reinforcing.
As with any practice, the more consistently you practice, the more “results” you’ll notice. Doing a practice every day for 3-5 minutes is more valuable than doing a practice for 60 minutes 1X/week. Make this easy for yourself and enjoy!
Practice #3 (this can take as long or short as you like)
This is from a method called HeartMath®. There are 3 steps. You can do all three steps to make it a gratitude practice or only do steps 1 and 2 to bring parasympathetic coherence (rest and digest) throughout your entire body and nervous system.
Step 1: Focus your attention on the area of your heart. This can be on your anatomical heart or the general space in your chest where your heart resides, or any image of your heart.
Step 2: Begin to breathe in and out of your heart space. You just imagine your breath flowing in and out of your heart or heart space as you breathe.
You can stay with this or turn this into a gratitude practice with Step 3….
Step 3: Allow your imagination to call forth an image or memory of a time when you felt gratitude for something in your life. Connect to that feeling and then bring it into your heart space as you continue to breathe in and out of your heart.
After practicing any of these options, always take a moment at the end to feel yourself — your body, how you feel emotionally, and observe the state of your nervous system. Do you feel calmer, more relaxed, more grounded, safer, more neutral? Just observe yourself without needing it to be any special way.
Find Calm in 3 Minutes: Master This Breathwork Practice for Instant Stress Relief
In 3 minutes you can shift your mood from stressed or anxious to calm and grounded.
In 3 minutes you can shift your mood from stressed or anxious to calm and grounded. (Learn more about the physical symptoms of stress and anxiety here.)
In light of ongoing uncertainty, everyone should have this quick practice in their stress relief medicine cabinet these days!
This can be done in moments when you feel anxious, fearful, overwhelmed, alone or isolated. But I also recommend practicing this when you feel good!
Practicing when you’re NOT triggered or stressed helps to train your nervous system to down regulate more quickly. You essentially train your nervous system to learn to let go and respond in the way you want vs. always reacting to stress when it blindsides you.
So, when you practice at times when you feel neutral or good, this practice becomes even more effective at times when you feel triggered and really need to calm and sooth yourself quickly.
One option is to set your phone alarm throughout the day, based on your schedule. If your schedule allow, you can set your alarm for each hour. Or you can wait until you’re at home and set your alarm, if this is more realistic. There’s really no right or wrong way to do this.
The idea is to create new neural pathways so that when you feel anxiety, fear, worry, anger or any of your usual “triggers” arise, you can catch yourself, acknowledge the feeling and begin the heart breath practice to calm yourself. (To learn more about how to integrate self care practices into your life, click here.)
Heart Breath
Time investment: 3 minutes.
Set up
You can be seated, lying down or standing.
If you’re outside, if you’re outside, stand with your feel on the ground and imagine roots from your feet extending deep into the earth
Do this when
You feel anxious
You feel fearful
You’re overwhelmed
You feel abandoned emotionally
Benefits
Regulates heartrate and breathing
Uses the vagus nerve to bring a parasympathetic state of coherence throughout your body
Calms nervous system
Builds self trust
Gives you sense of peace
Gives you sense of safety
Practice
Place both hands over your heart.
Focus your attention on the area of your heart.
Begin to breathe in and out of your heart space.
Optional: allow a memory or imagined moment of something that brings you a sense of peace, calm, appreciation, gratitude, or some other regenerative feeling and bring that feeling into your heart as you continue to breathe in and out of your heart.
What Is Self Care? How to Prioritize Your Wellbeing in Daily Life
Chances are, you’re already including some self care practices in your daily or weekly schedule, so you can stop panicking or feeling like there’s one more thing you’re not doing!
Chances are, you’re already including some self care practices in your daily or weekly schedule, so you can stop panicking or feeling like there’s one more thing you’re not doing!
First off, let me say that “Self Care” means a different thing to each person. There is no right or wrong.
For some people, a spa day definitely falls in the self care category.
For me, self care does not mean self indulgence or pampering oneself. I’m concerned with more holistic and consistent, self nurturing practices that support me in my day-to-day life. A pedicure is something I do to maintain my appearance. But I personally don’t consider it “self care.”
To me, self care means taking care of myself so that I can function in my life more peacefully and efficiently — so that I can take care of others as needed and do all the things I need and want to accomplish in daily life. To me, self care is a way to keep my own “gas tank” full (or at least not hovering on empty) while living in a stressful world.
With all that’s happening, especially in the past several years, taking care of yourself is more important now than ever before. We are generally more anxious, stressed, lonely, depressed and unhealthy.
So self care is simply part of the answer of how we can cope better with daily life and all the stress that comes with it. If that includes a pedicure or spa visit, then do it! If it includes a daily run or going to Pilates or a cup of coffee on the porch to start your day, great!
Intention and consistency
Self care can come in many shapes and sizes, and the length of time you spend on it is not as critical as the consistency and intention you have for doing a particular practice or activity.
What is important, however, is to include whatever practices resonate with you on a regular basis— a little bit every day if possible.
For example, practicing 5-10 minutes of yoga at home is more beneficial than a 60 minute class once each week. And a 60 minute class once/week is more beneficial than a 3-day workshop once/year.
When practiced regularly, self care practices can help boost your immune system, reduce your stress, increase strength and/or productivity, and increase your self esteem.
Self care is taking time in your day to practice self love and making yourself a priority and this is not selfish — this is critical.
Self Love
Self love is another current-day phrase I’ve struggled to understand. What is self love actually and how does one practice it?
What I’ve found, is that by actually prioritizing time each day — no matter how short — to practice self care, you’re actually practicing “loving yourself.”
Love is simply focused attention!
The benefit I’ve noticed is that I tend to take better care of myself naturally. I consider my own needs or how I feel physically or emotionally more often and am beginning to take care of myself the same way I took care of my 3 children when they were young.
Self care can include eating healthy food, seeking medical care rather than ignoring symptoms, scheduling regular movement classes or bodywork, taking time out of the day to ground and/or breathe or meditate, flossing or washing your face each night, setting aside time to read spiritual literature or fiction or draw, journal, garden, walk in nature, go to a museum — whatever intentional act feeds your soul.
Is fitness self care?
For some, self care is working out or regular fitness. Again, if done with intention, this can be amazing. When I was younger, I practiced hot sweaty vigorous yoga 6 days/week. Now, 15 years later, although I’ve tried to keep up my old pace, 3-4 days/week of more gentle vinyasa yoga or Pilates seems to give me the energy and movement I love, but it doesn’t exhaust me.
So allow your fitness routine to support you as you are today, not be an added pressure or stress. Allow it to nourish your body, mind and spirit and give you energy, not deplete it.
Self care can also be setting boundaries. For example, the quality of my work as a Feldenkrais practitioner and massage therapist depends on my own sense of groundedness and feeling at ease in my own body physically and mentally. So self care for me includes not exposing myself to constant mainstream news sources, but finding news sources that are less agitating and more neutral, for example.
Self care is being intentional about what you put into your body or use on your skin. It can be about taking supplements and herbs and also consciously deciding whether that second glass of wine really make you feel better or will you wake up tomorrow feeling slower that you’d like. It’s less about denying yourself something and more about making conscious choices to care for yourself.
What one person considers self care is not necessarily what another will embrace. But generally, self care is something we do to maintain positive well-being.
Internal vs external
For me, the question is: am I doing this because I want to practice loving or nurturing myself and I know this is good for my. body, mind, nervous system or spirit? Or am I doing this because I can’t accept myself the way I am now and want desperately to be thinner/fitter/have less flaws, etc.?
There’s no judgement or wrong answer. The first step is always to shine that light of consciousness on yourself — observe what you’re doing and what you would like to accomplish with your daily or weekly practices.
Can Feldenkrais® Help You Break Habits Faster? What to Expect
One of the first questions new clients have is “how long will this take this Feldenkrais to work?”
One of the first questions new clients ask is “how long will it take for Feldenkrais to work?”
They often aren’t sure whether they should expect to feel immediate relief, like you feel after a great massage, or if their pain or discomfort will be relieved after a few visits or in several months.
This is a reasonable question, and here’s the frustrating answer: it depends.
It depends whether a person has been suffering with a particular issue for several days, months, years or decades. It depends what the issue is. It depends how often a person is willing or able to receive treatment. And it depends whether the person is willing to practice the assigned movements while at home, or in group classes, between sessions, in order to reinforce the new healthier neural pathways that are created during a session. To learn more about how to get a clearer sense of how long treatment might take, read “How Long Until I Notice Results from Feldenkrais® Sessions?”
