Discover Inner Peace with Relaxation and Mindfulness Skills

This episode was pre recorded as part of a live continuing education webinar on demand. CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register@Allce.com Counselortoolbox hi everybody and welcome to today's presentation. Happiness Isn't Brain. Mindfulness and relaxation for the entire family. Over the next 30, 45 minutes, we're going to review the function of mindfulness and a variety of mindfulness techniques. We'll explore the concept of relaxation and identify different methods of relaxation. Too often people refer to relaxation as something active that they're doing. And what we really want to do during relaxation is allow the body to de stress. So to review mindfulness means being aware of your current state emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually. Mindlessness allows people to ignore minor stress until it adds up to a meltdown. So when we're talking about adults, well, everybody, a lot of times we don't pay attention. In our culture, we tend to be relatively mindless. We get up, we eat our breakfast, we go to work or to school, we come home, we eat our dinner, we do whatever we've got to do and we go to bed. And we don't really stop to think throughout the day how we're doing. I remember when my son was little, he would be just an angel at school, just an absolute angel. The teachers loved to have him. And he would come home and at 3:30 he would just lose it and go completely bonkers and bouncing off the wall and being irritable. So those are the things that we really want to pay attention to. So what was it throughout the day that happened or what was it that was happening at home that made him bounce off the walls? And you know, through doing some research and talking to some elementary school teachers, it became aware, clear to me that throughout the day, children are doing so much to try to hold it together when, you know, kids are kind of all over the place anyway, he was using so much energy to do that. When he got home, he was exhausted. He just couldn't keep it together anymore. So it was a time where he needed to just kind of let loose, let his hair down, whatever you want to say. And for kids, as opposed to us as adults who generally we come home and we're like, oh, I just want to sit on the couch and be quiet. Children tend to be the opposite. And they come home and they just want to tell you all about it and they want to play and they want to go. They've had to sit still all day long and they have all that pent up energy. I wish I could harness it. So as parents, as teachers, as whatever your capacity is, if you're working with youth, being aware that they're energy levels and their methods of de stressing and kind of letting down may be somewhat different than ours. Encouraging children from the very beginning to be able to articulate how they're feeling emotionally, mentally, physically and you know, spiritually as you get there, that's not something an elementary school kid's probably gonna wrap his head around again. With my son, I remember distinctly one day I had to stop by the office to do something and I was working in a residential community mental health center. And we walked in and we went down to one of my units and I picked up some paperwork and I don't remember what happened. You know, it was really non essential. But we're walking back up the hallway and all of a sudden Sean and his little toddler voice, he was probably, you know, three. He goes, mommy, I so angry. And I said, oh, okay, well thanks for telling me. Let's talk about that for a minute. Kids, if they're able to articulate their emotions, can get a lot more guidance from us on being able to deal with those emotions. And I said in the lead up, this is for the entire family. So I'm going to focus a lot on kids. More so than usual in today's presentation because we're gearing up to working with families and people who are getting ready to go to holiday parties and all that kind of stuff, which can be stressful. The other thing to remember with children and animals, if you have them, is that they are very perceptive and children will feed off of your own emotional state. So if you're getting ready to go to your in law's house or your parents house or wherever and it's going to be a stressful situation, children are going to pick up on that. And because children are very egocentric, you know, younger children especially, they're going to try to make it better or they're going to just try to distract you. That's their job. You need to be there. They need to preserve your existence because they can't exist without you. So they want to distract you from whatever's making you upset. And again, they're egocentric. So a lot of times they may think it's their fault or they're doing something to stress you out. Being aware of that sometimes we can't just make all of our stress poof go away. I would love it if we could, but we can't. Talking with your kids and going, you know what, honey, it's just, it's gonna be a long ride over to grandma's house and I'm just kind of stressed out and you know, I didn't get much sleep last night or whatever the case may be. You don't need to go into details about your relationship with whomever it is. But letting the child know it's not about them. You're stressed, you're going to be okay, it's all good. This goes a long way. It also helps children. It models for children what they need to do as they start growing up, as they start becoming more independent, being able to label their emotions and do something about it. Which takes us to the do something, whether it's us who are stressed or whether it's the child who is stressed. Children don't come with coping skills like built in, you know, they need to be taught coping skills. First step is articulating. I'm