worry – Crisbie Coach

How to Improve the Quality of Your Life with Relaxation Techniques

As you may know relaxation techniques are simple practices you can do to help yourself calm down, cope with stressful situations, and relieve stress. The warning signs are out there: headaches, stomach knots, and racing thoughts. They are all signalling you to take action. The good news is that you can. The resources are here. They can also help you fall asleep, and go to sleep (or back to sleep) faster.

Try out the different tips and techniques listed here and see what works best for you.

1. One Hour to Let Go

This technique allows you to finish your daily tasks and help you get ready for sleep an hour before bedtime. This exercise is done in three 20-minute sessions.

In the first 20 minutes, take care of any simple tasks, for instance preparing the dishwasher or feeding your cat.
In the second 20 minutes, do some relaxing activities like talking with family members, doing an additional relaxation technique, or thanking for three things that have happened in your day. Avoid scrolling on your phone though, as the blue light on your screen can inhibit your natural melatonin production and make it harder for you to fall asleep.
In the last 20 minutes, take care of your personal hygiene. Take a warm bath or shower.

Creating consistent and healthy rituals is really a good way to getting a good night’s sleep each night.

2. Guided Visualisation

Guided Visualisation uses your imagination to engage your senses. This simple exercise can be done on your own, or with the help of a therapist or a guided imagery practitioner. Here are some questions you can ask yourself:

What can you see? Look close and far, colours, shapes, and light.
What can you hear? Hear as many sounds as you can and keep looking for new ones, don’t focus on anyone for too long.
What can you taste? This is less fun as you are not eating, but try to imagine yourself eating something you love.
What can you smell? Focus on the smells around you – what are they and how many can you find?
What can you feel? Send your attention to the parts of your body that have contact with something, like the floor or a chair or table.

Through this technique, you can connect your conscious mind to your unconscious mind and help direct your body and brain towards a desired goal response. Guided imagery helps you relieve stress, reduce feelings of anxiety, and encourage healthy sleep.

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3. Self-Hypnosis. If you are only familiar with hypnosis that you might have seen on films, forget about it. Hypnosis is a state of consciousness where someone is intensely focused on an idea, which can make their brain more receptive to new thoughts or ideas. If you want to try it, there are apps or tutorials on YouTube available.

4. Breathing Exercises

You probably know that a deep breath can help you stabilize your breath when you are anxious or worry about something deeply. A breathing exercise can help encourage relaxation, reduce muscle tension, and even lower your heart rate and blood pressure. Repeat this as many times as you need. By practising deep breathing, you reproduce your breathing patterns as you fall asleep. In doing so, you encourage your body to enter that state of restfulness and get itself ready for sleep.

5. Progressive Relaxation

This technique allows you to become more familiar with your body and any of the places you may be holding onto stress or tension.

Progressive relaxation involves working with your body in different areas and each muscle group, first by tensing the muscles and then relaxing them. Usually you start with your feet and go your way up to the top of the head. In this way you will be aware of how the parts of your body feel when they are tense, as well as when they are relaxed. You can use this technique to address any tension or stress you may have.

6. Yoga Nidra

Yoga Nidra is also known as yogic sleep. It helps the body relax while the mind is alert and awake. The goal is to guide yourself through the main four stages of brain wave activity— beta, alpha, theta, and delta— and achieve a state of being between wakefulness and sleep.

To practice Yoga Nidra, all you need is a comfortable place to lie down. Begin then by lying face-up and set an intention for that session, for example stress relief or relaxation. Watch your body and notice any tension or sensations you feel. You can always find apps or tutorial on the Internet to guide you through this practice.

One study has shown that Yoga Nidra can be a very effective supplemental treatment for insomnia. In participants practicing Yoga Nidra, regular participation improved their sleep quality and reduced their insomnia severity, anxiety symptoms and their stress levels. This improvement even continued 3 months after they began practising.

Remember not to practice any of these relaxation techniques while operating machinery, driving a car, or doing anything that requires your full attention.

Have you ever heard of any of these techniques before?

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How and Why You Need to Learn to Take Better Care of Yourself

The education we have received has taught us that we must treat well the others. But why the others and not ourselves?

Are you your own worst critic? Do you sometimes insult yourself for something you did wrong or wanted to do better? Do you eat poorly, sleep little, abuse of harmful substances (alcohol, tobacco)? Or are you simply worried about pleasing others? Know that you are not alone. This is a common problem and normal to a certain extent. Because of this, it would be useful to pay attention to some daily details to learn how to look better after yourself.

As I was saying before, we have not been taught to take good care of ourselves. We put often aside our well-being. How many times have your parents told you to look well after the others or do things for the others? How many times, on the other hands, have you been told that you must also take care of yourself?

The way you look after yourselves is a kind of extension of what you have learned from your parents, teachers or caregivers.

For a very young person this may seem exaggerated, as some basic principles of self-esteem are taught in schools today. Some parents also try to instil some self-care virtues in their children.

However, for an adult or elderly person, taking care of themselves well and being truly respectful of themselves is not always something they have consciously internalized. In the past, it was not so easy to find someone who could help you cultivate a certain self-love without it being considered selfish.