And like almost anything else in life, it depends on how long the person has been practicing certain habits.
Neural Pathways
Neural pathways are the connections that form between the neurons, or brain cells, in your brain. They’re like a pattern that represents any thought about anything you’ve ever had – as simple as an apple, as complicated as love and integrity, every thought is a neural pathway.
These neural pathways, or connections between neurons, light up when you think of something or learn something like movement for the first time, and the connections form a pattern in your brain. Your brain has now attached meaning to that specific pattern.
When your brain processes a new connection for the first time, like when you first learned to walk as a baby, the neurons connected from your brain to your muscles, for balance, etc. The more you did the movement in the same way again and again, the stronger and more dominant the neural pathways became. And now, as an adult, you don’t need to think about walking anymore because it’s a well-formed dominant neural pathway in your brain.
Habits are learned — habits we want to continue AND habits that aren’t serving us; mental habits, emotional habits, and physical habits.
And unfortunately, this learning process happens if you’ve had many years of practicing muscular habits that aren’t healthy, like poor posture, or you’ve been unconsciously compensating for an injury (even from 20 years ago), or have been practicing a repetitive action in misalignment. You’ve now learned to associate certain muscular tension with these movement patterns.
This holds true for any type of learning. The more you practice something and it becomes a habit, then it will take a certain amount of time to change it to a new habit.
Feldenkrais® is not the same as massage or physical therapy. These other modalities work directly with strengthening, releasing or training muscles. Feldenkrais® works with the brain, the controller of the entire body (including the muscles). In this way, it’s actually a method of “learning” and also of “unlearning.”
To learn more about how Feldenkrais® works, click here.
When you first learned your multiplication tables, you probably were taught each table, one at a time, at school. Then you were given homework to practice at home. At first, that table might have been hard to remember. But after several weeks of writing and reciting the 3 times table out loud, it became second nature to you.
It took some time to create new neural pathways, but once reinforced, it became a “habit.”
A 2009 research paper by the University College of London says “it takes on average about 66 days of repetition to form a habit (which could indicate a change in the neural pathway). But it’s different from person to person. Some people change habits in as little as 18 days, others take as long as 254 days of repetition.”
So, having said this, this is what a person can expect with Feldenkrais.
If you’ve been experiencing pain or discomfort for a few weeks, then it is likely that a series of 6-8 sessions, received within a few weeks will begin to change the neural pathways. Unconscious habits of muscular contractions may have been practiced for much longer than the few weeks you’ve been experiencing pain, however. But the brain is always looking for the most efficient and healthiest way to move. And if you can practice some of the movements at home or in a weekly group class, then the new healthier neural pathways will be reinforced and lasting.
If you’ve been experiencing pain or discomfort for 10 years+, then most likely it will take longer to reverse the unconsciously held muscular patterns of tension. I recommend you begin with a series of 6-10 sessions, received within a month or so, and then see where you are. Very likely you’ll feel better and encouraged and will want to add another 6-10 sessions, perhaps spacing them out a bit more. Again, reinforcing the work at home or in a weekly group class is critical.
Anything between a few weeks and 10 years is someplace in the middle, depending on what the issues are that you’re experiencing. Regardless of the length of time an issue has been with you, most people feel better after their first session.
Yes, Your Brain Can Change Itself. How to Harness the Power of Brain Plasticity to Relieve Pain
THE BRAIN CAN CHANGE ITSELF. It is a plastic, living organ that can actually change its own structure and function, even into old age. This breakthrough in neuroscience is called neuroplasticity, and it’s changing the centuries-old idea that the brain is fixed and unchanging.
THE BRAIN CAN CHANGE ITSELF. It is a plastic, living organ that can actually change its own structure and function, even into old age. This breakthrough in neuroscience is called neuroplasticity, and it’s changing the centuries-old idea that the brain is fixed and unchanging.
Norman Doidge, MD, a psychiatrist and researcher, who wrote several books on the topic, including “The Brain that Changes Itself” and “The Brain’s Way of Healing,” reports that the brain is not, as was previously thought, like a machine, or “hardwired” like a computer.
Doidge says, “Neuroplasticity not only gives hope to those with mental limitations, or what was thought to be incurable brain damage, but expands our understanding of the healthy brain and the resilience of human nature.”
If you suffer from chronic muscle tension or pain, neuroplasticity might be of special interest to you!
If you’re dependent on daily stretching or frequent massages just to feel comfortable in your body, then you’re not alone. Some common tension issues people live with include tension or pain in their backs or neck and shoulders, jaw and/or TMJ symptoms, hips, or have regular migraines.
We assume that feeling this way is normal, or that it runs in the family—that tight muscles are just an unavoidable way of life as we age. But this is not the case.
Chronically tight muscles are basically unconscious habits of contraction that the nervous system has “turned on” in order to stabilize your skeleton as a whole.
For example, if you hurt your left knee years ago, your entire body had to compensate at one time. As time passed, you got used to these compensation patterns until it just felt normal to you.
Consider this scenario: perhaps you unconsciously learned to lean a little bit into your right hip and leg when you walked, to avoid putting full weight on your left leg while your knee was healing.
And then, to counterbalance the right-leaning of your lower body, you learned to lean in the opposite direction with your shoulders and neck.
All of this was a brilliant way your brain orchestrated to support your whole body while there was instability. In fact, you became so good at this new muscular “pattern” that you didn’t even notice it — until the muscles holding you in this “pattern” began to hurt and cause pain. You see, the muscles were holding the bones in place based on their instructions from your brain.
Learn more about how compensation patterns are formed and how we can work with them.
So a massage might help relieve this constant tension temporarily, but the original muscle patterns has not changed at the origin. After a few days, they’ll snap right back into place per their instructions from your brain, the control center of your body.
Another example might be chronic jaw and neck pain or neck and shoulder pain.
This is where neuroplasticity comes in!
When a person’s nervous system feels safe, like it can relax and let go—when it feels “heard” rather than fighting to hold muscles in place—the brain will tell the muscles to stop holding on for dear life. Depending on the history and physical trauma involved in a given situation, this can happen within weeks or months.
For physical muscular tension, The Feldenkrais Method® is an effective modality to change these neural pathways from old, unhealthy patterns to more efficient, healthier ones. To learn more about how Feldenkrais® works, click here.
When old muscular tension is released, there is also a sense of emotional calm and mental clarity. This makes sense because when your nervous system no longer has to expend so much energy stabilizing your whole system, there’s a natural feeling of physical and mental relief and ease. When you learn how to regulate nervous system physiology, you automatically regulate emotional tension.
Having Lower Back Pain? Here Are 7 Ways to Check If You Have Good Posture When Sitting
There are a number of myths surrounding the concept of “good posture” and it’s especially important to recognize these myths when sitting.
There are a number of myths surrounding the concept of “good posture” and it’s especially important to recognize these myths when sitting.
For example, “good posture” doesn’t mean being planted in your work chair in a fixed, upright position, holding in your abdomen and pulling your shoulders down and back.
Good or healthy posture means sitting in a way that allows freedom of movement of your entire body in any direction, as needed.
Try this.
Without changing anything about your posture, observe whether you can:
1. Turn your head to the right and left?
2. Turn your head and torso (shoulders and ribcage) to the right and left?
3. Can you breath freely into both your chest and abdomen?
If you’re engaging your abdominal muscles, you cannot breathe easily. In fact, when your abdomen is engaged, your diaphragm is drawn in and up, and your entire ribcage and back will be rigid and not able to move freely.
Your skeleton, and not your muscles, should do the primary work of holding you upright.
In order to see if you’re using your skeleton to support you in sitting, check:
1. Are both of your feet flat on the floor?
2. Are you sitting evenly on both sides of your bottom?
Sitting asymmetrically on one side can cause strain. (Some men already know this and remove their wallets from their back pocket when sitting!) When the weight of the body is distributed evenly over both sitting bones, your back doesn't have to work as hard.
3. Is your lower back rounded or slightly arched?
A slightly arched lower back offers better support and reduces pressure on the discs.
4. Are you leaning back in your chair or sitting forward in your seat?
Most people slump and round onto the back of their pelvis when leaning back. This causes muscular stiffness and strain. If you must lean back, place a pillow behind the small of your back so that a healthy arch is maintained.
