Dr. Nicole Cain walks through a three-round, three-minute exercise to find stress held in your body. Each round is 60 seconds: notice a sensation, trace it back to its earliest memory, then acknowledge that part of you by name and time. Many stressors get locked in before you had words for them.
Chapters
You're going to set your alarm for 60 seconds on your phone, and then you're going to just straight up acknowledge and notice. You're going to notice what it feels like. You're going to notice maybe the color or the temperature, the weight, the texture. You're going to notice that. You're going to acknowledge it. And so then once the 60 seconds runs out, you're going to set another minute and then you're going to follow it down the timeline and you're going to ask yourself, when is the earliest moment that I remember feeling this way? And so then you imagine going down the timeline and it may be surprising what you notice. It may be a thought or an impression or a feeling or a memory. And so you notice that, you notice what's coming up. And then when the 60 seconds runs out, we do our last 60 seconds. And when that 60 seconds starts, you are going to timestamp that. Because here's the thing with overwhelm events, adversity, trauma, stressors, most of the stressors that are living in our bodies right now were installed there before we were verbal. And so they don't have access to present time, awareness and language. So what we do is we go back to that early sensation, impression, maybe memory, and we timestamp that. We say thank you part. I hear you, I acknowledge you. Thank you so much for speaking to me about what you need.