In fact, this is precisely the basis: self-love, not to be confused with narcissism or egocentrism. To better understand this concept, we can first imagine what we do when we really love someone: we seek their happiness, we help them, we try to make them feel good, and we accept them as they are, with all their imperfections and qualities. Actually, looking well after yourself means really accepting yourself for who you are.

Becoming kind towards yourself, means understand yourself, especially when you face failures and mistakes.

That attitude can be a great ally. You can challenge yourselves in a healthy way, taking into account your possibilities, your desires, and not the desires that others have for you.

The use of language is very important to achieve the goal of taking good care of yourself. It is common, and to some extent normal, that on some occasions you speak “badly” to yourself, you do it unconsciously. You cannot talk to yourself always in a loving way, as you could enter into toxic positivity (when a positive attitude is used to mask negative emotions, namely pretending that all is well when it is not).

However, you must not use words that hurt yourself. Nobody insults those who truly love, right? Talking to yourself and thinking badly about some personal aspects (physical or mental), and constantly reiterating it, can in the end make you really believe it.

Taking care of yourself is essential. This implies developing a healthier and more suitable lifestyle. Sleeping and resting enough hours, for example, as well as eating well based on our weight, age and lifestyle, not abusing alcohol or tobacco, are all ways to take care of yourself. Taking time to relax, reconnect with what you really like to do, keep your hobbies, follow your passions and interact with people who bring you something positive in your life means being respectful of yourself.

What about you? Do you take good care of yourself?

How and Why to Prevent a Recurring Thought from Turning into an Obsession.

You have thought – and rethought – if you locked the door when you went out? Are you on the street and you wonder if you turned off the light; or the gas? This is not as serious as it looks like. Moreover, you are not the only person it happens to. The thoughts that come to your mind are normal; they are not obsessions … yet.

Thoughts don’t turn into obsession overnight. At first, they are imperceptible, then they grow, but they don’t seem so serious to you; when you start having problems at work, in the family, with friends, you may have developed an obsession. Recognizing the degree of frequency and intensity is crucial to avoid that one of your recurring thoughts starts to be harmful.

If you don’t get major problems in your daily life, you can let your recurring thoughts flow and unlock them with relaxation techniques, and by becoming aware of their cause.

Imagine a grandmother lighting a candle in the Church so that her grandson succeeds the exam. Or the songs you hum in your brain and can’t get rid of them. Or the cultures that pray to get some rain. They are examples of small obsessions that do not harm anyone or give problems in everyday life. Therefore, in similar cases, you do not need to take actions.

However, there are other kinds of thoughts that trap the mind in a vicious circuit and catch your attention very often. They are called OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder).

There are some tricks you can use to keep them under control.

Let’s see some of them.

If, for example, you wash your hands too often, try to actually count how many times you’ve washed them. Then, think about the absurdity of doing it so often because washing your hands well once should be enough, and doing it twice should reassure you that they are really clean.

If your fear is to get infected on the public transport, because you touch knobs, bars, doors, use gloves every time you take them or take a hydro-alcoholic gel with you to be used as soon as you get off (very useful also during Covid times).

The important thing is to be able to rationalize your recurring thoughts and find solutions to control them. If you really cannot manage to do it, however, you should consult a professional (doctor, psychologist, coach) who can help you keep your thoughts from becoming obsessions.

Also be aware that genetics can be a cause of your recurring thoughts. If you are very emotional and have difficulty controlling your impulses, you are somewhat predisposed. Exposure to obsessive models in the family, which transmit the values of order, norms, not making mistakes, can also be a cause. Highly demanding, perfectionist, rigid, excessively ordered, inflexible and reluctant to delegate tasks personalities are also more prone to developing OCD.

Recurring thoughts are normal until they become fixations. In addition, remember that most of the things that worry us never happen. Try to notice it and let me know.

9 Things to Let Go to Be Happier

It is said that being happy is a choice. But we have a tendency to complicate our lives to the point of not recognising it when we have it in front of our eyes.

What could we do to be happier?

Here are nine things we should let go to find more happiness in our lives:

1. Give up anger. Anger steals time and precious energy that we could use more usefully. Did you know that for a minute of anger you need an hour to recover?

2. Let go of things you can’t control. Control is an illusion. We live in a world that is out of control, we have to accept the fact that we cannot control everything.

3. Stop worrying about what others think of you. This also makes us waste time and energy. We could never please everyone, there will always be someone who doesn’t like us. It doesn’t matter what other people think of us. .

4. Try to be the best version of yourselves, to spontaneously attract people who are related to you.

5. Stop living in the past. We all have gone through difficult times. But we survived. Try to silence that little voice that tells you: “I should have done this”, “I shouldn’t have done that”, “if I went back I would change things”. The past is past and does not come back, so let’s accept it as it is. We can learn many lessons from the past that will help us manage the present and lay the foundations for the future.

6. Try to buy fewer useless things because they don’t make you happier but they empty your pockets. The less things we have, the happier we will be.

7. Stop gossiping. Those who share gossip with you today, will be the same gossiping on you tomorrow.

8. Don’t worry more than you should. Worrying means investing time and energy in something that has yet to happen. Again, let it go and try to trust life.

9. Stop taking things personally. People are just too busy thinking about their own lives to be able to think about others’ lives. The world does not turn around you. Most people’s reactions have nothing to do with you, don’t worry about it.

Are you ready to take on those tips?