angry, I'm sad, I'm stressed out, I'm scared. We can help them with that. And as parents and teachers and doctors and whatever your position is, that's what we do. Our knee jerk reaction is, okay, let's talk about that or let's see what we can do about that. Sometimes parents are so overwhelmed or overburdened with all that's going on in their, in their world. When a child says, I'm angry or I'm scared or I'm stressed, the parents response is there's no need to be, don't worry about it. And they ignore what's going on with the child. Instead of talking about it a little bit and helping them identify ways to deal with whatever that negative emotional state is. So encouraging children to develop a good emotional vocabulary. Encouraging children to check in with themselves emotionally, you know, at breakfast, you know they're not going to do it. When they're at school at lunch, it's probably just not going to happen. If they do, it's great, but if they don't, that's fine. But I always use the meals as an anchor. Check in with yourself and tell me how you're doing. Whenever I would pick Sean up when he was in public school, I would pick him up from school and on the way home we talk about how his day was, how he felt, and I'd get an idea about what was going on with him and I could help him put labels to what's going on. So encouraging them to do this gets them off to a good start as they grow up. And we know that when they hit those teenage years and hormones kick in and their moods are all over the place, I've got two teenagers right now. If they don't have that vocabulary, if they don't have the ability to articulate what's going on, they may not know why still. But if they don't have the ability to articulate what's going on, they're going to have a more difficult time dealing with it. And you'll get vague comments like I'm just tired or I don't feel well, when there could be a lot more going on that depression, anxiety, grief, those sorts of things. Helping children work through this prevents them from acting out. And we're going to talk a lot about self esteem and acting out and being able to deal with dysfunctional emotional states in the presentation on bullying at the beginning of November. Moving on to mentally being aware of your own mental state. Are you able to think clearly? Are you foggy headed? Are you being forgetful? The same thing is true for kids. When my kids were growing up, well, still, but especially when they were younger, they would go through phases and it was like they'd be learning English and they'd be doing great in their language arts and their math skills would just be kind of holding steady or, you know, forgetting some. And then one day it's like a light switch went off and they would flip and all of a sudden they were on with the math and they couldn't remember anything about how to conjugate a verb. And I'm like, what happened? Or when they're starting to get sick. My children, and I know a lot of my friends report the same thing. Children get more disorganized. Their brain is not dedicating the resources to cognition and memory and all that stuff. It's dedicating resources to fighting the bugs. So if your child or you are feeling foggy headed, having difficulty concentrating, it's worth looking at. Is there a growth spurt going on? Are you fighting off some sort of illness? Is there some sort of hormone imbalance, you know, change of life thing going on? Is your nutrition, okay, look at all those vulnerabilities to try to figure out what might be causing that current state. As we approach the holidays, a lot of times people's nutrition gets a little bit more wonky. We get busy. We've got holiday parties to go to, we've got football games to go to, we've got practices on top of everything else. So in some instances, people start eating more fast food and paying less attention to what they're eating. So it is important to check in on the nutrition and make sure your kids are eating. I don't know what school lunches are like now. I've heard horrible rumors, but I'm hoping they've gotten better. It's important for kids to eat throughout the day in order to sustain that mental focus as well as us. If you've come in one morning and maybe you were good and you ate breakfast, but then you got caught up in meetings and seeing clients and everything else, and before you know it, it's four o' clock and you haven't eaten anything since like six, you'll notice that there's probably a difference in your energy level and how you feel and how you're able to function. The more rundown we get, whether it's avoiding dealing with negative emotions and just being unhappy, being tired, being malnourished, the more problems that we have, the harder it is to relax. We're using a lot of energy to kind of fight against resistance physically. If you're physically exhausted, it's going to be harder. So if you're kind to yourself and you're aware of what's going on and listen to your body. It's not something I like to do because I like to be the master of my own domain. But if you listen to your body like you're supposed to, you'll get an idea about what you can and cannot accomplish. Some days you just need to relax. And if you find yourself feeling physically exhausted over a long period of time, you know, more than a couple of days, then you want to start looking at what's causing that. Remembering again that nutrition, sleep deficits and neurochemical imbalances from depression, anxiety and side effects of drugs can all cause physical exhaustion and problems. Spiritually, how are you doing with your honesty, hope, faith, courage, discipline and integrity? How are you doing with living a life that is grounded in your values, doing things each day that are getting you closer to where you want to be? I sound like a broken record with that phrase, don't I? And