Guided Imagery QuickStart Guide | Live with Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes

Hey there, everybody, and welcome to today's live interactive presentation. I would love to hear from you throughout the presentation, but I am going to talk a little bit about guided imagery. This is the last video that I'm going to put up for Mental Health Month, so let's just get started. What is guided imagery? Guided imagery is exactly what it sounds like you are walking yourself through. You're using words to describe to your brain what it is seeing or what you're hoping to have happen. It differs from meditation, because meditation, you're trying to clear your mind or you're repeating mantras. In guided imagery, you're actually trying to force form a picture in your mind of something. Guided imagery can help us in a lot of ways because when we're forming that picture in our mind, which is really awesome, it helps solidify the memory pathways and it helps our brain sort of learn how to do that. They've done a lot of studies with athletes, for example, that have shown that if they envision themselves having that perfect golf swing swing or doing that perfect dive or whatever their thing is, they are often better at that skill. They can actually improve their abilities by just envisioning it, visualizing it, and that starts teaching the brain what it is supposed to do and what it is supposed to tell the muscles. So let's talk about how this applies to mental health. We can use guided imagery for a lot of things, but today we're just going to talk about a few. The first one, and the most obvious one, is for relaxation and stress management. There are two techniques that I like to use with guided imagery for this particular use. The first one is tense and release. And this goes with progressive muscular relaxation. It, you know, dovetails really nicely. But I want people to close their eyes and I want them to tense and feel the tension. And I want them to see their, you know, if they're tensing their fists, I want them to see their fists turning red or black or whatever it is in their mind's eye. I want them to see their fists gathering that tension. And then when they release, I want them to see that, that color, whatever that color is just kind of streaming out of their fingertips, tensing and releasing and feeling that the blood is basically what you're feeling, but feeling that tension exit the body. Happy place is one of the more common guided imagery techniques that we use in envisioning your happy place. It helps you get to a place where you can feel relaxed. This is a great activity to do when you are stressed, when you're getting ready to do something stressful or, or even when you're trying to get to sleep. Because when you're focused on your happy place and describing it and experiencing it, then your mind is not as easily going to all those things that you worry about. So for your happy place, one of the keys to this is to make sure that it is multi dimensional. You don't want to just try to see it like a picture on the wall. You want to identify five things that you see, at least four things that you hear, at least three things that you smell, and two things that you feel. So, for example, my happy place is a cabin in the woods. And I see the trees, I see the chipmunks, I see the leaves on the ground. I see a babbling brook, and I see the sun glistening through the tree canopy. I hear the birds chirping, I hear the chipmunks scampering. I hear the babbling brook. I hear the wind blowing through the leaves. I can smell the tree, tree leaves as they decompose. I can smell the water, you know, you know how the. The woods tends to smell. And I can generally smell gardenias or honeysuckle or something else. Those are two of my favorite flowers. And as far as what I feel, I feel the cool breeze wafting through as it rattles the leaves. I feel it touching my skin. And I feel the sun as it beams through the tree canopy. You know, it's not super strong, but I can feel the warmth of the sun occasionally hitting my arms. So when I'm envisioning that, I'm really taking myself and transporting myself to, to that place. And you can do the same thing with the beach or wherever your happy place happens to be. Another guided imagery technique is for anger management. And this one is really simple. It is what I call the door technique. And I want you, when, if, when you get angry, envision yourself slamming that door, okay? That is your anger uncontrolled. And then I want you to envision yourself getting to the point where when you get angry, instead of slamming the door, you can shut it. Either way, whatever you're angry about is on the other side of the door. You're just closing the door on whatever it is for right now until you can let your adrenaline calm down. For urge and trigger management, you can use guided imagery by imagining a bunch of box or a safe or those are the two that I like to use. And when I have an urge, I envision myself taking that urge and putting it in the box and closing the box and putting it on a shelf. It's not gone forever. You know, I still need to deal with it at some point, but I'm just going to put it on the shelf for right now. The same thing with triggers. When I experience triggers, I envision myself in, you know, putting, doing something to control that trigger. And depending on what it is, sometimes I imagine shutting the door because it's triggering anger. If I'm being triggered to do something, like I'm being triggered to go get a snack, for example, you know, that's another one of those things that I