Use These CALMING Techniques to Relax In MINUTES

when now life's happening and i have the actual things to be stressed out about can i use my breath to regulate myself in those moments the normal range of psychological suffering is a story of telling yourself a story you're thinking part of me that's debilitated by anxiety that and according to gestalt therapy is a character that resides in me it's not thinking about the mountaintop you can by the way you breathe you can change the electricity in your mind this too shall pass that's the good and the bad generalized anxiety means that you have so many triggers now for your anxiety i'll give you one of mine this was so bizarre to me this is when i first thought oh i don't think i'm nervous i don't think i'm a nervous person i think this has officially reached levels of anxiety if i turned so i used to work in a parking garage where you know you would go up to four or five or whatever and every day i would just turn right turn right turn right turn right all the way down but you could turn right or left and i remember one day for whatever reason i turned left and i had this sudden spike of anxiety and i was like why the hell would i be anxious about turning left and so that was when i realized okay whoa whoa like this isn't even now attached to any sort of major thing this is about me overextending doing something new going into the unknown and i realized that that was the beginning of the anxiety for me that because i'm not a born entrepreneur getting into business was this incredibly anxiety provoking endeavor the stakes were so high i felt like i was constantly on stage like it was nuts and so i realized oh my god anytime i do something quote unquote out of my comfort zone no matter how minor my brain has now allowed itself to condition itself to be anxious about anything that sort of deviated from the norm and when we boil it back down to what is anxiety anxiety is living in the future and worrying about it okay you're mentally projecting into the future and you are worried about it and you allow yourself yes allow yourself to worry and it feels like it feels like you're doing yourself a solid because you're thinking through all the things that could go wrong so you want to be ready i remember i used to okay i'm going to get in you know this situation in a meeting or whatever and at some point the eyes are going to turn to me so what do i do if my heart starts racing and i'm getting panicky what do i do about that and i realized that i would sit there and be like okay i'm gonna you know maybe i can say that i've got a stomachache or a headache or something and i'll find a way out of the room all i was doing in those moments was rehearsing it going wrong that i was gonna get into this situation and need an exit and then i realized you know a better approach because all my planning to make sure that i'm ready is the thing that's making me anxious okay i i want that to hit home that is the thing that's making you anxious is that you're thinking about you might get anxious what kind of utility or usefulness are we looking for and what do i mean when i say this a lot of us when we're looking to create change we actually want the people around us to be the ones changing so it's kind of the radical you know kind of self-responsibility ownership the conversation i always have around boundaries boundaries aren't ultimatums they're not me pointing some finger at you tom and giving you you know if you do this this will happen if you don't do this this will happen boundaries are for self-empowerment so i answer and i think about things in the same context right what am i looking what pattern am i owning here um what role am i playing and how can i create change whether or not you're being an active agent or an active player as well and sometimes this means being radically honest with ourselves and exploring what our intentions are what our behaviors are and how we're participating in the pattern even in the moments where we're pretty much convinced it's not us um so i think a lot of times it's that deep level of self-exploration that can give us clarity on that generally just learning about how feelings worked was very helpful the guy i've been working with for the last six to eight years he does a thing called gestalt therapy which is very interesting it was very big in you know the 50s or 60s and it kind of waned but it's really interesting so it's some people do call it like the empty chair work and that's essentially gestalt therapy so for instance there's the part of me that's debilitated by anxiety so that and according to gestalt therapy is a character that resides in me i have a lot of dif there's a chorus of voices of course of characters that reside in each one of us you simply engage in a conversation with that character so it's this kind of actors actually do really well with it it's kind of like role playing so you have myself there's the therapist over here and there's an empty chair so i'm me then i have a conversation with my anxious guy i'm like tell me about yourself i remember sometimes i've been just debilitated by anxiety i couldn't move i um i i was tongue-tied sweating in panic attacks like who are you and what what are you about that you kind of take me over in that way and then i get you literally get up and you walk over and you sit in that other chair and you talk back to the empty chair that guy talking back to rain to reasonable rain and that guy you don't know what's going to come out you do you don't try and plan it you just try and just it's like improv you just step into the shoes of that person and by the way you can do this all with writing too you can just do conversations by writing and some people take to that a lot more easily and then that guy might say like you you know you're a piece of [ __ ] and nobody likes you and so i'm you're you're terrified of being found out as a total fraud and unlovable and so i'm there to protect you and and if that happens like i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna protect you and you're gonna i'm gonna seize you up and i'm gonna overwhelm you so that i'm just by the way i don't know that any of this that i'm saying is