it's partially intentional. We need to encourage our kids to be aware of where they are, to be aware of the fact that on Tuesday they may feel very different than they do on Wednesday. So they may be able to accomplish very different things those days. And that's okay. We all have energy ebbs and flows, things that wax and wane. If you don't sleep so well one day, you know, you don't want to start probably trying to do something that's really complex. Unless you have to. So planning ahead, being aware of things that are coming up, and being kind to yourself, you can head off problems before they become real issues. If you know that. Yeah, you know, I feel like I'm getting a scratchy throat. Maybe I ought to go to bed early tonight. You know, that makes sense. But if you're not being mindful, you may try to just push through. Too many of us push through when we are emotionally drained. We push through. What does that do? It leaves us at an emotional deficit, and we want to talk about ways to improve how we feel emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually. So what discriminative stimuli, and if you remember from behavior modification, that means things in the environment that tell you to do something. It makes you discriminate. When you. When you're at home, and this is true for me as well as my children, I behave a certain way, you know, I dress a certain way, I behave a certain way. I'm just kind of relaxed at my house. When I go to my mother's house, we don't act the same way. We are a lot more formal, we are a lot more proper in the way that we act, the way that we dress, you know, all those sorts of things. The discriminative stimuli is the fact that it's her house. You know, I'm in a different situation. I'm in a different environment. Other things that you can do to remind you to do a mindfulness scan, put a sticky note somewhere. Like I said, do it during meals. Maybe set an alarm on your smartphone to remind you to check in with yourself. And scans don't take that long. It's like, okay, how do I feel emotionally right now? Check. How do I feel mentally? Check. Physically. Let's do a body scan. All right, Check. That takes all of, you know, 30 seconds. But make sure that you're staying in tune with how you're doing. Anything you can do to remind yourself not only to do a mindfulness scan and check in with yourself, but to make yourself happy. Because we have one life. You can choose to live it and be miserable, or you can choose to put on rose colored glasses and, you know, be obnoxiously optimistic. I had a employee at the last place I worked. I mean, he was just a lovely man. Former military, career military. So everything in his office was just so. It was clean, it was tidy, it was organized, Everything had a place. And every once in a while and he would come out and he would have. And I hate to say this right now, with all the Clown stuff, but it was funny. Then he would have a clown wig on, a clown nose, clown shoes, and one of those little obnoxious honky horns. And he would walk down into the day room. And the point was, you know, he would do that just randomly to remind people to stop and laugh for a minute, don't take everything quite so seriously. And it was a good reminder for the rest of us when he would do those sorts of things because it was such a dramatic departure from what he normally did. Now, I don't really see myself putting on a clown hat, but I'm usually pretty goofy to begin with, so it's not a far stretch for them. My favorite is knock, knock jokes. I would go up to different clients who may be having a bad day and obviously if it was appropriate, and tell them some silly knock knock joke that I got on my Facebook and they were all G rated. And it was the fact that we can laugh at the same things that three year olds can laugh at. And, you know, that's okay. Mindfulness activities. Doing a body scan, I mentioned that a couple times already. A body scan, you just go from head to toe or toe to head, whatever makes you happy. And just check in and go, okay, how do I feel in my head? You know, physically, is there any pain going on? But you know, sometimes in your head you've just got a lot of noise. Checking in with that, that's all information that you need to have and moving down, checking for any pain, any signs of nervousness, anxiety, stress, tension. That'll give you an idea as to how you're feeling. It takes a minute or so if you're going to do it well, but you can do it anywhere. It's not like you have to lay down and close your eyes. You can do it in the car on the way to work, especially if you're stuck in a traffic jam and you're not driving. But, you know, obviously you want to pay attention to driving. Mindful breathing, now, this is one of the easiest ones and I am not good at sitting still. I know, big surprise there. But mindful breathing is something that I'll do about once or twice a day. And it all started, you know, for me, I started and I didn't even realize I was doing something mindful. My goal was to see how low I could get my heart rate to go. But mindful breathing is just that. You focus on the inhale and you focus on the exhale and that's all you're focusing on. You're focusing how it feels when your abdomen rises and lowers, when you're. When the air comes in and it goes out and you're focusing on just that, not necessarily how you feel, you're trying to relax as much as possible, but being aware of how you are in the moment. Mindful observation is focusing on a specific object. If you have a religious symbol, if you have a picture of your dog, if you have something in the room that you can focus on that is positive or at least grounding. You don't want to focus on something that's going to make you unhappy, obviously, and focus on that for a period of time. Noticing it, noticing how you