This is a Day 7 episode from Dr. Don Wood's "12 Days of Heart" YouTube series (holiday anxiety reduction tips). Dr. Wood introduces the theme for day seven using holiday imagery (seven swans), explains the symbolic meaning of the number seven (completeness/perfection), and gives a resilience-focused tip: acceptance. He shares a success story about "Kirk," who experienced ~30 years of anxiety and panic attacks and has been attack-free for about five to six years after attending Dr. Wood's program, illustrating that anxiety can be managed without lifelong medication. The segment emphasizes accepting that one's mind can be affected and that it's okay to be "a little off," plus using previously given regulation techniques to recover.
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Welcome to the 12 Days of Heart. And if you remember, heart stands for holiday anxiety reduction tips. I'm Dr. Don Wood. I'm the founder of the Inspired Performance Institute, and I'm your guide throughout this series on how to reduce anxiety. And so we're into day seven and day seven again. Let's get into the spirit before we start getting into the tip. And I got another hat here.
And this one is Bah Humbug. But I don't believe in Bah Humbug. But Scrooge, it's a nice story, right? So anyway, it keeps disappearing anyway, so Bah humbug. Day seven. Let's get Alexa to give us some music. Alexa, play some holiday music.
Here's a station you might like. Holiday favorites on Amazon. Music.
Holiday music. Beautiful. All right. Most wonderful time again, we got the same song, so. But I love the song. So seventh day, day seven. Let's take a look at what do we got going on the 12 days of Christmas on day seven.
Let's look at this. And on the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me seven swans. A swimming. All right, we're right back at the birds again. So we know we've got lots of birds, but these are actually cool birds. So I don't mind the seven swans. Those are actually pretty cool. So if you look at a swan, a swan is very graceful when they swim on a lake. You just see them, they just look so. Like they're gliding. It's just so smooth. And that's how we're supposed to be. We're supposed to live. Like that doesn't mean that things don't come along. And there's not some events and experiences that could maybe interfere with that. But most of the time, we should be gliding. We should be staying present in the moment, enjoying life. However, things happen to us, and we have these experiences and we have these events that may be interfering with our ability to stay present and in the moment. So let me tell you a story about a gentleman. His name is Kirk. And when I met Kirk, he was telling me about having 30 years of anxiety and panic attacks. Can you imagine 30 years of dealing with it? And basically the answer all the time was just go on medication. And he really didn't want to be on medication all the time. So he just struggled and dealt with them on a constant basis. And he just sometimes disappear for 3, 4 days because he would go down with one of these panic attacks, and he would just have to literally stop communicating and talking to anybody. So again, why was that happening? So there was nothing wrong with Kirk. Kirk had just experienced some things in life that were affecting the way his mind was working. And after he went to our program, I'm pleased to tell you that he's been probably six years now, five, six years without any panic attacks. We got that settled down. It's possible to calm all that down. The reason it hasn't been is because the mind is constantly going through and filtering through all these events and experiences, and that's going to create the anxiety, that's going to create the panic attacks. So let's take a look. And there's help. So that's the good news, right? It's holiday season. We love good news on holidays. So the number seven, if. What's the significance of seven? We got seven swans of swimming. Number seven denotes completeness or perfection. And that's true in probably every religion. So that number seven is significant in even most religions around the world. So what, what I'd like you to do now is let's connect up number seven to the tip. And the tip is acceptance. Acceptance that there's nothing wrong with anybody. There's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with your mind. Your mind has been affected. And sometimes because of that, we have anxiety because our mind is worried about something, an imminent danger, if you remember. And that's because we've experienced danger and our mind is now looking for it. So let's just accept that we're okay and we can do things to help with that anxiety. And we've given you a number of tips, six tips up to now. The seventh one is to be accepting that it's okay every once in a while to be a little off. But now you have some tips to get back into regulation. So if you look at the.
The action or process. Let me just look this up again here. I just want to go into this a little bit more.
So acceptance, the definition of acceptance is the action or process of being received is adequate or suitable, typically to be admitted into a group. So there is help for you. You're not the only person dealing with anxiety. There's lots of people dealing with anxiety and there are solutions. There are ways to help. It doesn't always have to be medication. Even if medication helps you temporarily, there's other things that you can do, and we're giving you a whole bunch of them. So taking action, take an action, get some help if you need it. And also use these tips. They're great ways to help you as well. So keep looking out for more of these tips in your inbox. And there it is.