envision myself putting that urge or whatever the snack is that I want in that box and, and putting it on the shelf for a little bit. And then if I need to come back to it later, I can, but it's allowing me to unhook from that urge, from that trigger so I don't continue to think about it. I'm going to put it on the shelf for a little bit. We can use guided imagery with relationships and this one's awesome. Envision that relationship with your kid or your significant other. And I want you to really, you know, think about what that looks like. If you were a fly on the wall, what would those interactions look like right now and what would they look like in an ideal situation? What do you want it to look like and what do you do? You can't control what other people do, but you can control what you do. So if you are thinking about improving your relationship with your teenager, for example, you may envision what that looks like and maybe your teenager is at that stage where they're trying to pull away a little bit and you feel rejected or ignored or whatever. And when that happens, sometimes you get, you tense up or you get irritable. In guided imagery you want to envision yourself successfully managing that interaction, anticipating your teenagers desire for independence and how you're going to react not only verbally but also non verbally. Because I can tell my teenager, you know what, that's okay. But if my non verbals are saying that's not okay, if I'm like that's okay, then that is not going to be the same message. So with guided imagery, I can see the kind of relationship that I want and I can see, see how I am acting or interacting in order to make that relationship happen. I'm envisioning what I'm doing now and identifying things that, you know, I might not be doing so well like those non verbals and I'm visualizing and practicing rehearsing in my head having more appropriate or more helpful Nonverbals. The next issue for guided imagery is pain management. And there are a lot, a lot of different scripts and things that you can use for guided imagery for pain management. One of my favorite and one of the easiest to do again is colors. Most people are familiar with colors, so and colors evoke a, a mood or a sensation in a lot of people. When you see red, when you see purple, when you see blue, they bring out certain feelings. When you see baby blue or carnation pink for, for a lot of us that reminds us of, you know, children. So with pain management, you envision colors. Wherever your pain is, you envision that being, for example, red. Red often means anger or pain or could mean passion. But whatever color you choose, I'm going to say red. For this example, envision that area of your body being red and getting redder and redder. And then envision that red kind of lifting off of where that pain is and floating away. Or you can envision that red gradually decreasing in intensity. You can turn down the intensity just like on your, on your phone when you take pictures and you adjust the color and the saturation, you're doing the same thing for your pain. You're envisioning the pain as maybe this brilliant, rich red. And then you're going to see it turning down until it is obfuscated a little bit. Finally, goal achievement for guided imagery. There are two that are really helpful to use starting the day. This is one of my favorite to use personally for guided imagery. Just laying in bed for a minute or when you're drinking your coffee. Coffee. I usually do it when I'm drinking my coffee, Spending two or three minutes. It doesn't have to be a long time. Just envisioning what your day is going to be like. Seeing yourself, you know, maybe getting dressed, going to the gym, going to work, going to whatever meetings you've got to go to, walking yourself through the day and seeing yourself be productive and happy and interactive and whatever other things you want to be. You know, I really enjoy, enjoy seeing myself accomplish my tasks. I'm one of those task oriented people. So envisioning starting the day and successfully getting through my to do list starts me off energized. I'm like, okay, I got this, I can do it. The final type of guided imagery we're going to talk about, and we actually started by talking about it a little bit, is task achievement. Envisioning yourself successfully completing a task, whether it's taking a test or going on a date or a job interview or, you know, have going and playing golf and having the perfect golf swing. Whatever it is that you want to do, whatever it is that you're hoping to be able to do, you want to envision that in your mind. You, you want to see yourself doing it. So if I want to apply to to a graduate program, you know, I'm going to envision myself, see myself doing it and see myself getting in. I'm going to see myself successfully achieving it. It helps reduce stress because it's helping me believe that I can do this and it's also helping me feel less anxious about the stuff steps that I need to take to get there. As I said at the beginning, there are lots of different ways you can use guided imagery. These are just some of my favorite. I would love for you to share some of your guided imagery tools and uses or scripts in the in the comments below. But that is just one place to get you started. So you can start from feeling happier. So you can start feeling more content and more confident and feel like you are not as controlled by your emotions. Emotions are normal. Thoughts are normal. It's what we do with those, whether we nurture them or whether we figure out, okay, is this something I want to hold on to.