feel while you're focusing on it, noticing what thoughts it brings up. So if you're focusing on a picture of your kids, noticing how you feel when you're focusing on that picture of your kids, thinking about nothing but your kids and how you're feeling, quiets a lot of the rest of the noise that's going on out there and shuts down all those distractions. You'll notice less as time goes on. The cars that are driving by, the people that are walking by in the hallway, the phones that are ringing, and that's all part of training your mind to be able to focus on you. Environmental awareness is exactly what it sounds like. I love these things because they're exactly what they sound like. Sitting in a room or out on the patio, wherever you are, just noticing your environment. Not all of us are visually inclined. I am, but not everybody is. It's important to understand that we want to help people focus all of their senses. What do they smell? What do they hear? What do they feel? You know, maybe the cool temperatures. It may be moist outside. It may be the sun beating down on their skin. What are they noticing right then? That shuts out the noise from. I've got to do this. This happened this morning. We're not focusing on what happened two minutes ago or what's going to happen in two minutes. We're focusing on what's in your environment right now. One of the activities I used to do when I taught at the university, I take my class out and I would have them sit on the courtyard for five minutes, and they were just to go out there and sit quietly and notice. When we came back in, I would give them another five minutes to write down everything that they saw, heard, felt, thought about, and then we would talk about it. Because they were all sitting in the same plaza. They were all sitting within 20ft of each other. And we would compare what everybody else noticed. And what they didn't notice to highlight the fact of how environmentally unaware we often are and sometimes how we can miss some really cool things. It's a fun activity to do with kids, both of these. If you go on a walk in a park, pulling a leaf off the tree or pulling a tree down, if you don't want to rob it of its leaf and have the child notice it, what does it look like? What. What does it feel like? What does it smell like? In order to encourage the child to appreciate the depth of the experience. And then asking them to give you an idea about maybe something about how they feel or what's going on with them at that point in time. Mindful awareness. Thinking before you act. When something happens, we don't have to act right away. Mindful awareness means being in the moment, aware of what's going on, aware of your feeling, but also aware that those two things are not necessarily. Do they necessarily have to be connected. You can observe something without having to act on it. You can actually feel something without having to observe it. Giving yourself time to just observe it as it is and then make a decision about what to do. With teenagers and with a lot of adults, impulse control is a huge issue. Encouraging them to practice mindful awareness when something happens, stop, think, then act. So we don't want them to jump into something right away. Mindful appreciation. Notice five things in your day that usually go unappreciated. You got to work without getting into an accident. Great. You know, that's awesome. We take that for granted a lot of the time, you know, whatever it is that you don't usually appreciate, you know, I noticed this year, I don't know why I hadn't noticed it before or looked it up for that matter, that my four o' clocks flower in late summer. I kept waiting for them to flower and waiting for them to flower, and they hadn't flowered until about a month ago. But being appreciative of it now that they are here and what I see when I come home and the butterflies and all that stuff, I will notice animals. Those are the things that I usually do notice. Other things that you can appreciate are also things that your family members do. Mindful appreciation of the fact that somebody cleared their dish after dinner. Four plus four. Four senses plus four stimuli. So. So what are four things that you see, four things that you hear, four things you can touch, and four things you can smell. This is kind of cool because it's also an activity you can do on car rides or if you're waiting at the doctor's office or something where a child may be getting antsy. It's also an activity you can do if you're at grandma's house and Junior starts to lose it or you start to lose it for some reason. Go, go outside, get away from the hustle and bustle and identify what are you seeing? What are four things you're seeing, four things you're hearing, four things about touch, and four things you smell. That gets you out of the moment, so you're sort of riding the wave. It's a distress tolerance activity in addition to a mindfulness activity. Tactile mindfulness. If you're having difficulty separating or stopping, pinch yourself, which I don't recommend because it can bruise tissue and yada yada. Hold an ice cube. Be aware of how it feels when you're holding it, as if you've ever had to ice a part of your body before. You know, at first it's like, okay, that's really cold. And then it starts to hurt. And then the hurt goes to kind of a numbing sort of sensation. It helps you tune in to how you deal with pain and what emotions arise. If you're holding the ice cube and you're starting to get really frustrated that you can't let go of the ice cube or that you're feeling this pain or that your body is objecting to something that you're doing, then you know that where some issues may be arising, if you sort of lean into the pain and breathe through it and focus on the fact that this will be over in two or three minutes and it'll be