is the truth i'm just giving an example super helpful and and you can do that with all of these different characters in your head and um they then they cease to have that as much control because they're not these characters swimming in the sea of our unconscious that sometimes leap out with their tentacles and grab on and control us they're much more like oh when you hear that voice you you start to feel the anxiety like oh there's mr anxiety guy again or you try and control it's like oh there's my control freak i wonder what he's trying to control or there's my angry act reactive guy going again it kind of it allows that kind of distance to know that i don't have to be a victim to these characters that live within me so now going back to our woman with postpartum depression so she's having these thoughts um they're giving her a neurochemical cascade where she is having a physiological response to this she's confusing the physiological response with what's actually causing this how does she then begin to back out of that like how does she the what what is the process the mood journaling and all of that is going to help her get out well there's there's two phases to it now when i wrote feeling good it was just how to crush the negative thoughts but now i think it's worth walking us through that i think people understanding the the sort of gist of the 10 cognitive distortions well sure let's let's do that then maybe later we can talk about this amazing new thing that speeds recovery so much uh but but uh you know she what is she telling herself well she's telling herself it's my fault that that the baby isn't nursing i i'm a failure as a mother and also i shouldn't have mixed feelings about having a child mothers are supposed to just love their their children and uh and though those thoughts have all of the classic cognitive distortions for example uh uh should statements i i i shouldn't have mixed mixed feelings um also uh self-blame it it's my fault that the baby is is having trouble uh nursing that that type of thing and she had about eight thoughts and they all had multiple distortions you know all or nothing thinking looking at things in black or white uh categories emotional reasoning is huge a lot of people are listening right now feel depressed and hopeless so that they feel like losers so they say i must be a loser i feel like a loser i must be hopeless i i feel hopeless she's also involved in mind reading thinking oh other mothers don't have mixed feelings other mothers are you know these ideal ideal mothers and and so that's the first step is to recognize that what you're telling yourself is not true it's it's distorted the second thing is to realize that it's it's kind of mean-spirited what what you're doing to yourself what is anxiety anxiety is you are catastrophizing about the future so i'm guessing if you're worried about going to the gym you're thinking oh my god they're going to judge me they're going to think i'm a loser i'm fat i'm weak i'm skinny i'm whatever your concern is you've got to pattern interrupt that you've got to stop it you've got to focus on not what other people think about you you've got to focus on what your goal is and if your goal demands you go to a gym if you want to be more social and your goal demands you go out and meet people then that's what we're going to do so we're going to do whatever we have to in order to get beyond that sense of like this is a terrible thing so now this is where we put our meditation in this is where we stop our catastrophizing we do the pattern interrupt we start thinking about oh man this is going to be great i'm not good at social stuff yet but i'm going to get good tom told me action cures all so i know i need to go do this thing there's nothing to panic about because the only thing that you're quote unquote panicking about is some future thing that's going to happen but what's really going to happen let's say everybody judges you they they think that you are a loser they think that you are fat they think that you are skinny they think that you are dumb whatever now did you die or do you survive that and more importantly do you get a little bit better a little stronger a little more resilient it's really easy to think about when you think about going to the gym if everyone there thinks that you are fat or skinny or whatever but you show up to the gym every day and you put in the work they cannot stop you from getting the result that you want so they can throw all the shade they want which by the way they're not nobody gives a [ __ ] about anybody else to be honest like they might give you a sideways glance and think you're a loser but they're worried about themselves they're thinking about themselves they're trying to look cool or feel good or be proud of themselves or move forward in their life or whatever and the odds that they're spending any significant amount of time thinking about you is basically zero so the great news is no matter what they're thinking about you they cannot stop you from getting the result that you want when you show up and put in the work so focusing on getting a little bit better every day that's really the goal so whatever your goal is it mandates certain actions the good news is action cures all the even better news is that you can interrupt that escalation mentally with a pattern interrupt with a focus on the fact that you can get better reminding yourself of empowering statements instead of disempowering statements and then you just get to work just do the thing and every time your brain starts worrying about the future remind yourself if i let myself sit here and think about this this will become the easiest thought for me to think this will become the easiest feeling for me to feel which means that when my brain walks into a gym or a bar or whatever i will have trained it to trigger over into this negativity i suffered from severe anxiety attacks i would get anxiety attacks where i would be on the subway in new york city like shaking and was afraid that people were going to think that i was like a crack addict because i was like sweating i'm kind of sweating right now actually but that's more from the la weather but um uh you know i would be