Stress busting tip number 11 - posture

Hi there, it's Caroline Cavanagh, and this is— what are we, day 11 of our Stress Busting Advent Calendar tips? And today it's the second of my, what I call my first aid tips. So the first one was, I don't know, tip number 8, number 9, I can't remember which one, was all about breathing. Pretty obvious one, but when we're stressed, you change your breathing. This is number 2 of my first aid kit, and it's all about posture. So what I would love you to do is to play a little game with me. Now, it's very easy. Now, just imagine that you're depressed. Get into a posture that reflects being in that depressed, down mood. And normally when I do this with people, what always happens is like shoulders slump, head goes down. And now hold that position, and whilst you're all floppy and withdrawn, try and have happy thoughts. Try and have positive thoughts. It's really flippin' difficult, isn't it? Okay, lift yourself back up, and now I'm gonna ask you to do the opposite. Stand up. Okay, and while you're standing up, really ground yourself, get your feet under your hips, back strong, head up, and now have really negative thoughts. Equally as hard? Yeah? And if you were then to start moving, dancing, try even harder to have negative thoughts. Easy? No. Okay, you can relax now. Or maybe I can relax anyway. Um, the whole principle of this is how you hold your body will actually make it easier to access some emotions and harder to access others. So when you're withdrawn, when you're all curled in on yourself, it is like self-protection. Actually feeling positive is really, really difficult. Similarly, when you're feeling strong, having negative thoughts are much, much harder to have. So the principle of this tip is to become much more aware of your physiology. If you're feeling really stressed, the chances are you're kind of fiddling, you're jittery, you know, you're kind of on edge. And that's the time when you can link this to tip number 1 of my first aid, change your breathing. As soon as you become aware of your posture and you go, ah, okay, breathe. Do that breath. You breathe out. And if you don't know what that tip is, go back onto the Facebook page. They're all in there. And actually, I've all uploaded them to YouTube as well, so you can see them on the Caroline Cavanagh YouTube too. Really simple breathing technique that again will start to slow you down. But even becoming aware that you're perhaps fiddling with your hands, relax them. That's going to start to change your posture. As soon as you start to change your posture, it will start to have an impact on your thoughts too. So those— these 2 things are intrinsically linked: your posture and your feelings. If you want to change how you feel, a great way to do that is to also change your posture. So a very simple one for today, and the 3rd in my 3 first aid tips will be coming along very soon. If you want to catch up on all the other 10 I've posted so far. As I said, they're on the Facebook group, they're on the YouTube page. And because I am doing this with the intention of trying to help people have more resources, more techniques to help them when they're feeling stressed, I would love it if you shared any of these posts that you thought other people that you know would relate to too. And for anyone that shares one of my videos, I'm putting their names in a hat and I'm gonna draw some names out of that hat just after Christmas and give them the opportunity, should they wish to, to work with me one-to-one with my compliments. If you would also like to put that little like, that little thumbs up on my Facebook page, that helps with Facebook and its wisdom of logarithms to spread the reach around, so that helps more people learn these tools too. So if you do share the post, please do let me know in the comments box because sometimes with the privacy settings I don't actually know you've shared it, and that's really frustrating because I would love to have your name in that hat. Similarly, I love it when people comment on some of the other videos. There's been some great comments that goes up, and I love getting some dialogue about this stuff. So please let me know what works for you of the 11 so far. Have you tried any of them? Which one do you feel more drawn to? Which one perhaps less to? And if you want to get a little sort of step or two ahead, on my website, which is carolinecavanagh.co.uk, On the resources page, there's a free ebook which has 30 different tips, so it covers all the 24 I'm doing over Advent and a few more. And that's a really sort of tangible resource that you can just dip into and out of at any time and just build up your awareness of these tools so that when you do start to recognise it's a high level of stress, what do I need to do? Right, change my posture, change my breathing, or stress preventative. I've talked about a couple of those already too. They're all at your fingertips. So thank you very much for watching again today. It's Friday evening. I wish you a wonderful relaxing weekend as I record this. If you're on catch-up, just have a fantastic day. Thank you for listening, watching, and I will be back with you tomorrow with tip number 12. Bye for now.