to the numbing stage, That's a whole different way of dealing with pain. So we can take that corollary of physical pain and translate it to emotional pain. When people feel angry or depressed or anxious, do they lean into it and go, okay, this will get better. I need to take an action. Or do they get stuck and get angry and get frustrated that they feel the way they feel? I and you exercises. This is a new one that I learned. Pay attention to how often you use the word I in a sentence throughout two hours. It's way too much focus, at least for me to do for an entire day. But when you're talking to people and in our society, we are extremely egocentric. A lot of times we will tell people, I feel. I am. I will. But we don't ask, what do you need? How do you feel? What are you doing? We're too busy telling them things instead of inquiring Pay attention to how often you use the word you as well in a blaming, directing, or accusatory, you need to or you did this, or whether you use it in an inquiring, compassionate fashion. What is it that you need me to do? Most of us find that throughout the day, we find that we tend to be a little bit more egocentric and bossy than we do inquiring and compassionate and all that stuff. And it might be interesting to compare, you know, for your own self when you're in a session, how your verbiage, how your language differs in session with a client versus at home with your family. Cause and effect. When something happens, and this goes with impulse control, play out the story for everything that you do for a given period of time. I got out of bed because the effect of this is whatever. Mindfulness helps you focus on your motivations, the cause and effect activity helps helps you focus on, why did you do something? I got out of bed because there was some sort of a reward. We know that we do things that have a reward. What was that? The effect of me getting out of bed is X, which means I'm going to do another behavior. It goes into chaining. You know, a lot of what we do on autopilot is just sort of a preformed chain of behaviors. Think about if you've driven home from work one day after a really hectic day and you're kind of lost in your own thoughts, you still get from work to home and make all the right turns, hopefully, because you're on autopilot and your body knows that, okay, when I see this stoplight, I need to turn right. Becoming more cognizant of that cause and effect in our own behaviors, not just in our driving patterns, helps us understand why you did something. Devil's Advocate can be useful, and it can be useful with children and teenagers sometimes. But obviously it's one that you have to use with some element of care in order to not make the problem worse. But basically, you act as if you believe the opposite of what you believe about something. So if your child comes to you and says, you know, I just. I can't stand algebra. I will never use algebra. It's a pointless endeavor. That's how they feel about it. And, you know, okay, so I will say play devil's advocate and tell me all the reasons I need to know algebra, all the ways that I might use algebra initially, you know, when I did it with my kids and algebra was one that we talked about a lot, I would give examples of how I had used algebra throughout the day. I mean, I hadn't really thought about it in terms of being algebra. But you know, I think I've got six people for dinner tonight. Each person is going to need 6 ounces of protein. So how many ounces of protein do I need for the meal tonight? So I need to make sure I have X amount of meat or whatever it is when I go to the grocery store. That's algebra. Who knew? And we use different examples of that in order to drive home the point that some of the simple algebra is really necessary for my son who's going to go into, at least he thinks right now he's going into computer programming. We look at why some of the more advanced algebra is important and you know, that kind of gets above my head. So I refer him to his father who happens to be in computer programming and they talk more about why those sorts of things are necessary. Devil's Advocate can also be an interesting mindfulness activity again under the right circumstances to do at the, at the dinner table. We've been studying politics right now and you know, the kids are watching the, the debates and they're watching everything that's going on with the presidential election. So I will encourage them to take a topic and play Devil's Advocate with each other, which can be quite amusing as long as a fight doesn't break out. But which is why I say you want to make sure that you're using it a situation where you know it's not going to cause harm and it's going to stimulate cognitive juices, once you're aware of how you're feeling and once you're aware of how you are in the moment, then you know whether you need to relax and recover or you've got energy to go. The interesting thing about energy to go is no matter whether you're doing it for something really exciting like going on a two week cruise, or you're doing it for something not so exciting like having to do annual evaluations for all of your employees. It takes energy. When you use energy, you've got to give your body a chance to recharge and that's relaxation. We need to allow our body to stop being stressed. One of our major sources of energy waste, if you will, is muscle tension. It's like having the air conditioning on but the windows open at the same time. It doesn't do a lot of good. You're just going to keep running that air conditioning. When you have muscle tension, your body is constantly using energy to keep those muscles knotted Up. The muscle tension oftentimes comes from our own mental stresses and possibly our own poor posture. Identifying any sources of stress that need to be eliminated or that