shaking and sweating on the subway um panicking or days i couldn't get out of bed sometimes i would just fall to the ground these came and went for years sometimes they would be attached to a thing so all of a sudden they would get attached to flying and then i would have this terrible fear of flying then it would go away from flying and then it would be enclosed spaces and i would get it around and close spaces then it would just kind of randomly happen how did you as an actor on the stage how did you deal with that that's gotta be a pretty big trigger um to literally be on stage in front of people yeah yeah in fact it was a big deal i um i it never happened on stage but i would get that fear you know that when you get that cold chilled ice water in your veins like heart thumping fear like oh oh [ __ ] this thing is about to happen i would get that terror that i was on the stage because i did theater for 10 years before i came to l.a and eventually did the office so um i did a lot of different plays a lot of different styles of acting characters and i was terrified that one of these days i was gonna seize up on stage forget all my lines and start shaking and sweating do you have a guess as to why it didn't happen well i think i think that it's like people who stutter like i have a couple friends that stutter and when they're acting they don't stutter they're actors who study so in real life they stutter and when they're on stage playing characters they don't stutter so what is that about there's a certain part of the brain that you're using there's a certain consciousness and focus that you're bringing to the words that you're saying that um i think allow you to not stutter and to not succumb to panic attacks what is up my friend tom bilyu here and i have a big question to ask you how would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of one to ten if your answer is anything less than a ten i've got something cool for you and let me tell you right now discipline by its very nature means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful boring which is what kills most people or possibly scary or even painful now here is the thing achieving huge goals and stretching to reach your potential requires you to do those challenging stressful things and to stick with them even when it gets boring and it will get boring and even when you might be afraid of the outcome if you fail building your levels of personal discipline is not easy but let me tell you it pays off in fact i will tell you you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline if you're not already a 10 out of a 10 with this skill and i use that word intentionally because it is a skill you can build it you can get better at it class from impact theory university called how to build ironclad discipline that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself to do the hard things that greatness is going to require of you promise if you want to achieve your goals this is the number one thing you have to focus on as jacob willing says discipline equals freedom right click the link on the screen register for this class right now and let's get to work i will see you inside this workshop from impact theory university until then my friends be legendary peace out what techniques do we have beyond that things that are sort of the mental equivalent of going to the gym we want to practice it consistently so starting there this isn't the light switch i like to say a lot of us you know maybe discover consciousness we know it's there maybe we've practiced once oh i can use my attention i can come here be present yet we don't practice consistently enough um even those of us with a meditation practice where maybe that's the purpose of that one or two or five minutes where i'm sitting my question always remains what about the rest of your day so if you had to force rank the tools so is meditation number one alarms are number two like what what is the the value stack of um practicing attention consciousness is the foundation so whether or not you can develop your consciousness muscle by sitting as a sitting meditation for some of us beginning if i were to speak from my own experience tom that was so overwhelming my body didn't feel safe my thoughts raced i felt so agitated when i would try to sit silently that i actually began to build my consciousness muscle in real time setting those alarms because i found that as i went about my day and my alarm went off and say i was on a walk being consciously present on my walk felt a little less intimidating so i say that to say consciousness is the practice we can develop it sitting in quiet turning inward or in real time and those of us that feel a bit overwhelmed by the first practice can do it in any thing we're doing we can use any context any activity and use our focus of attention to be conscious i see you you're doing brazilian jiu jitsu you're somebody who obviously cares about martial arts and being able to fight and defend yourself i've heard you talk very eloquently about violence and clearly in your professional life you've just even just what you've done in the writing let alone the lecturing you've already achieved such massive success refused to believe that there wasn't a just massive amount of energy behind that so how do you think about meditation in that context is this like going to war with your mind and you're i'm going to come out the other side having face demons uh and having won some sort of victory that allows me to perform at a higher level or am i totally missing all of this and it needs to be a letting go a more peaceful relaxed sort of transient experience yeah well at first it's a very common association i i totally understand it and it's presented in many ways where yeah you under that framing you can just feel the testosterone leaving your body you know so uh yeah that's not my orientation it is a lot like jiu jitsu for the mind and it's and it's a lot like it i mean what's so beautiful about jujitsu in particular is that you can have this massive effect in the domain of violence while being relaxed it is what aikido off you know advertises itself to be but it's a much more you know at least in my estimation a