For more information about sitting dynamically on your pelvis to prevent back, shoulder and neck pain, see my blog post called “Here's the Right Way to Sit in a Chair to Relieve Lower Back Pain”
If you’d like to experience more mobility in your pelvis so that you your back, neck and shoulder muscles are no longer responsible for holding you up in gravity, check out this recording of “Sit Like a Pro,” a recording of a short workshop that teaches you the tools that will give you comfort and ease when sitting.
Here's the Right Way to Sit in a Chair to Relieve Lower Back Pain
Two of the most common activities so many of us do for hours each day are sitting at work and driving.
Two of the most common activities so many of us do for hours each day are sitting at work and driving.
As a Feldenkrais practitioner and massage therapist, I’ve found that most people who come to me with concerns about discomfort in sitting have the idea that if they could just find the “right” chair and the “right” way to sit in that chair, they would be able to engage in sedentary activities for hours without moving.
I’ve had clients who beat themselves up because they feel they’ve been told that if they only held in their abdominal muscles all day, they’d somehow protect their backs. Or if they only held their shoulders down and back, their posture would be improved, and they’d avoid back, shoulder and neck pain while sitting. (Here are 7 quick check-ins with your body to learn whether you’re sitting the most efficiently.)
The human body is not well adapted for long hours spent sitting in a restrictive or constrained posture.
As a graphic artist for 20 years, I’d spend hours each day at my drawing table (I’m aging myself!!) and computer, doing detail work and barely coming up for air. I accepted the pain I often felt in my lower back and along the side of my right leg, and got my work done.
I tried to make up for the 8+ hours of sitting still with a few hours of yoga, stretching and running each week. And although working out was healthy, and I felt better after yoga and stretching, it didn’t change or fix the daily discomfort I lived with.
Now, many years later, after years of training and practice as a movement expert, I have found the main key to comfortable sitting.
Your pelvis is the foundation of your entire body when you sit.
For most of us, when we’re sitting all day at work or in the car for long periods of time, it’s typical to sit or roll back onto the back of the pelvis.
We get stuck in our chairs—meaning we sit statically and barely move, and this teaches us that we need to use our muscles to deal with sitting instead of our bones.
What I mean by this is that we think we need to keep something “engaged” to protect ourselves or keep ourselves upright (like “engaging our core” or back, or jaw or neck or shoulder muscles).
But if we were to learn to use our skeleton to support us, our entire musculature would be free of tension.
The key to this skeletal support is at the foundation when you sit—your pelvis!
Your pelvis actually has the ability to move in a variety of directions. tilt forwards so that you have a slight arch in your lower back, backwards so that you round your spine, to the left and right so that you side bend, and around in a circle. But for most of the day, we sit statically on the surface of our chair.
The more your pelvis is able to move in all these directions, the more you can control any discomfort in your back when you’re sitting. The muscles no longer need to be 100% responsible for keeping you upright in gravity because you’re sitting dynamically on your base — your pelvis.
Click here to learn how to set up your work space specifically for your body.
If you’d like to experience more mobility in your pelvis so that you your back, neck and shoulder muscles are no longer responsible for holding you up in gravity, check out this recording of “Sit Like a Pro,” a short workshop that teaches you the tools that will give you comfort and ease when sitting.
3 Keys to Comfortable, Effortless, Lower Back Pain-Free Sitting at Work
Many people experience discomfort when we sit for extended periods of time. And most of us have tried a variety of different things to remedy this discomfort — whether it’s back pain, neck or shoulder pain, hip pain, or sciatica.
Many people experience discomfort when we sit for extended periods of time. And most of us have tried a variety of different things to remedy this discomfort — whether it’s back pain, neck or shoulder pain, hip pain, or sciatica.
In my blog post “The Myth About Core Strengthening and Why It Might Not Help Lower Back Pain” I write about how “engaging your core,” or abdominal muscles, is not a solution to preventing back pain — especially when you’re sitting at your desk or in the car for hours.
Engaging or contracting abdominal muscles seems to be one of the more popular “solutions” according to google searches and the collective physical therapy consciousness.
I used to believe this too.
As a graphic artist for 20+ years, I’d hunker down at my drawing table (I’m aging myself!!) and then at my desktop into the position I thought was best, and got my work done.
For many years, I tolerated lower back pain and sciatica and accepted it as part of my life. I practiced yoga and worked out a few times each week because I knew that moving my body was important. And this received the discomfort for short periods of time, but it felt like the discomfort was a constant struggle.
Years later, as a massage therapist, my clients would often complain about how much they sit and how they worked out, stretched, engaged their core abdominal muscles, and forced their shoulders down and away from their ears to have “better posture.”
Many of their firms hired work space experts to set everyone up with standing desks, ergonomically correct chairs and work stations, and still, they were in pain and discomfort.
They felt guilty and frustrated because in their minds, they were doing all the things they were told would help, but they still had back, shoulder and neck pain.
It was frustrating for me not to be able to help them find relief for more than a couple of days.
Now, as a movement practitioner, I know there are 3 keys to comfortable, effortless, painfree sitting.
1. Eyes
Your body and spine organize around where you’re looking.
In other words, if you’re looking downwards at your laptop screen, your neck bends and your entire spine follows because your entire spine is made up of individual articulating bones (or vertebrae).
Your heavy head pulls the top of your spine (your neck) downward. Then your entire spine (chain of vertebrae) follows.
The lower end of this chain of vertebrae ends at your pelvis. Your pelvis rolls backwards to complete the rounding of your spine. And this is where you stay most of the day while your back and neck muscles work overtime to hold you in place.
2. Breath
When you’re engaging your abdominal muscles, you aren’t breathing freely and easily.
Try this: sit in a chair and engage your abdomen. Take few deep breaths in and out and notice the effect on your diaphragm, chest and belly.
Also notice how your entire middle back and ribcage are rigid. There’s minimal movement. This indicates that you’re also not moving the entire middle section of your back when you sit — the 12 vertebrae that are each attached to a rib.
This makes your neck vertebrae and lower back vertebrae and the muscles that support them have to work harder — leading to neck and back muscle pain.
Now, try this: allow your belly to be soft. With a relaxed belly, take a few deep breaths in and out. Notice how your belly and chest and sides of your ribs expand when you inhale. Observe how your diaphragm moves when you breathe. There’s a softening in your ribs and the muscles of your middle back don’t have to work.
3. Pelvis
Your pelvis is the foundation of your body when you’re sitting, and it must be able to move dynamically.
This means that you need to be able to move your pelvis — the foundation of where you’re weight bearing— as you sit on whatever seat you’re sitting, as opposed to sitting in a passive, static, rigid way.
When your pelvis learns to move in response to the seat you’re sitting on, your entire spine will respond by rounding and arching, rotating, and side bending naturally and spontaneously. We do all of these micro movements thousands of times each hour.
So for most of us, when we’re sitting all day either at work or in the car or plane, we’re not very lively on the base of our pelvis.
It’s typical to sit on the back of the sitting bones and sacrum. And the spine has to round, and then, the neck juts forward to accommodate the pelvis. (And we stay here for most of the day, get up and stretch, and then resume this position.)
When we’re sitting rigidly, movement is not possible and that’s when the muscles of our back, neck, shoulders and hips have to work overtime to hold us up in gravity.
We get stuck in our chairs and over time, that teaches us that we need to use muscles to deal with sitting instead of our bones. To learn how you can easily set up your work space for the healthiest alignment for your specific body, click here.
We think we need to keep something “engaged” to protect ourselves or keep ourselves upright (like “engaging our core” or back, neck or shoulder muscles).
So what is the solution to sitting without back pain?
Learning to be more mobile from the base of the pelvis and sitting bones, up through the spine willl allow the musculature to be free to act or respond to each moment. The more able your pelvis is able to move in all the directions, the freer your spine (back and neck) will be and the less muscular contraction and effort is needed. To learn more about how to sit in a chair comfortably to prevent back pain, click here.
If you’d like to learn more about how to sit so that your neck, shoulders and back can be comfortable and pain-free, please check out this 90-minute workshop.
8 Surprising Benefits from This One Easy Restorative Yoga Pose
One of my favorite restorative yoga poses is Supported Child’s Pose! This restorative pose allows you to stay in it for a bit longer than the version without props, and provides all the amazing benefits of the more athletic version without any discomfort.
One of my favorite restorative yoga poses is Supported Child’s Pose!
This restorative pose allows you to stay in it for a bit longer than the version without props, and provides all the amazing benefits of the more athletic version without any discomfort.