can be easily eliminated are great. Let's see how we can close the window so the air conditioner can be more efficient, so the body can rest and recharge and be more efficient. So emotionally we want to increase pleasant cues in the environment. And what's pleasant for me and what's pleasant for each of my children are very different. So when we're working with families, you know, I'm not saying I want everything to be uniform everywhere. If the child can have a corner or a place, you know, maybe they share a bedroom so they can't have a whole room, you know, that's fine. They need to have a place they call their own. When I was working in residential, we would have eight women in the same room and they were in bunk beds and their space was their bunk and the wall space that was above their bunk and a dresser, and that was it. They didn't have a lot of space. But what they did, what space they did have, they were allowed to try to make their own, you know, within reason sounds. Not everybody finds the same sounds pleasant. Whether it's, you know, put on music, instrumental music, birds, silence. You know, some people just love the sound of silence, waterfall, any of those background noises. The white noise machines that you can get, you can also get DVDs. A lot of people use them when they're doing meditation that just has some sort of a nature based background or flutes or something, sights. What can you put in your environment that's relaxing? As far as pictures, colors, organization, safety. When I go into my office and I have pictures that are inspirational, I have pictures that are encouraging, and I have my diplomas and all that other junk hanging on the wall, you know, that's great. That's sort of energizing for me because that's when I'm in my professional mode. But when I'm home, you know, I have pictures of cats and chickens and my kids and things that they've drawn. That's what I have up in my home environment. It's a separate feeling when you go, just like we were talking about being at my house or being at my mother's house. My demeanor and my stress level is very different when I'm at work versus at home. Not to say one's better or worse than the other. It's just different. What's the feel? Make it comfortable so you're not unpleasantly Hot, unpleasantly cold. And texture. This is. I'm a big person for texture. I'm a sweater junkie. But scratchy sweaters or anything that's stiff or if it's too tight. And we've all had times where we put on a pair of pants and we've been like, yeah, this is a little bit too tight, but I'm going to wear it anyway. That's not the best thing for relaxation. It's hard to relax if you've got to suck it in all day long. Paying attention to those things, they're just little things, but little things add up in the environment. What do you smell? You know, sometimes it can be something as simple as just opening the windows and getting the smell of the crisp, fresh air. Other times you can use things like aromatherapy or even the little tart warmers that you can plug into the wall. Most agencies may not allow you to use those because that would be a whole other MSDS sheet to go in the. In the thing and a whole nother issue as far as safety is concerned. But if you can find a way to incorporate a pleasant smell, whatever is pleasant to you, you know, it may be roses, it may be ginger, it may be coffee. Oh, I love the smell of coffee. Good coffee. Anything that can help you relax and get into that state of mind. When we talk about guided imagery, next time we're going to talk about getting into the state of mind for you. That's your happy place. Cognitively, in order to relax cognitively, don't think, just be. And that's hard for a lot of us to not think. And we're going to talk about different ways to try to help us not get caught up with all the noise that's going on in our mind and appreciate what's going on right now, you can use guided imagery to help you relax mentally. And again, we're going to talk about that next week. But talking about guided imagery briefly, you're being guided through a scene or a scenario. And guided imagery can be used in a lot of different ways. It's been used and tested with AIDS patients to help increase their T4 helper cells. It's been used with cancer patients to help their recovery. Also been used with people who are stressed out to help them get to a more relaxed state of being. So guided imagery can walk you through a lot of different scenarios and can be used for a lot of different purposes. The cool thing with guided imagery, and like we've talked about with anxiety before and our mind misinterpreting cues with guided imagery. We don't necessarily have to see something. We don't necessarily have to see the waterfall with our eyes to be able to see it in our mind's eye, to be able to imagine that we're there and get roughly the same experience. Reading something enjoyable that's non stressful. I try not to read clinical stuff when I'm at home because I'll get myself all fired up arguing about, you know, whether they use proper statistical analyses or how rigorous the study was done. And, you know, I just, I'm a statistics junkie too. So it's one of those things that it's better for me not to get into. So I will read books about crocheting, I will read books on gardening, my hobbies, and I try to keep the two separate. Read something that you enjoy. Some people love fiction. I can't get into it, but if you love it, that's awesome. My son loves it. Learn a new hobby. It's not relaxation in its truest sense, because anytime you learn a new skill, it takes a fair amount of focus and mental energy, but it can distract you from other stressors. When I learn a new crochet stitch, or if I'm crocheting to a pattern, I have to focus on what I'm doing and I can't be focusing on all the different