Mental Health Moment

so if you're interested in beginning a mindfulness meditation practice it's a great time to do that because there are all kinds of apps out there free and some are subscriptions to use and really then all you have to do is just turn your phone on and listen for five or ten minutes to a guided meditation. I often do this as a substitute for scrolling on, you know, TikTok or Instagram. I think, well, I'm going to use this five minutes to just do a brief little meditation. My favorite app to begin with is called Happier. And what I like about this app is they have a course called The Basics 1 and 2. And the moderator explains to you what are the benefits? What am I trying to learn here and why am i trying to learn that so he gives a little tutorial for about four or five minutes and then there is also then like a four or five minute meditation that comes up so that's a great way to start and there's hundreds of meditations on the app for all sorts of things from emotions difficult emotions for beginners advanced meditations the the second app that i usually recommend people use is completely free and it's called insight timer and it's a little tibetan singing bowl is what is on their um their icon for their app this app has 700 oh i'm sorry about 270 000 free meditations on it you do not need to subscribe although they do offer a premium channel don't get the premium just do the free there's more than enough meditations on there and again if you just write down mindfulness meditation for beginners it will come up with hundreds of different meditations for you to try so good luck

so why is meditation useful why is meditation worth the trouble first of all it helps with focus we become constantly overstimulated in this modern blitzkrieg world with social media we're always having to be accessible with our phones we even have our watches that alert us all the time. So meditation can help boost your mental muscle of focus. That can be a game changer in the ability for us to increase how long we can stay attentive to another person when we're talking to them. Mindfulness meditation is a great tool for that. A second benefit of mindful meditation is that it can help to be less yanked around by your emotions. That can be like a game changer. It's helping us to be less emotionally reactive. So you learn to respond wisely to a situation instead of reacting blindly. So with a daily, just a five or 10 minute daily meditation practice, you can learn to emotionally regulate yourself on a much better, to a much better degree than without this one thing I want to address is there's a big misconception about mindfulness meditation a lot of my patients will say I can't meditate I've tried I I just can't sit and clear my mind and be Zen and perfectly still and focused and attentive actually mindfulness meditation is the opposite about of that it is learning to pay attention to what's coming to our mind it's almost like we're studying the habits of our mind so yes our mind is always working and always coming up with thoughts we notice that and we come back to the body and come back to the breath and then again your mind's going to go off on a tangent discursive thoughts you notice that you come back to the the breath. So it really is about learning our patterns and habits of the mind. And you can do this really easily. There's nothing, there's no special outfit you have to wear. There's no special place you have to be. You can sit in your bed. You can do it while you're waiting in the carpool line. You can do it, I do it in bed before I go to sleep at night for about five or ten minutes. And I think it's a game changer in learning how to understand how your mind works.

what are some central nervous system hacks that you can do very simply very easily that people won't even know if you're in a room of other folks that you're actually trying to reset or regulate your nervous system one of the things you can do is to hum you can hum a little tune or you can just hmm but humming for five to thirty seconds that vibration where that central nervous system is that vibration somehow helps to reset and settle us down just a little bit so there are some folks that you may hear humming that you don't even know why the heck they're humming they may not know why the heck they're humming sometimes we do things that help our system to regulate so humming is one of them. Another thing that has been a lot of research done around is listening to bird song. So if you are at work and things are really stressful and your break is coming up, I encourage you to go outside, put your face to the sun, and actively listen to the birds singing. It sounds kind of kooky, but it actually helps settle the body. You could even just go onto YouTube and watch a video of birds coming to a feeder and chirping, and that's going to help, again, to regulate that nervous system. So that's hack number two. The other thing to know is that our brain is always set for a negativity bias. And so we want to kind of flip the switch on that because if I have a negativity bias, it means I am always looking for the what ifs. What if this goes badly? What if I can't do this? What if they do that? And we tell ourselves a whole storyline around that. So our job is to kind of flip the switch into a positivity bias. And one of the ways to do this, and research has been done around this a lot, is you get a pen, you get a little notebook, and I just want you to write three things that you're grateful for. Not 10, 20 things, three things. And there has been research around that actually writing them down makes a difference in decreasing stress, anxiety, and depression. So a daily practice of just writing three things you're grateful for can help to make that switch of that negativity bias to a positivity bias which is gonna help your central nervous system again regulate in the way it needs to thanks so much

Part of what happens when we decide to come to counseling or therapy is that we think okay we have an issue we have a problem coming on and we want to talk to somebody about it or we want to get a different perspective and quite often we think it's a thinking problem and we don't think that this is connected to the rest of our body. And we have a whole central nervous system that is working behind the scenes always to keep us protected, keep us calm, keep us regulated. And sometimes when there's high stress in our lives and high cortisol going on in our body, our central nervous system gets overstimulated and doesn't quite know what to do with all the energy going on so part of what our job in and therapy quite often is to help somebody regulate their central nervous system it doesn't have anything to do with the brain and more to do with our central nervous system and the main nerve running through our body the longest nerve in our body is called the vagus nerve. And it runs from about the base of our neck to our gut, and it regulates our heart rate, it regulates our breathing, it regulates our digestion, and it regulates our mood. So when we feel our heart racing, or we can't get a deep breath, or we've got to run to the bathroom because something has totally, you know, gone awry, many times that is also connected to mood regulation. So So how can we begin to do that? Part of that is just to be aware, "Oh, this is not me losing it and not being able to manage my mental health." Many times it is just a dysregulation in our body. So there are ways that we can hack into our nervous system to be able to reset it and regulate it better. you