much more effective version of that same underlying ethic where you can like you can control someone and use as little violence as as necessary and basically just use a superior knowledge of physics and leverage and position against them so it's a very it can be incredibly relaxed and yet um given what the circumstance is it can be a very high testosterone experience you know it's not it's a kind of quintessentially masculine thing to be doing but you can internalize the same sort of structure and that's largely what meditation is because basically the default state is one of being attacked and ambushed all the time by your thoughts and by your reactivity and by uh you are being taken in by assumptions and and illusions and not know yet just you just you you're in a fog not you personally but you know one is and um you know even when you learn to meditate you're in this fog most of the time i mean and you're cut so the practice is one of continually breaking the spell you were constantly on the mat constantly finding yourself in a position of some surprising disadvantage right like it's like all of a sudden there's a rear naked choke that's you know three quarters applied right and you need an answer for that and not knowing the answer is just synonymous with death what you eat what you drink what you take in all of it matters so much i'll even say lifestyle might be a better answer so your diet is a huge portion of it but your exercise routine is also critical so if you know you have something stressful coming up i'm going to recommend get your diet on point beyond the scope of this video to go into that but i'll say really quickly whole foods just eat whole foods things that look like it looked when it was walking around or like it looked when it was in the ground okay if you stick as close to that as humanly possible you're going to be headed in the right direction then the next part is getting your exercise right so actually working out pushing yourself and then even more important than the exercise is meditation so you're you can actually change the structures of your brain by meditating let that land you can change the s the physical structure of your brain by meditating you become more emotionally resilient you become more able to focus on a task over long periods of time a lot of really fascinating things happen when you meditate so if i were trying to preemptively self soothe that's exactly what i would do diet exercise and sleep that's a critical part and then meditation belly breathing diaphragmatic breathing changed my life so i'd be curious to know what tools you use for that yeah so for a lot of us who struggle with our posture it's hard um so back straight shoulders back so i started laying down it was difficult for me so i would begin my practice either right before bed or right when i woke up when i was already laying and for me it started with just a small daily promise of five breaths from my deep belly area for me putting my hand on my belly physically so i could feel it when it would expand and when it would deflate was really helpful so that was just a daily promise every time every morning or right before bed i would put my hand on my belly and just practice practice practice but then like i said i wanted to become more aware of how i was using my breath all day long and then building on that foundation can i harness my breath all day long when now life's happening and i have the actual things to be stressed out about right can i use my breath to regulate myself in those moments so it becomes a foundational practice that we can build upon what i would be helping them do is create the pathway that requires the least amount of energy because the brain is hard wiring it it's wrapping it in the myelin sheath so that the electrical signals are trans um they're going more efficiently and so the brain from a caloric usage standpoint is trying to do whatever is most efficient and so simply through intelligent repetition you're moving people into the default network of the brain so they can sort of [ __ ] space out and when they space out they're becoming more calm their default reaction is the de-excitation of the nervous system yeah no i like what i'm hearing uh so the question is repetition and i agree it's not thinking about the mountaintop you can by the way you breathe you can change the electricity in your mind we've seen that with the people we put grids on like we have actual measurements now but that's the you know what's the structure where you get the most out of repetition what is the perfect spot where meditative breathing hits that sweet spot for people and they'll increase it if it continues to benefit them but the food the breathing sleep is a hard one but to me um food what we eat and meditative breathing i think are the most uh graspable and measurable uh the creativity stuff the sleep stuff uh the exercise stuff is harder for people uh but the exercise stuff is in its own way the most important if we could get back to that ooh why keeps your brain arteries open releases all these neurotrophic factors inside your brain so not just the plumbing that irrigates the flesh of the brain tell me about it but ignf yeah they're nerve growth factors they're all neurotrophic factors and whatever the the for the in this case to be abbreviation gdnf bdnf ngf it doesn't matter they end with gf and growth factors so it really is i've heard your word miracle grow but getting back to the garden analogy uh to keep the flesh we're going to get you know electricity is one thing to keep the flesh healthy uh you have to irrigate it and that has to do with your brain arteries and since we already said it's not a it's not a ball you know it's these uh you know these jellyfish and they're moving and they're throbbing and they're pulsating and their tentacles are reaching out there's a lot of space in between and that extracellular space outside of the actual cells outside the neurons outside of the jellyfish if you will it's not just water there's chemicals floating around in there now dopamine might be just from technical to tentacles you know serotonin might be this way but what's it what's in all the stuff around all those billions and