Some benefits of Child’s Pose:
Gentle stretching of the hips, thighs, and ankles
Stress and anxiety relief
Relieves fatigue
Regulates the nervous system (To learn more about your nervous system in general, click here.)
Improves mental focus
Supports the belly, heart and head
Relieves back pain
Relaxes the muscles onn the front of the body
Passively and gently stretches the muscles on the back of the body
To get into this pose, follow these steps:
Set up your bolster or stack of blankets on the floor in front of you.
Come onto your knees with your big toes together and knees wide apart behind your bolster.
Straddle your bolster. If this isn’t comfortable on your knees, you can place another blanket or rolled towel in the crease between your calves and thighs. If this is uncomfortable on your ankles, place a rolled towel underneath your ankles so that your feet drape over the towel.
Drape you torso over the bolster and rest your head on one side. The pose should start out completely comfortable so make sure you tuck a towel underneath the side of your head or face if you feel any tension in your neck.
If your shoulders and hips are not in the same plane, add another folded blanket on top of the bolster to add height.
Rest your elbows on the floor. If they don’t rest comfortably, place additional towels or pillows underneath your arms and hands.
Rest in supported Child’s pose for 2-3 minutes and then turn your head to face in the other direction for another 2-3 minutes.
Before you come out of the pose completely, rest your forehead on the bolster in neutral position for a few moments.
Enjoy this pose whenever you feel stressed or need to rest your back.
And while you’re here, grab your FREE “Calm your Stress” audio recording of a gentle exercise to do right before bed so that you fall asleep easily!
3 Tips for Recovering Your Body, Mind, and Nervous System
It’s often overwhelming to figure out the next steps to take to recover and restore yourself. Now, over 3 years later, I recommend a triad approach that includes emotional/mental, medical/functional medicine and physical/nervous system repair.
When I emerged from an extremely challenging, traumatic life experience, I was overwhelmed. I wasn’t sure who to turn to for support. I tried a bunch of different practitioners who seemed to help with one aspect of my healing or another, and although their intentions were good, I didn’t feel as though I was improving at all.
There are many different versions of “challenging life experiences” can leave you feeling the effects of a dysregulated nervous system. Whether your challenging life experience is an abusive relationship, like mine was, the devastating loss of a loved one, being a caretaker for someone who’s ill and living in fearful expectation of that next lab test result, going through a contentious divorce where you feel attacked legally, financially and emotionally, a pandemic where you’ve been isolated and fearful for a period of time.
It’s often overwhelming to figure out the next steps to take to recover and restore yourself.
I know that I personally wasted too much time trying to handle things on my own and trying piece together solutions.
Now, over 3 years later, I recommend a triad approach that includes emotional/mental, medical/functional medicine and physical/nervous system repair:
1. Emotional/mental/subconscious healing support:
Find a good therapist who has been educated in trauma AND your specific situation. Whether you experienced narcissistic abuse, death of a loved one, divorce, or being a long-term caretaker—you need to be heard and validated.
The most helpful therapist I went do didn’t have the highest credentials — she had been through and survived what I was going through.
If your practitioner doesn’t understand the specific dynamic of your situation, keep looking. Ask for an initial complimentary interview and get a sense of the person. It might take several paid visits to get a deeper sense of whether it’s a good fit. If it’s not, cut your losses and move on. It’s okay to be discerning and it’s okay to spend some money and time figuring it out.
In addition to more traditional therapy, I currently also work with someone who helps remove subconscious blocks so that I can explore what my own emotional patterns throughout my life have been that would have lead me to an experience like narcissistic abuse. This would also fall under this category of emotional/mental/subconscious healing support.
My advice is to initially seek to feel stability in yourself again. You can add on later if you’d like to continue and deepen your self study.
2. Medical/functional medicine + nutritional support:
Find a good functional medicine doctor. Although I did start with my primary care practitioner, I was told that the extreme exhaustion I was experiencing was in my head and further testing wasn’t ordered.
Two years later, I found a functional medicine doctor who believed me when I told her I could barely move. Once she ordered the proper tests and a realistic baseline was established, I had a plan to improve and I began to feel better. For me, it was important to use holistic methods to heal and this practitioner was a good fit for me. You have to find someone with whom you feel comfortable, and a method that resonates with you.
Healing from a stressful life experience can be a slow process. It took time to get where you are now; it takes a bit of time to get better.
I highly recommend that you find someone who can give you nutritional support as well. If your health care practitioner can’t give you specific support, I would hire an expert who only focuses on eating to support your nervous system, your hormones, your adrenals, or wherever you need support. See my blog post on foods to calm your nervous system.
3. Physical + Nervous System repair:
This is a critical piece of information so if you’re skimming, please back up and read this carefully….
If you’ve recently been through a challenging life event, then you’ve probably not been nurturing yourself for awhile. In fact, the idea of that might make you uncomfortable.
Pushing yourself to run or power walk or “work out” or even practice a vigorous form of yoga is NOT nurturing if you’re exhausted and your body aches.
Find a physical component that nurtures you. I was fortunate to have Feldenkrais as a practice I could rely on. I did some yoga, but at the beginning, it took too much energy that I didn’t have. Even a few sun salutations felt like too much. I craved something more nurturing for my body — something that connected me to myself, and included the physical component. Meditation is good, but it doesn’t move energy in the same way as a physical practice.
Connecting to your physical body is critical — now especially.
The main reason Feldenkrais worked for me is because it involves physical movements and works with the nervous system. I was able to regulate and release any physical tension at the same time. After each session or class I felt as if I’d had a really good massage and felt emotionally calmer and at peace. My mental clarity improved substantially.
I took group classes as well as worked with a practitioner, but looking back it was the group classes that empowered me and gave me on-going tools to calm my nervous system by myself.
To conclude, anyone who has recently moved on from an emotionally and mentally stressful life experience may find themselves continuing to feel unexpectedly depleted. Begin with a triad of support — the right expert who can support you mentally/emotionally, the right expert who can support you medically but in a way that is all-inclusive and resonates with your values, and some sort of gentle physical or somatic method that addresses your body and regulates your nervous system so that you can reconnect with your body and feel stable and safe again.
Here is a beautiful nurturing audio lesson that will give you a taste of what it feels like to calm your nervous system while making small, gentle, slow movements of your body. Lie on the floor or your bed, remove distractions, and enjoy.
What If You Could Change Your Muscle Tension Patterns for Good?
All of these therapies are amazing and all of them help us feel better … temporarily. But addressing chronic muscle tension via the muscles is like trying to clean a dirt spot off your face by wiping the mirror.
Emotional tension — better known as stress, anxiety, worry, and fear — actually BECOMES muscle tension.
Most of us agree with this statement, to varying degrees.
We have a general sense that our bodies and minds are connected. We know or have heard that meditation helps calm our blood pressure. We all understand to some degree that chronic stress isn’t good for us and that it causes physical symptoms that aren’t pleasant.
We try a myriad of therapies and practices to alleviate the muscle tension at the area of the tight muscles.
Massage helps us feel better for about 3 days. I know this because I’m a massage therapist and I love helping people feel relaxed and restored.
Physical therapists give exercises to redistribute the responsibility of the overworking muscle. I know this can help, depending on your practitioner, but for how long?
We do yoga and stretch out our muscles and feel good.
But have you noticed how the tension comes back if you miss your regular practice schedule?
All of these therapies are amazing and all of them help us feel better … temporarily.
“But addressing chronic muscle tension via the muscles is like trying to clean a dirt spot off your face by wiping the mirror. ”
What if we were to address the muscle tension at the root cause of the tension? What if we could change our habitual muscle tension patterns for good?
In order to make lasting change in muscle tension or pain, you have to go to the source of the problem.
I propose that working with the nervous system directly is working with the root of chronically tight muscles.
The brain and nervous system are where the instructions to tense and contract the your muscles originate, and that’s where they can be turned off.
Here’s an example of how mental tension — in this case, extreme worry and anxiety — might play out in your body.
Let’s say you went through a pandemic.
You spent over a year worrying about your health, your family’s health, your job, your kids’ school and social situation, your family’s mental well being. You felt isolated because you weren’t seeing friends and you lost your usual way of managing your stress.
When you left the house, you were on high alert — scanning the grocery store for who was nearby, did they have a mask on, are they too close to you? When you brought groceries home you felt worried because you didn’t know if you were washing them well enough….and this went on for awhile.