distractions. I can't let my mind wander to the stresses of the day. I have to stay in the present moment to make sure I don't miss a stitch. You know, crochet may not be your thing. You can use, you know, different crossword puzzles, anything that makes you happy. Physical Relieve pain and muscular imbalances and regulate blood flow. Stretching if your left and your right are not evenly relaxed, you're going to feel pain. If your front and your back are not evenly relaxed, you're going to feel pain. So you need to have muscular balance between front and back and left and right and top and bottom. Massage Massage can help loosen some of those muscles so it's easier to stretch. It can help with some of the muscle tension. It can help with some of the muscle spasms. Unfortunately, massage doesn't last forever and, you know, sometimes you have to go to a masseuse and that's not necessarily practical. There are a lot of good videos online about ways that you can use tennis balls and foam rollers to massage, you know, the basic parts on your own. Some people swear by hot tubs as a way to help their muscles relax. Progressive muscular relaxation is a technique I used to teach my students, they would sit or lie comfortably and then we would start at. I always started at the top. And we would start at the top and tense and relax our foreheads, noticing the difference between tense and relaxed. We do that a couple of times. Then we'd move on to the next muscle and so forth. And every few muscles, we would do a scan from top to bottom and make sure no tension had returned. You can find all kinds of scripts for progressive muscular relaxation online. But as people become more adept at noticing the difference between tense and relaxed, then they'll be able to earlier identify when they're getting some muscle tension. And then breath work can also help. The more you oxygenate your blood, the better you feel. In general, you know, there's hyper oxygenation, which isn't good, but anything that you do with breathing and focusing on your breath, getting good, deep breaths is generally going to help relax the body. When you slow your breathing, your heart rate slows. It's just the way it happens. Your body goes, oh, you're not breathing as fast. So I don't need to beat the heart as fast. Which can help people with anxiety and anger issues. Social relaxation. You want to look for social environments that promote calm, tranquility and happiness. And that's different for everybody. When I go to the gym, you know, I get in my own little world. There may be 30 people there or more. I don't count, but I don't care about what's going on around me. I'm in my own little world where I'm calm and I'm happy and everything's grand. Laughter naturally releases endorphins and it's an excellent relaxation technique. So find funny things and it can be funny memes, it can be stupid cat videos. Whatever it is that makes you laugh, try to work it in five to ten minutes each day. A good belly laugh does a lot to improve mood and help people relax. Extroverts may be more comfortable around a group of people because they don't mind the interruptions and they actually draw energy off more people. So extroverts may look for relaxation in a social setting, whereas introverts may want to go to coffee with one or two other people where they won't be interrupted and bothered a bunch. People who tend to be more judgers or structured don't like surprises and they need to plan for whatever the social event is. Not that they don't like social events, but don't throw it on them at the last minute. And call up your friend Jane and Be like, hey, it's 4 o' clock on Friday and I don't have anything to do. Would you like to go out at 6 o'? Clock? If Jane is strong on the structure scale, she's probably going to say no. You know, I already planned to do laundry and wash my hair. And that's actually probably true. Perceivers, on the other hand, don't like that much structure. They like to go, well, you know, after work on Friday, I'm probably gonna go do something. I don't know what. So when you're talking about relaxation, you need to be aware of who you're doing it with. And your children will have temperaments just like we do. Make sure that you're attending to their temperaments as you're planning these things. If you're going to a family event, if you have holiday parties that you've got to go to, whatever it is, if it's something that is going to add extra stress to your child's existence because they don't like being in big crowds or they don't like being in the car for four hours, just be aware of that and plan on it. It will make stress go down a lot and encourage them to figure out ways they can deal with it, too. What can you do in the car for five and a half hours? Environmental relaxation. What makes the environment relaxing for you? What colors do you find relaxing? I love purple, but I also love, you know, like a light yellow and white. Those are probably my big ones, but that's me. Some people like blues and greens. My stepmother loves greens. What do you want to see, you know, when you walk into a room? My daughter's doing interior decorating right now, and she's learning about all the different styles of interior decorating. And I am definitely not what you would call a person with a taste for modern design. I'm more of a country or old fashioned, early American sort of design. But that's not for everybody. Some people prefer the crisp lines. What light level do you like? Some people like it to be darker, some people like it to be a lot brighter, like daylight. And you want to look at the temperature of the lights. Some people like the soft whites that are flattering, and some people like the daylight lights that have a much bluer hue and they're much brighter, but they also tend to be much harsher. What