billions of neurons they're growth factors and minerals and chemicals that the brain naturally has but there's also a soup that these billions and billions of neurons are floating in bdnf is a key component of that soup that helps regulate the health of each of those uh jellyfish or nerve and we can trigger more of that exercise yeah you exercise it releases it it showers itself it's not like the thighs thigh muscles sends it up to the brain the brain says hey i'm feeling good this is good i like this i'm gonna create a new rut i'm gonna remind you you feel good when you run well i would just point out the mechanics of it which is what is actually going on is that they're lost in thought they're they're thinking without knowing that they're thinking basically every moment of their waking life right and the character of that story in this case is depressing or or uh you know certainly productive of unhappiness now there are two the three at least three possible antidotes to that and they should try all of them right so like if we're talking about a clinical depression it's it's useful to say that there's a physiology to this that you know can be driven from below in a way that's not narrowly responsive to their thinking right so it's it'll tend to produce uh depressive thoughts and the depressive thoughts will tend to feed back on the state but you know i don't think all forms of depression are just a matter of what a person's thinking it can be really it's it's best viewed as a kind of disease you know a physiology and so you know i'm not against antidepressants at all i know many people who've you know received a lot of help from them and i hope we get better ones in the future and and pharmacology is definitely a piece of the of the solution for for many people and everything else that is good to do that people sort of lose their commitment to doing at the worst possible time should be done i mean you have to sort of get behind yourself and push to exercise and to socialize and to do things that you know you you may not want to do because those are good for you and help you know break and can break you out of it but the normal range of psychological suffering you know not clinical depression but just feeling like you know life sucks and you're a failure and there's nothing you know it's like uh you're just it's you're stuck that is a story of telling yourself a story you're thinking and you can either become more and more mindful of that and interrupt that more and more uh and or and it should be and you can reframe this continually and tell yourself a better story right you can actually just engineer you know you can change the code that you're that you're you know uh running moment-to-moment and i mean just you know a very simple one which i you know i use and i actually recently recorded this in a lesson on the app you know just gratitude just thinking this is actually you know this particular maneuver is i believe comes from stoic philosophy i didn't actually get it from stoic philosophy but this this sort of use of negative imagination where you think of all of the bad things that haven't happened to you right so if you're just you know if you're stuck in traffic driving to the job that you don't like and you're you're frustrated you can think of all the things that could happen to you right that haven't and if any one of them happened to you you would consider your prayers answered if you could just be returned to this moment right like you haven't been diagnosed with cancer right you've got two young kids say you know you want to live to see them grow up and you could be the guy who today is going to find out you've got two months to live right and you have to then the next two months is spent just unwinding your worldly affairs right you're not that guy right that hasn't happened to you yet that's just more thinking but it can have a profound effect you can you can reframe your experience in a way that doesn't actually change anything material about your circumstance and it can let the light in and there are many techniques like that that are just a matter of invoking useful concepts skillfully step number one don't compare yourself in to others in a way other than i could become that with enough time and energy and effort put into it and then number two recognize that when you have a cognitive distortion like catastrophizing i'll never be that good right you don't have evidence to support that and even if you do it does not serve you to spend time catastrophizing so you are way better off just from a neurochemical standpoint you are way better off doing what's called a pattern interrupt stopping yourself from thinking that and instead of saying so the nice simple pattern interrupt here i'm never going to be that good wait pattern interrupt i'm not that good yet but i can get that good okay and that becomes the way that you break that cycle and the only way to undo that anxiety is to let it atrophy now the fastest way to make something atrophy is to focus on something else so now the thing that we're going to replace that catastrophizing with that's hardwiring into our brain is we're going to replace it with the way the human animal works i can get good at anything right so if it's what i call the only belief that matters if i put time and attention into getting better at this thing i will actually get better that is the nature of the human animal and so i would just repeat that i can get good at anything i can get good at anything and so that becomes my pattern interrupt that becomes the thing now that i'm reinforcing in my mind that becomes the thought that hardwires that becomes the feeling that hardwires and now all of a sudden when i encounter somebody that's doing something better than me that's outpacing me whatever the case that's raising my anxiety levels and i want to get back to that calm state i'm going to pattern interrupt that and i'm going to repeat now something that empowers me and makes me feel better and by doing that now i'm reinforcing something that makes me feel good that makes me feel expansive versus contracting so it makes me feel expansive like i can tackle the challenge and that's what i'm going to hardwire you