Your nervous system was in survival mode pretty consistently for 6-12 months.
When you’re stressed for a period of time, you practice certain familiar muscular contraction patterns throughout your body.
Nerve cells continue to wire in a certain predictable stress pattern called neural pathways. The stressful feeling happens and then its corresponding habitual muscle contraction happens. Over and over and over again.
This means that if your habitually take on stress by clenching your jaw or grinding your teeth, you end up worsening your jaw tension, TMJ symptoms, and headaches.
If your tendency is to round your shoulders, then you practice your habit and create more neck and shoulder tension or pain.
If you tend to contract your belly, you probably also are not taking full deep breaths because your abdomen is contracted, your diaphragm is not moving freely, and your shoulders are rounded forwards. It’s a predictable stress muscular pattern.
We can’t control or change these patterns by forcing ourselves to have “better posture.” These become habits of contraction that happen unconsciously each time we feel anxious or stressed.
The way to unwind these patterns for good is through your nervous system — the same way they were formed in the first place.
To conclude, it’s no secret that our physical bodies are directly affected by chronic stress that we experience emotionally and mentally. We can find temporary relief by working directly with the muscles involved, but relief only lasts for a short time. To find long term relief, we have to unwind the habitual unconscious muscle contraction patterns through the same path tension was created in the first place — through our nervous system.
Here’s a free audio lesson that will help calm your stress and relax your muscles overall. Simply lie on your back on the floor or your bed and eliminate any distractions for 15 minutes. You’ll find that by doing these small, slow, gentle movements as instructed, you’ll feel mentally AND physically relaxed and calm.
Here's How to Up Your Self Care Game with This Simple Pose
Are you feeling tight in your legs, hips or back? Do you feet hurt? Maybe you pushed a bit too hard on that run or sat at your desk longer than usual.
Are you feeling tight in your legs, hips or back? Do you feet hurt?
Maybe you pushed a bit too hard on that run or sat at your desk longer than usual.
In any case, if you’re feeling tight and achy in your legs, seat or back, here’s a simple and classic yoga pose called Viparita Karani (or “Legs up the wall”) to restore your body in 20 minutes.
To learn more about what “self care” really means, and how to tailor some practices for your own life based on what is truly meaningful for you, click here to read “What Is Self Care? How to Prioritize Your Wellbeing in Daily Life.”
To get into this pose, follow these steps:
Sit with your right side against the wall, with bent knees and your feet drawn in toward your hips.
Swing your legs up against the wall as you turn your torso to lie flat on your back.
Place your hips against the wall or slightly away. If your hamstrings are a bit tighter, move away from the wall and allow your knees to bend. You can place a pillow between your knees and the wall so your knees don’t hyperextend.
Place your arms in any comfortable position. (They can be on your belly, or one hand on your heart and one hand on your belly. Or both arms can be on the floor.)
You can use an eye pillow if you like.
Now here's the difficult part: just lie there — maybe listen to music or a podcast — but stay there for at least 15-20 minutes to allow gravity to work and allow your muscles and joints to relax.
To release the pose, gently push yourself away from the wall.
Relax on your back for a few moments.
Draw your knees into your chest and roll onto your right side. Rest for a few moments before slowly moving into an upright position.
Some benefits of the Legs-Up-the-Wall are to:
relax your mind
regulate your nervous system
relieve leg and feet cramps
improve circulation
promote lymph flow
manage varicose veins
relieve headaches or migraines
increase energy
As with any yoga pose, there may be some contraindications. Check with your health care provider if you have hypertension, glaucoma or hernias. You may want to avoid inversions if you are on your menstrual cycle.
And that's it! Do this a few times a week to allow your body to rest and recover. If you’re traveling and doing a lot of walking, do this when you return back to your Airbnb or hotel room, before going out for dinner!
For added relaxation, grab your FREE “Calm your Stress” audio recording here!
The Myth About Core Strengthening and Why It Might Not Help Lower Back Pain
80% of adults experience low back pain sometime in their lives. According to physical therapist, Dr. Tim Sobie, the most common treatments include prescription medicines, chiropractic treatments, or physical therapy with a focus on what is called “core stabilization.”
80% of adults experience low back pain sometime in their lives.
According to physical therapist, Dr. Tim Sobie, the most common treatments include prescription medicines, chiropractic treatments, or physical therapy with a focus on what is called “core stabilization.”
The “theory” behind core stabilization is that if you focus on strengthening your deep trunk muscles, you will be able to utilize your “core” more, and put less strain on your back.
But Dr. Sobie says that more often than not, these exercises don’t work because they are “one size fits all.” Each person’s history and reason for low back pain come from a unique set of variables.
He explains that these “core stabilization” exercises are designed to assume a “specific correction” for an assumed “specific cause.”
He goes on to say that “statistics have shown that 9 out of ten people who experience back pain never find out the primary cause of their back pain, despite going to from doctor to doctor, and getting varied opinions, while also getting various treatments. Among these opinions, the idea of ‘deficient core strength’ remains most common.”
But, strengthening the core muscles does not mean you can use them efficiently.
In fact, over strengthening the muscles of the abdomen can actually have negative consequences if the muscles don’t “know” how to coordinate with the rest of a persons’ body.
I experienced this myself as a 6-day/week vigorous yoga practitioner with a 6-pack that was basically useless in terms of functionality.
It’s the relationship of all of the muscles together that allows us to function efficiently and without pain, not the strength of one muscle or muscle group.
Muscles need to move and bend, and be flexible, and this can’t happen when one muscle group is in a tense and contracted state.
When we get into the habit of over-contracting in one area like the abdomen, it interferes with our true, coordinated strength.
Simply strengthening abdominal muscles will not improve motor skills.
The Brain is the control center of muscular tension
The brain will always find a way for a person to be functional.
If someone has had an injury, then the brain goes to work to create homeostasis throughout the entire person, including the musculoskeletal system. We adapt to these compensation patterns and they feel “normal” to us. As time goes on, these compensation patterns begin to cause discomfort.
What is needed at this point — when there’s discomfort in the form of chronic muscle tension or pain — is a way to reorganize from unhealthy unconscious muscle contraction patterns to new, healthier muscular patterns.
Feldenkrais is a method to reorganize neuromuscular patterns— or release the unconsciously held muscular contractions that the brain has put in place to stabilize an entire person when it perceived instability.
“If you’re looking for a viable alternative to core stabilization, a recent clinical study by my research facility has shed light on perhaps a more effective option: The Feldenkrais Method®,” writes Dr. Sobie.
“Our study’s results revealed that a novel eight-week Feldenkrais Method-based treatment approach demonstrated greater effectiveness across all relevant outcome measures for:
1. decreasing pain,
2. decreasing perceived disability,
3. increasing function, and
4. increasing endurance”
In conclusion, the accepted common treatments for back pain include strengthening the core. We, as a society, seem to blindly accept this view. But upon looking more closely, a “strong core” may not deserve as much merit as it’s been given across the board. Muscle tension and pain is a symptom of overall imbalance in the system and the brain — the controller of the entire body — is the link to the source of this tension.
If you’d like to experience for yourself how it feels to release muscle tension and improve flexibility in your spine effortlessly, gently, and quickly, I invite you to try this audio lesson. All you need is a chair with a firm surface, and minimal distractions. You’ll be twisting and turning effortlessly, without using your muscles, in 15 minutes or less.
Source: https://www.feldenkraisguild.com/article_content.asp?edition=§ion=&article=478&page=2#comments
4 Warning Signs Your Body is Reacting to Stress - Don't Ignore These Physical Symptoms
Most of us believe that when we finally leave an intensely stressful situation, life will be so much better in all the ways. And while it’s true that it’s a relief to not have the original stressors to deal with on a daily or hourly basis, the journey has, in some ways, only just begun.
Most of us believe that when we finally leave an intensely stressful situation, life will be so much better in all the ways.
And while it’s true that it’s a relief to not have the original stressors to deal with on a daily or hourly basis, the journey has, in some ways, only just begun.
In any life situation where you’ve experienced the feeling of not knowing when that next stressful moment will occur––whether you’ve been in an abusive relationship of some nature; you’ve been the caretaker for your loved one and have lived day-to-day, waiting for the phone to ring with more test results; or you’ve gone through a contentious divorce with an anxiety-producing legal battle––your nervous system and your entire body has been deeply affected.
Now that the “cause” of your stress has been removed from your life (and perhaps replaced by other emotions like grief, etc.), you’re left to put yourself back together again. And this can be complex and overwhelming to figure out on your own.
