Dr. Nicole Cain walks through a three-step anxiety practice: scan your body for sensations, trace the strongest one back to its earliest memory, then talk to that younger part of yourself and visualize putting the burden down. Do it daily for 90 to 120 days to rewire your nervous system.
Chapters
It's a little bit of a toe dip into doing some inner child work or trying to get to the root cause of what your anxiety is trying to tell you needs healing and how. So what you're going to do is you're going to set your alarm for 60 seconds and we won't spend the full time today doing that and walking through it. I'll just give you the steps. You can read the book, you can do it on your own, but you'll set your alarm for 60 seconds. And you can do this when you're feeling activated. But I would say even more powerful is to do it on a regular basis. Maybe at the beginning of your day or during lunch or at the end of your day is just schedule it in. 90 to 120 days of doing this consecutively will change your brain, it will change your nervous system, which then will create a domino effect that may change your gut, may change your hormones, may change your immune system. Take off that coat. Right, so here's how it goes. You set your alarm for 60 seconds and then you're going to just simply notice your body, just like we did at the beginning. You're going to notice your alarm. You're going to start at the bottom of your feet and you're just going to notice. Curiously, you don't have to change anything. You're just going to observe it and then you're going to allow your mindful awareness to follow up your body. You're just going to notice a little gassy. My shoulders are shrugged. I've been clenching my jaw. My teeth kind of hurt. I can't believe I've been furring my brow and I've been putting tape on the angry 11s, but now I need more tape. Right, whatever it is, you're going to notice your body and you're going to then go back to the place where it's the loudest, the most intense. And this depends on what type of anxiety you have or what type of alarm you have, which we can touch on. I know we're coming towards the end, but we can touch on the nine types in just a moment. But you're going to notice the loudest place of the alarm and then your 60 seconds probably run out. So you're going to set your 60 seconds for the second time. There will be three. So the second time I want you to really focus in on where the sensation was the strongest. And I want you to go down, imagine a timeline and I want you to go to the earliest moment, the earliest time in your life that you can remember feeling that way. And it may be that you have an impression of an early moment, but you don't have images or language for it. Because we've seen that trauma, stress, adversity, overwhelm adaptations and coping mechanisms. A lot of that happens in the first year and a half before we have language. So you just may notice impressions or images and that's okay. So you're going to notice that. Follow the timeline. If you don't see anything, that's fine. Just allow your mind to go early. Maybe it was yesterday, whatever it is, it's okay. And then your alarm is probably going to go off. And then we're going to do our last of our 360 seconds. And in this last of the 360 seconds we're going to address that part. Because one of the things that we've seen in the trauma science and the trauma literature is that when adversity and stressors and our winter coats get stored, they don't always get stored in parts of the brain that have access to time and logic. So that's why top down therapies don't always work where people are like, oh, just, just forget about it, or pull yourself up by your bootstraps or just think positive or just say your mantras. Those don't always work because the logical brain can't communicate with all of those sometimes. So what you're going to do is you're just going to notice it and you're going to come into your body and you're going to talk to that part and you're going to say, thank you so much for sharing with me your needs. Thank you so much for speaking to me with your language. I want you to know that I hear you, I honor you and I've got you. And I want you to know that it's whatever year it is, I want you to know that it's 2024 and that we're not in the past anymore and that I have you. I have all the things you've taught me, plus a bunch of resources you didn't have. And so I want you to consider setting down the heavy burden of needing to take care of us and let me take care of you. I'm using the visual image of a big backpack or a big box, something that we can put the stress and the worry that may have come up inside of that container. That visual can be really helpful. So you may imagine doing that, putting it in a container, exhaling it with the breath, and then you put that container to the side. Or you can throw it over a cliff. A lot of my clients want to burn it. Whatever you want. And then you move on.
