Sayre Counseling Services: for all the Seasons of your Life
Ever hear yourself say, “A part of me just wants to …. But another part of me wants to….”
Maybe you feel an inner conflict about an event or decision. Perhaps you sometimes feel as if you don’t know who is in the driver’s seat calling the shots.
Take a look at this 8 minute video to find out why you feel this way.
Whether we admit it or not, we all worry. Big things, like your job, your relationships, or missed opportunities. Small things like your to-do list or the stupid thing you think you just said. A certain amount of worrying is completely normal and expected, but when your worries take over, it can stop you from enjoying what’s happening in the present moment. When worries feel overwhelming, it can become anxiety or even cause a panic attack.
Do you find that you spend most of your day in your head, thinking, analyzing, planning? When you’re lost in worry, it’s easy to mistake your fears and worries for facts, instead of recognizing that they are just thoughts. Feeling anxious in response to these thoughts can make your stomach tighten, your breathing faster and shallower and your heart begin to pound. Your fingers and toes may feel tingly or numb and you may even feel lightheaded. This pattern can interfere with your sleep, hamper your body’s ability to digest and repair, and leave you feeling strung out and exhausted.
Many people experience this at times. You are not alone.
What to do when you notice yourself getting lost in worry, having repetitive thoughts, or feeling sensations of tightness or nervousness in your body. Many people get upset with themselves for feeling worried, anxious or panicky, and try to fight it. This actually intensifies the anxiety and makes it worse. Rather than telling yourself you shouldn’t be feeling what you’re feeling or trying not to feel upset, it’s important to allow yourself to feel however you are feeling. If you can learn to tolerate some uncomfortable feelings, those feelings are more likely to settle down and pass.
Here are three simple and quick mindfulness techniques you can use to help break free from worry and away from anxiety.
1. Grounding
One of the best ways to calm yourself down is to anchor yourself by directing your attention into the lower half of your body. Begin by focusing on your feet and how they feel inside your socks or shoes and against the ground. Wiggle your toes. Notice the sensations in your lower legs and then in your upper legs. Do they feel heavy or light? Warm or cool? Tingly or numb? Now include the sensations of your breathing, really relaxing as you breathe out. Use this to anchor yourself, with your eyes open or closed, while sitting or while walking around. Then breathe.
2. Breath counting
This technique can be used in conjunction with grounding or on its own. On your next in-breath, count up to 4 as you breathe all the way in, and then on the out-breath, count up to 6 as you breathe all the way out. This technique slows down your breathing. It also forces you to release more carbon dioxide, slowing your heart rate, calming you down and restoring emotional equilibrium. If you choose to slow your breath even more, make sure that the out-breath is at least two counts longer than the in-breath. Aim to continue for 4 minutes or as long as you need.
3. Finger breathing
Finger breathing is another version of breath counting. Hold one hand in front of you, palm facing towards you. With the index finger of your other hand, trace up the outside length of your thumb while you breathe in, pausing at the top of your thumb and then trace it down the other side while you breath out. That’s one breath. Trace up the side of the next finger while you breathe in, pause at the top, and then trace down the other side of that finger while you breathe out. Keep going, tracing along each finger as you count each breath. When you get the end of the last finger, come back up that finger and do it in reverse. This practice gives you something visual to focus on and something to do with your hands as well as focusing on counting and your breathing. It’s very useful when there is a lot going around you and it’s hard to just close your eyes and focus inwards.
These mindfulness techniques are not new. Try them and notice what happens.
“Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is a powerful psychotherapy approach that has helped over an estimated two million people of all ages relive many types of psychological distress.”
Cited as an effective treatment by the American Psychiatric Association, the World Health Organization, the U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs and Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The validity and reliability of EMDR has been established by rigorous research.
There are now nineteen controlled studies into EMDR making it the most thoroughly researched method used in the treatment of trauma.
EMDR was developed 1987 by Dr. Francine Shapiro to treat major trauma, but it has since been used effectively to treat:
Most people feel significant relief of distressing feelings more quickly than with traditional psychotherapies. EMDR can be a brief focused treatment or part of a longer therapy program.
You lost your job and the bills are overwhelming, your partner just received a scary diagnosis from the doctor, your child is in big trouble with a capital T, again! There is a dark cloud hovering over you. Your mind seems stuck on a track that screams “Disaster,” and it is impossible to understand how people around you are fussing about their neighbor’s dog, their boss’s irritating habit, or how they are too busy to get an oil change.