When you’ve been living in a cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol, you will likely be left with health concerns and you might not have even connected them to your stressful life situation.
For example, once I was out of my abusive day to day situation, I was exhausted. I spent most of the next two years lying on the couch in my spare time. Following my departure from my abusive situation, my commute was a 15 minute walk through Capitol Hill to my DC office. I had to leave 30 minutes early so that I could lie down before seeing my first client.
After seeking medical help and being told “it was all in my head,” and I needed to relax, I finally found a functional medicine doctor who agreed to do some more detailed blood tests. I learned that my adrenals were scrapping by. Apparently living in a hormonal cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol takes it toll. It’s taken me several years of conscious eating specific to my condition and rest to support my adrenals. A qualified practitioner guided me to regain my energy.
Some people find their hormones are completely out of wack after a chronic stressful situation. Others have elevated symptoms of fibromyalgia or autoimmune diseases or joint pain.
Many people are left with relentless chronic muscle tension or pain. This can show up in many different ways — one might not even think it’s related to muscle tension.
1.
Common “muscle tension” from stress and anxiety can look like:
Jaw pain or TMJ symptoms
Neck and shoulder pain
Back or pelvis pain
2.
But other, less obvious muscle-tension issues can show up as headaches or migraines. When the larger and small muscles of your neck and head contract, this can cause issues you might think are unrelated. You might think all you need to do is stretch or have deep pressure in the specific areas of discomfort. Unfortunately this will not give you lasting relief.
3.
Some people find they have digestive issues, and this can also be related to muscle tension. The parasympathetic nervous system is designed to “rest and digest,” but when we’re chronically stuck in the sympathetic response, “fight or flight,” our digestion isn’t able to function in a healthy way.
4.
Insomnia can be another result of a dysregulated nervous system. And lack of sleep creates other health concerns.
Most physical issues can be linked back to a nervous system that is not functioning optimally because of chronic stress and anxiety. This is the time we need the most support and it’s also the time we’re least able to think clearly or take action to help ourselves.
But the root cause of the physical symptoms is a dysregulated nervous system that has been in fight flight response for a long period of time. Chronic stress responses, including muscle contraction, have been practiced over and over again.
Of course you want relief, however the most efficient way to relieve multiple symptoms at once is to calm your nervous system at the level of your body.
Please see my blog post “Recovering your mind, body and nervous system” to learn more about how to cover all bases when you get out of the situation and want an efficient plan to help move yourself forward the most efficiently and in a timely way.
Please try this audio recording to calm your stress and anxiety. Even if you don’t have stress, you might find you feel calmer, physically relaxed, and at peace!
How to Cultivate Inner Strength with Being Easeful
When I was younger I was able to power my way through anything — I was physically strong and was proud of this quality. I was mentally strong and when challenges arose, I met them head on. I started 3 separate businesses–two while raising 3 children and taking care of my family while my husband at the time traveled internationally frequently for his job.
When I was younger I was able to power my way through anything — I was physically strong and was proud of this quality. I was mentally strong and when challenges arose, I met them head on. I started 3 separate businesses–two while raising 3 children and taking care of my family while my husband at the time traveled internationally frequently for his job. We moved across the country 3 times in six years and I managed each move from start to finish, practiced vigorous sweaty yoga 90-minutes/day, 6 times/week. I was strong and efficient and capable and could handle anything!
But in the past few years I’ve been brought to my knees.
Besides being older and having less energy, I’ve been through some pretty darn challenging life events that left me holding relentless tension in my body from anxiety and chronic stress. I’m slowly recovering from adrenal exhaustion and I’m having to find a new way to live and to be — a way where I don’t have to force my way through challenging physical and emotional situations.
It’s a scary proposition to not be able to rely on my own ability to power through life.
Perhaps you can relate to some of this.
And although, I can’t say I like having to change my ways, this is what I’m discovering….
Being easeful is actually powerful
In my Feldenkrais practice—as a teacher, practitioner, and student—I’ve learned to make very slow, small movements within my own range of comfort. I pay attention to my physical sensations as I move.
I’ve learned to observe where I feel muscular resistance and effort or thoughts that tell me to “try harder” or “do more,” to make the movement I’m practicing “happen.”
When I sense I’m contracting muscles to make these small, gentle movements, then I do even less and go more slowly.
And the paradoxical thing that happens is, within a few minutes, the ease of this movement improves and the range spontaneously becomes bigger. On it’s own. With no help or forcing or managing or “pushing through” on my part.
In fact, if I do “help” or “force,” the improvement doesn’t happen.
This is the same principle applies when a client is on my treatment table. I’m listening with my hands for what range and trajectory of movement is completely easeful for the person. And as I join her nervous system, with no agenda on my part, she suddenly has more movement and mobility available. Muscular contraction melts away almost spontaneously.
The work is easeful and the results are powerful.
In other words, in order to have a powerful result, I must practice ease.
Last weekend on a hike in Boulder, I felt my energy was low. My legs felt heavy and my breathing felt forced. Initially I walked quickly and was pushing myself, berating myself for not going faster.
And then I remembered the process of Feldenkrais and thought “Is it possible to create power ease-fully?”
I slowed my steps way down, to the point where I was breathing easily and my pace felt effortless. I started to look at the flowers and my surroundings. I stopped for water breaks frequently and to breathe in nature. I didn’t allow myself to feel tired or as if I was pushing myself at all.
And I gave myself this leeway without judgement or it needing to be different.
At around my turn-around point, 45 minutes into my hike, I noticed that my pace had become much faster — effortlessly. I wasn’t tired at all and I was breathing evenly. I had energy and my hips and legs felt light and loose.
I can only conclude that this phenomenon is somehow related to what happens on the treatment table— that the nervous system is involved in all aspects of life, movement, thinking, and manifesting.
In other words, ease creates power in more areas than the physical.
My practice this week has been to notice when situations arise that cause me stress (which is multiple times each day in the world of an entrepreneur).
Initially, I observe myself automatically go to: overwhelm, anger, fear of not being able to handle something, self pity, forcing my way, overexerting, overworking, and so on.
And then I remember to ask myself: how can I create the possibility of ease and power?
I want to spread this quality of ease into my daily life and trust it in the same way I trust this process when I work with people in my practice.
So, the next time a stressful situation comes up for you, try noticing what your habitual thoughts and emotions are. It’s likely that you, like me, respond this way every single time you face a stressful situation.
It’s an opportunity to ask yourself how you might create the possibility for ease in this situation? Where might you do less? And observe if somehow, a sense of power arises that you never expected or could have anticipated while doing things your habitual way.
To learn more about how The Feldenkrais Method® works, click here.
Want to Beat Insomnia? Here's the System You Need For Better Sleep
We lie down in a comfortable position, close our eyes and for many humans, this is sufficient to create the internal and physical conditions necessary for sleep.
We lie down in a comfortable position, close our eyes and for many humans, this is sufficient to create the internal and physical conditions necessary for sleep.
In order to fall asleep, there must be an overall decrease in metabolic activity. Physiological and psychological stimulation needs to be reduced. Muscles relax, and this signals the brain that its functions are not required for the time being. Oxygen consumption is reduced, blood pressure and heart rate are reduced, and body temperature is reduced, compared to sitting or standing.
When we close our eyes, light is blocked out out, decreasing environmental stimuli.
Yet, simply lying down and closing your eyes isn’t always sufficient, especially when we’re under stress — particularly unremitting or chronic stress and hypervigilance, or feeling like in order to stay safe, you have to be on alert. To learn more about what the physical symptoms of anxiety or hypervigilance feel like in your body, click here.
When stress is present, it produces a heightened sense of arousal — increased mentally and physically. Relentless stress produces excessive, unremitting arousal — or “hyperarousal.”
The Sounder Sleep System is a natural and effective way to beat insomnia
Michael Krugman, creator of The Sounder Sleep System, writes “we cannot maintain a state of arousal all day long and then expect to turn it off instantly at bedtime. The body doesn’t work that way. The stress we endure during waking hours persists through bedtime and beyond, delaying sleep onset, causing shallow, fragmented sleep or both.”
In other words, we have to be well-rested in order to be able to sleep.
(And we need to be calm and not stressed in order to be well-rested.)
Krugman, a teacher of The Feldenkrais Method®, and an insomniac for much of his life, put 3 related types of practices together that involve bodily movements, the ability to pay attention to and sense these movements, and the breath.