temperature do you prefer? And this is a constant battle in our house because my kids would prefer it to be like, you know, 76, 77 in the summer, in the winter, and like 72 in the summer, which doesn't make any sense to me. I'm like, why don't you just want it 74 all year long? I, on the other hand, would prefer it to be 68, like all year round, because then I can always layer up if I get cold. So find out what makes it more comfortable for you. Location. Do you want to sit where you're facing a window? Do you want to be in a room without windows? What makes your environment, what makes your location important? Again, what do you want to hear? And organization. Some people are okay with, you know, just moving stuff off the sofa so they can sit down. Other people need to have a place for everything and everything in its place. And it's not that you're necessarily OCD or, you know, anything like that. Just sometimes it feels more relaxing to not be surrounded by clutter. But that depends on the person. I know people who. My best friend. Her apartment, you know, looks like a whirlwind, hit it. But she doesn't care. She's like, whatever. I got better things to do right now than to clean. And that's fine for her. And, you know, it's fine for me when I'm there too, so. Mindfulness involves increasing awareness of our emotional, mental, and physical selves. Children don't know how to do that from get go, so we need to teach them starting out when they're young, giving them an emotional vocabulary, and then when they use their feeling words, helping them figure out what's causing the feeling and how to deal with the feeling. Kids are also very attuned to how we are feeling as their caregivers. So if we become stressed, they will probably start to become. They will act out more is typically the phrase that I hear. Because they're trying to distract the person. They're trying to make the stressfulness go away, make you laugh, make you forget about it, whatever. Encouraging children to be aware of that, but also articulating to them that, you know, I'm stressed right now, but it has nothing to do with you. So their little egocentric minds don't get focused on what did I do and how can I fix it. Then we move on to mental self awareness. And. A question comes in. When a child hits, for example, because they're frustrated or angry, then we want to stop and go, okay, you know, tell me what's going on. And the child will probably tell you, well, Sammy did such and such and such, so we would need to paraphrase. And that made you angry or that hurt your feelings and help Them identify that feeling vocabulary that they missed because they went from activating event to consequence and didn't identify the emotions or beliefs in between. And the other thing we can do, that my son's preschool teacher used to do, she was just awesome with children. In certain situations she would ask the children, how do you think that made Jimmy feel when you hit him? And the kid would usually go, oh. So then she would say, okay, well if Jimmy hit you, how would you feel? Oh, I'd be angry or I wouldn't like it. Okay, so when you hit him, how do you think he felt? Well, he probably didn't like it exactly. So she would walk them through the devil's advocate point of view. If you want to say that to help them take the other's perspective, develop empathy and all that wonderful stuff that we just assume kids are born with and they're not, we need to help them learn as they go through life. So then moving on to the mental state, this is as children get cognitively older and then us, we're technically cognitively older, looking at how we're feeling, are we foggy headed? Are we able to concentrate? Are we just on task? You know, some days you come in and you sit down at work and you've got a laser focus and you can get million and one things done. And some days you come in and it's, you're lucky if you get one thing done. But being aware of where you are and working within your limits is part of mindfulness because you'll reduce your frustration a lot if you don't try to, you know, push through when there's just, you've got nothing left to give. And being aware of your physical self if you're sleepy, if you're hungry, if you're tired. I already said sleepy. If you're in pain, those are all going to decrease your tolerance to stress as well as your ability to focus. Understanding that and just going with it instead of getting upset about it is going to be huge. In helping kids learn how to manage their own stress and helping our clients and, you know, maybe ourselves learn how to deal with our own stress as it comes up, we can realize that, you know, today I'm only about 80% and it is what it is. What can I do to help my body relax and rejuvenate? Mindfulness helps us to develop an understanding of external stimuli that influences ourselves. So as we become more mindful, we become aware of those stimuli in the environment that may have triggered a smile or may have triggered us to go oh no, don't want to do that again. Relaxation is a technique used to restore equilibrium after a period of stress. As clients increase self awareness, they'll be able to identify signs of distress earlier, implement relaxation strategies to prevent the upheaval. They'll be able to kind of turn it down and learn their own stress triggers and effective interventions. If you enjoy this podcast, please like and subscribe either in your podcast player or on YouTube. You can attend and participate in our live webinars with Dr. Snipes by subscribing@Allce.com Counselortoolbox this episode has been brought to you in part by allce.com, providing 24. 7 multimedia continuing education and pre certification training to counselors, therapists and nurses since 2006. Use coupon code counselortoolbox to get a 20% discount off your order this month.