The idea that life will return to normal, that you might actually find something funny or be able to relax at a movie seems preposterous.
Your mind says, “I must find a job today; my electricity is going to be turned off; my partner might die; the medical bills are going to send us into bankruptcy; how do I fix my child.”
It may feel wrong to suggest that this is exactly the time when you must reach for normalcy, to indulge in pleasure, to laugh out loud. But human BEINGS (not human DOINGS) cannot thrive on an unending diet of non-stop thinking/searching/fixing a big problem. Exhaustion sets in, mental and physical, hitting-the-brick-wall-melt-into-a-little-puddle can’t sleep or get out of bed type of exhaustion.
Your search for financial stability, for parental peace of mind, for the calm in the storm is not reached without the inner strength that comes from nurturing the body and soul.
Do something fun, recharge the battery. Go to a movie and lose yourself. Play your favorite music. Dance to it. Do something frivolous in the world with your tribe. Play like a child or with a child. Give yourself something to think about besides your sad, worried feelings.
When you do something out in the world, with other people, even when you don’t want to, you remember there is a world of possibility.
I am a trained EMDR therapist (member of EMDRIA, the world governing body for EMDR practitioners) and happy to explain to you how this therapy can help you with many different types of problems.
EMDR has been recognized as a scientifically effective and evidence-based treatment by the American Psychiatric Association, the World Health Organization, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of health and Human Services and many more.
What Can EMDR Do for You: Managing Your Pain Better with EMDR
The impact of EMDR on emotional distress of all varieties has been well researched. It can help you if you are suffering from trauma, anxiety, depression, phobias and so on. All of this has been documented in the literature for decades now. But not many people are aware that EMDR has been successfully shown to help people trying to cope with chronic or recurring pain. How can a non-medical therapeutic technique relieve a physical sensation?!
Physicians treat pain in a variety of ways: oral medications, surgery, AND with alternative procedures such as biofeedback, hypnosis, massage therapy, and acupuncture.
What may not be widely known is that pain is something felt and perceived in the brain.
Consider, suppose you stub your toe on a chair or whack your elbow on a table. Ouch! The part of your toe or your elbow that is hurt has nerve endings in it that detect all sorts of things both bad and good, such as heat, cold, a light breeze on your skin, pressure from a touch, and big time shocks such as ramming furniture with a body part.
But does a patient knocked out by medicine for surgery feel pain? Tissue is definitely being damaged, but the patient feels nothing. Because, unless your brain is able to process information from the tissues, there is no pain. It is a conscious experience. We become aware of pain by messages sent from our brain. They tell us where the pain is located and begin the process of attaching meaning to the pain such as “will I be able to work” “is this return of the cancer?” And you are motivated to do something: grab some ice, put a dressing on the injury, or call 911 because of these messages.
However, the brain sometimes gets tricked and thinks the body is in danger even when it isn’t. While working in a hospital I witnessed this with amputees. A painful limb may have been removed years ago, but pain is still being felt where the leg or arm used to be.
Or sometimes, we become more sensitive to the same amount of pain, like when you wear a path going back and forth to your neighbor’s house. The more times we feel a certain type of pain, the easier it is to feel it, like a groove being worn into the fabric of your brain.
You may have heard the phrase that neurons that fire together wire together. This is like when your mouth begins to water when you see a picture of your favorite food. No food is present, no delicious aroma, no option to put it in your mouth, but your body reacts as if all that is possible.
Pain can be caused in the same way. Maybe your work has triggered pain in the past, by lifting boxes or being hunched over a keyboard. At some point, your brain associates work with pain so that you might start to feel pain just by arriving at work or thinking about going to work. Job dissatisfaction is a huge predictor of back pain. Plus, strong emotions such as anger and anxiety will reduce pain tolerance. How much pain you can bear goes down.
What does this have to do with EMDR? It is now generally accepted that chronic pain is caused by a combination of physical and psychological factors and that the best approach is multidisciplinary and includes psychological treatment (Fordyce, 1976; Gatchel & Turk, 1996; Turk & Meichenbaum, 1989). Research over the past 20 years indicates an approach combining traditional treatment with EMDR can be very effective at improving quality of life and decreasing perception of pain. (J Clin Psychol. 2002 Dec;58(12):1505-20.)
Want to talk about whether you are a good candidate for this? Call for a free 15-minute phone consult.