Over a period of 3 weeks he was able to produce improved sleep, as well as tools to relieve stress and anxiety during the day (which, he says, is the primary cause of insomnia for most people).
1. Breathing
The first component of Krugman’s system is designed to restore the natural rhythm, pattern and pleasure of the breath, which for most people, has been lost as a result of chronic stress. This gentle breath awareness practice provides a foundation for the other components of the system.
It’s a common recommendation in our society to be encouraged to breath deeply when stressed, but this is not utilized in this effective practice. When we take big deep breaths, we’re communicating the message to our NS that we need to prepare for action — we breathe deeply when we need power. This is the opposite of what we’re looking to do when we prepare to relax or sleep.
Instead, Krugman uses gentle, natural breathing as the foundation of his system. He called this breathing “Guided Natural Breathing.”
2. Daytime Relaxation Practices
In addition to natural breathing, daytime relaxation practices are the second component of the Sounder Sleep System. They’re designed to actively offset the constant stress of living and calm the hyper-arousal that can delay the onset of sleep or make sleep shallow and fragmented. These are done for short periods of time, a few times each day, either sitting up or lying down.
Practicing these during the day actually set the scene for easier, more restful sleep at night. By practicing these short movements during the day, you’re essentially “training” your nervous system to regulate during the day, when there’s no pressure to sleep.
3. bedtime relaxation practices
The third component of this system are special movement practices done when lying on your back or your side, in your bed. They help you fall asleep and if you awaken during the night, they help you get back to sleep with ease.
Both the daytime relaxation practices and bedtime relaxation practices include movements of your hands, eyes, lips, and tongue. The hands, mouth and tongue take up 70% of the sensory cortical real estate in your brain, which makes these tiny movements extremely effective for calming your nervous system overall.
In conclusion, you have to be rested in order to get a good night’s sleep. Going to bed in the same stressed state you’ve been experiencing during the day, doesn’t set you up for good sleep. But practicing tools to decrease stress and regulate your nervous system during the day, will help you create the inner environment for peaceful sleep.
How to Harness the Power of Food to Regulate Your Nervous System
What you eat makes a difference in your mood.
If you’re stressed or anxious, then it’s even more critical to nourish yourself in a healthy way. But unfortunately, many of us use our chronic stress as an excuse to overindulge in foods we know are bad for us.
What you eat makes a difference in your mood.
If you’re stressed or anxious, then it’s even more critical to nourish yourself in a healthy way as part of your regular self care practice. But unfortunately, many of us use our chronic stress as an excuse to overindulge in foods we know are bad for us.
Holistic chef and food for life coach, Cheryl Rojic is an expert in creating individualized healthy eating plans to lower stress and improve immune function.
Some foods Cheryl highly suggests avoiding food with the following, especially if you’re experiencing chronic long term stress:
Highly processed foods,
Foods loaded with sugar,
Artificial flavors and colors
Non-food substances or chemicals
She says that these choices are linked to poor gut health, which plays a critical role of the healthy functioning of the nervous system. The gut strongly influences the functioning of the brain and how we handle stress, both physically and mentally.
“Let’s use sugar for an example,” says Rojic. “Many of us indulge in sugary processed carbohydrates in times of stress – a candy bar, baked goods, alcohol. High levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, usually result in an amino acid deficiency which in turn causes those cravings for sugary, as well as fatty, foods.
“To further the negative affects of cortisol, it leads to the body creating new fat cells, enlarges fat cells, and even increases how much fatty tissue your body stores, especially belly fat.
“This stubborn belly fat in turn releases cortisol – if someone is chronically stressed, it’s nearly non-stop. And this cortisol causes even more cravings for sugar and fat.”
Rojic suggests that choosing foods to support gut health and blood sugar will help to balance cortisol (the stress hormone) levels in the body.
She recommends these foods that can help put an end to the rise in cortisol and control blood sugar spikes:
Complex carbohydrates: sweet potatoes, quinoa, beans, nuts, oats and seeds. These “comfort foods” actually promote production of serotonin, the “happy hormone.”
Foods rich in Vitamin C, such as red or orange bell peppers, strawberries and cauliflower.
Dark leafy greens are loaded with protein, calcium and magnesium, a mineral that promotes a relaxed state. Folate, in those leafy greens, as well as in asparagus, is essential for a calm feeling.
Berries are rich in phytonutrients and antioxidants that fight free radicals and help to balance mood. Even one square of high quality, pure dark chocolate (72% cacao or higher), reduces cortisol and increases serotonin.
In conclusion, the connection between food and stress and anxiety is a vicious cycle. We tend to eat the worst when we’re chronically stressed, but what we eat is essential to managing our stress, lowering stress hormones, and regulating blood sugar.
Cheryl Rojic is a holistic chef and food for life coach, serving up inspiration to change the way we nourish body, mind and heart. From simmer to boil, she will help sift out and render key ingredients to create a recipe for better health. As a thriving two-time cancer survivor, Cheryl has been dishing up plant-strong deliciousness with classes and gatherings for nearly 20 years.
3 Ways to Regulate Your Nervous System When You're Stressed
It can take less than 20 minutes to feel calm, relaxed muscles, easy breathing, calmer mind, at peace, and balanced emotionally.
It can take less than 20 minutes to feel calmer, have more relaxed muscles, breathe more freely, have a calmer mind, feel at peace, and feel more balanced emotionally.
Three of the most effective ways to come back into a parasympathetic (rest and digest) state involve your hands, your mouth and your breathing.
Your mouth, tongue, and jaw take up 35% of real estate in the sensory part of your brain and your hands take up another 35%. (It’s surprising to learn that the entire rest of your body only takes up the remaining 30%!) This means that these areas have the most influence over your mood and sense of well-being.
So it makes sense to work with one or both of the areas of your body that are the most sensitive, or available to sensing, in order to make the biggest improvements to calm you down, in the quickest and most efficient way.
Below are 3 self care practices for you to try. See if one of these helps you feel grounded, calmer, more physically relaxed, and able to breathe more naturally and freely. To learn more about what constitutes a “self care practice,” click here.
1. Natural Breathing
Many people recommend breathing deeply when there’s stress, to calm your nervous system and send the message to your brain and body that all is well, but I recommend natural, easy breathing.
If you think about it, deep breathing is what we do when there’s a big task to accomplish or when we have to prepare for action or have to exert ourselves. But natural, relaxed, easy breathing signals the body and brain that all is well.
Practice:
Lie on your back either on the floor or on your bed, and get comfortable. You can bend your knees and stand your feet or put a bolster underneath your knees.
Rather than having your head on a pillow, see if you can rest your head on a folded flat towel or folded yoga blanket so that your forehead and chin are on the same horizontal plane, and your throat is open (rather than your throat closed and your chin tilted lower than your forehead).
Relax your tongue and your jaw.
Follow your breathing. Notice if you’re breathing at all or if your breath is shallow. Simply follow your breathing. Don’t worry if your breath is shallow or uneven or if there are long gaps between each breath. Simply allow your body to inhale and exhale at its own pace.
Your brain knows how much oxygen your body needs at any given time. You’ll find that your breathing isn’t always even. It varies. Sometimes you may need more breath and sometimes it will be shallow. Sometimes you’ll notice a big space between breaths and sometimes your breath will quicken.
At first it will feel difficult and you’ll be tempted to control your inhales and exhales or do a pranayama breathing practice or yoga breathing that you’re already familiar with. But see if you can come back to your natural, uncontrolled breathing. You’re only observing — not forcing or making anything happen.
2. Hand Movements
As I mentioned above, because your hands take up 35% of your sensory brain space, your hands are extremely effective in lowering stress generally throughout your body.
Rolling your hands practice instructions:
Lie on your back either on the floor or on your bed, and have your legs long or bend your knees. You can also place a bolster under your knees — whatever you need to do to feel really comfortable. See #1 for recommendations regarding a pillow.
These movements are to be done very, very slowly, very small, only in the range that is completely comfortable (no stretching or straining or forcing), pause between each movement before doing the next, and rest as often as you like.
3. Mouth and Tongue Movements
As I mentioned earlier, your mouth, jaw and tongue also take up 35% of your sensory cortical space. Many people hold tension in their jaw, tongue, face and neck. This practice will not only help you release any unconsciously held tension in your mouth and jaw, but generally, throughout your entire body, as well.
In conclusion, these three, very efficient and effective ways to immediately relieve stress and regulate your nervous system involve observing your natural breathing, and sensing yourself as you make gentle, small, slow movements with your hands and mouth.
The above two audio recordings are from The Feldenkrais Method®, a somatic practice that helps people regulate their nervous system and let go of unconsciously held muscle tension patterns. To learn more about The Feldenkrais Method®, click here.
If you enjoyed these practices, and would like more information about online classes or working together, please email me.
What Does Anxiety Do to Your Body? Look Out for These Patterns
Stress and anxiety are completely normal. The universal response to a difficult situation or to perceived threats are common to every person.
When you find yourself in a stressed or anxious state, there is a typical “body pattern” that takes place unconsciously—a general set of muscular contractions that are linked to each other and affect a person’s entire body. This physical pattern is universal to all humans.
In fact, this general pattern of muscle tension is innate—that is, we’re born with it!
Physical pattern of stress and anxiety
The pattern looks something like this:
• There is a tendency to round forward: shoulders round forward (protectively), our entire spine/back rounds, and we roll slightly backwards on the pelvis into a sort of “pelvic tilt.”
• On the back of our body, we feel this as pulling or muscular tension in various areas of the back: neck, shoulders, shoulder blades, mid/lower back, pelvis/hip tightness or pain, sciatica.
• This rounded muscle pattern in the back on the body creates an opposite pattern In the front of our body. We feel tightness in our throat or chest and our chest stiffens, which also changes our breathing to be shallow (because our diaphragm is contracted from the rounding forward), our abdominal muscles contract (which often shows up as digestive discomfort).
• Because we organize our entire body around where our eyes are looking, our head comes forward and down and our neck muscles strain to hold our heavy head in this position. This contracts the muscle tension around the face and jaw, and vision can be affected
In other words, this innate physical pattern of stress and anxiety affects the movement in our back, neck and shoulders and jaw, as well as our freedom in breathing and digestion.
This muscular pattern is common in every person.
This becomes a problem for us when stress or anxiety occurs over a period of time. We unconsciously habituate toward this restrained state of tension, contraction and restricted mobility.
Over time, it becomes painful. And when these unconscious stress response patterns are practiced over and over again, it reinforces in the brain (and neural pathways) that this stressful situation is still present, even if that situation happened five or even twently years ago.
We develop this muscular situation and have adapted to it over time, so we forgot what it feels like to feel comfortable and loose and easeful in our bodies. We’ve forgotten what easy breathing is and what feeling freedom in movement is like.
We’ve unconsciously created a habit of being stressed muscularly.
The good news is that as human beings, we’re very good at creating habits, and because of something called neural plasticity—the ability for our brains to change—we can also change muscle contraction habits to something more functional and healthy.
Our brain and nervous system is extraordinary and capable of change.
Our brain only needs to be reminded of a healthier, more efficient way becayse our nervous system is attracted to feeling better and will always move in this direction of health when given the option to do so.
How do you do this?
You begin to learn how to observe where you feel these unconscious contractions in your body that have become a habit over time, and then you can learn to organize yourself to move away from these habitual stress patterns and to move toward ease and relief.
The Feldenkrais Method® is one effective way to change these old unhealthy unconscious muscle tension patters to new, healthier patterns. When taking group classes or working privately with a practitioner, you learn to make small, slow movements and pay attention to what you sense and feel in your body as you do them. The movements themselves are less important than your ability to pay attention to where you feel the slightest bit of resistance or tightness or discomfort. And then you make the movement even smaller and slower and, almost spontaneously, you find that the ease and comfort of the movement improves. Your brain takes in this sensory information and processes it, and then immediately comes up with a more efficient way for you to move with ease.
When you become aware of what it is that you’re doing, you’re able to interrupt what you do. That habitual thing you’ve done for years or even decades suddenly becomes responsive to change.
It seems almost “magical,” but the brain in nothing less than brilliant!
Maybe you’ve forgotten what it’s like to feel better.
You want to be able to bring yourself back to a state of homeostasis — a state where you’re able to restore yourself–to a calm alertness vs. an anxious alertness.
In conclusion, many of us experience chronic stress and anxiety and so many of us hold this muscular tension unconsciously in our bodies in very predictable patterns that we practice continuously for many years.
We’re not doing something wrong—what we’re doing simply doesn’t serve us anymore.
We don’t even realize these are the contraction patterns that are causing us pain after time, because they’ve become so “normal” to us. But this is not a life sentence! These patterns can be released.
Our brain and nervous system is always working in our best interest. Our nervous system must be made aware of the patterns, and then be presented with other, healthier options.
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Empower Your Body: Understanding the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Nervous Systems
We have two main aspects of our autonomic nervous system that both perform very different functions.
We have two main aspects of our autonomic nervous system that both perform very different functions.
Sympathetic Nervous System
The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the stress response. We commonly know it as fight, flight and freeze. It’s a survival mechanism. When you experience a threat, your body tells you to take action in one of these ways.
Some ways your body creates energy to deal with this perceived or real threat is:
Quickened breath and heart rate
Tensing muscles
Sweat
High blood pressure and more blood flow to your organs
Expanding blood vessels to allow you to get more blood flow and oxygen
Heightened senses
Release of blood sugar and fats from the body’s stores to be used for energy
Increased Cortisol levels (stress hormone)
If we remain in this sympathetic state longterm, we’re then in a chronic stress state, and this has longterm effects that we definitely want to avoid.
This is where the parasympathetic nervous system comes into play.
Parasympathetic Nervous System
The parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for the rest and digest response.
It tells your body to:
slow down
breathe and relax
the danger is over
cortisol levels falls back to normal
your body conserves energy
your heart rate slows
your digestion increases
You can literally “rest and digest” again.
One aspect of the autonomic nervous system is not better than the other — we want to be able to have access to the sympathetic nervous system when circumstances call for us to run or fight. But we’re designed to be able to go back and forth as needed–to take action and to recover.
Unfortunately many of us spend much more time in a sympathetic state than in a parasympathetic state and are chronically stressed.
And furthermore, some of us can’t feel we’re in an activated state because it’s become so “normal” to us, except we feel certain effects and aren’t sure why we have them.
For example, some of us are so used to chronically tense muscles or jaw, neck and shoulder tension or pain, but we don’t connect that chronic stress has caused this.
After a period of months or years, this chronically stressed state becomes “normal.” We sort of adjust and just live with the discomfort.
Some muscular tension patterns associated with a chronically stressed state are:
Contracted jaw
Small muscles in face are contracted
Eye tension
Neck and shoulder tension
Back tension and pain
Tension in hands or arms
Tension in pelvis, glutes, hips and thighs
Link here to learn more about what the physical symtoms of stress and anxiety look like in the body.
And our posture reflects this chronic muscle tension:
Head forward and down
Lack of mobility in our back, neck and shoulders
Contracted abdomen which restricts our breathing
Fortunately our brain and nervous system are capable of change.
They only need to be reminded of a healthier way. And not only can they change the unconscious muscular tension patterns, but the habitual patterns of reacting to the stress will also change through focusing on the body.
But we can’t over-ride the old, unhealthy habitual muscle patterns with force or muscular effort. We must use our brain, literally, to change our muscular patterns and relieve our own stress response.
The Feldenkrais Method® offers the way out of chronic stress-induced muscular tension patterns. In this method, either working one-on-one or in group classes, you’re guided into small, gentle movements while you pay attention to what you sense and feel in your body as you do these movements.
As you slowly move, you observe where you feel resistance or tension, or where you feel the quality of each movement go from easy and comfortable to resistance or forcing.
It’s through this focused attention, that you take in this sensory information, and your brain processes it, and then comes up with the most efficient, easy way to move.
And often, almost spontaneously, the tension is released.
This often happens within the first session or class. However because chronic tension has been reinforced for many months, and in some cases, years, it takes several sessions or a series of sessions or classes to maintain these new, healthier muscle patterns. But the end result is often lasting and provides people with tools to maintain this new healthier way of functioning comfortably on their own, without needed an “expert” to help them manage their pain forever.
So, in conclusion, when you’re chronically emotionally and mentally stressed, chances are you’re living mostly in a sympathetic nervous system state. In that state, muscle tension — skeletal muscles, smaller muscles of the face and eyes, muscles of the digestive system, and muscles of the neck that cause migraines as well, can contract. But fortunately, because your nervous system is always working on your behalf, these chronic habitual contraction patterns can be released. (Link here to learn more about how to improve chronic pain symptoms.)