Part of my 11-day course “Mindfulness Made Easy”
Now that we’ve covered some lifestyle changes that can impact on stress, let’s look at some of the relaxation techniques you can employ throughout the day, in order to get your physiology back to the point where it can begin to think and experience in mindful ways.
There will be times when you find yourself with a few uninterrupted moments to spare. There will also be times when you are in a stressful situation, perhaps in a role of job that requires your peak performance. Relaxing in these two types of situations require different techniques.
In terms of achieving mindfulness, it’s far easier to relax one’s mind and achieve a state of mindfulness if first the body is healthy and at ease. Our physiology depends frequently upon feedback loops, and hence, if our muscles are tense, it predisposes us to have tense thoughts and emotions too.
So in this chapter, we are going to focus on different techniques we can use to relax, depending upon the situation. During a typical day, we may find ourselves in a variety of situations, some of them challenging to even the most mindful of people. Navigating rush-hour traffic, for example. Or the complicated dynamics of the workplace.
Very often, when we face stressful situations, our breathing becomes fast and shallow, our pulse quickens and our blood pressure becomes elevated. Cortisol and adrenalin courses through our veins, and we might find we become shaky or more frantic with our movements and mannerisms. We might frown or stretch our cranial muscles, causing ourselves to develop headaches or migraines. And finally, our very thoughts become harried and uncoordinated as we nudge ourselves along the spectrum between calmness and panic.
So before we can get to the point where we can practice mindful thinking, we need to halt this physical runaway-train effect.
A deep breath
Let’s start with the simplest exercise, and one that can be performed almost anywhere. Very often, in tense situations, or even when we are toiling at a computer workstation, we forget to breath. We breath out, and then simply forget to breath in again, sometimes for significant periods. When we do inhale, they often are short, shallow intakes. This is one of the physiological stepping-stones that triggers our stress hormones to kick in, taking us one step further towards a state of panic or distress. So when you notice yourself beginning to feel antsy, if you hear yourself snapping at someone or crying out in frustration over yet another thing that’s gone wrong, then stop—take a long, deep breath…
Try to enjoy this long inhale, like when you take a long cold drink on a hot day. Savour it. Fill all your lungs and hold onto that life-giving air for a second or too, before gently exhaling, and blowing out all your tension.
As you exhale, do it at a slow, unhurried pace. Allow yourself to feel your muscles relax on this out breath. If you can, you can try stretching your arms, or legs, or neck muscles, on the in-breath, to really loosen those little knots. As you exhale, and release yourself from the stretch, let your muscles and frame relax into a softer, looser posture. You don’t need to slouch—just let go of that unneeded tension.
If you like, you can repeat the process until you begin to break the cycle of escalation towards fight-or-flight.
Qigong belly breathing
With is roots in Chinese medicine, Qigong is the philosophy of breathing, posture and healing techniques that involve the concepts of energy, or life force called chi and qi.
Qigong breathing techniques ask us to visualise the body’s life force flowing through us. With every inhalation, we are encouraged to visualise drawing in positive energy from the universe and breathing out our negative energy. Visualisation is a really effective method, regardless of whether we subscribe to the actual idea of chi or qi, and often induces strong physiological effects.
So it’s useful to try this practice and see if it has an effect (martial arts experts swear by it!). In particular, you must draw your breath in using your belly muscles. Allow your belly to expand to its fullest as you breath in, utilising the lower muscles of your diaphragm. Breath in through the nose, and pause at the fullest point. As you exhale, don’t forget to breath all the way out.
Belly breathing activates several reflexes that trigger calming responses in the body. Whatever the mind imagines has a strong effect on our physiology. So you can imagine drawing in the positive chi energy and actively focusing it into the belly area which, in Qigong, is the power centre of your being. Try and feel a shining, potent ball of warm energy accumulate in the centre of your core, and use this as a source of strength to help you manage stressful environments. At the very least, focusing your attention on these areas increases blood flow to your vital organs. This helps to keep your systems at their optimum levels for good health.
There are some additional things you can try, to augment this technique, depending on circumstance. You can place your hands upon your belly, to help focus your attention on the process and to also help take your awareness away form whatever is stressing you. You might find this practice to be comforting.
You can try placing your hands or fists onto your lower back, and massage your kidneys, to further help increase blood flow to these areas. This helps your body to better process toxins, leaving your blood in a healthier state for replenishing nutrients around the body.
If your situation allows it, try to extend the practice for a session of about twenty minutes. This will really activate the full benefits of belly breathing, allowing you to reinvigorate your body, enriching it with full lungfuls of oxygen, exhaling the appropriate amounts of carbon dioxide and activating all the vital organs.
After a twenty minute session you should be feeling relaxed and in a much better mental state—a little like floating on a cloud of well-being.
One last thing to remember is that all these techniques are meant to be comfortable at all times. Don’t push yourself in any way that makes your situation more uncomfortable than it already is. That would be counterproductive!
Body scanning
Another technique that is easy to do in most situations is to perform a body-scan. Body-scanning is a simple process whereby you place your attention on different parts of your body and consciously make them relaxed.
Very often in stressful situations we find that our muscles have tensed without our knowledge. We become ‘up-tight’ in a very physical sense. Apart from making us feel like we are gearing up for a fight, tensing muscles for prolong periods can cause aches, strains, headaches, migraines and long-term postural injuries. For example, my neck has never fully recovered from a period of two years where I sat at an improperly designed workstation. Whenever I was tense, I would change my posture unconsciously, resulting in me having to crane my neck to look at the screen. Hour after hour, day after day I did this, until finally, I have permanent damage.
Learning to check our posture and musculature at regular intervals can not only help to keep us from getting stressed, it can save us from a lifetime of chronic pain. Here is how we perform a body-scan:
At regular intervals, or perhaps if you notice yourself feeling tense, pause what you are doing, adjust your position to a more balanced posture and begin placing your awareness upon the cranial muscles in the top of your head. These muscles can be found reaching upwards from the ears towards the crown; and backwards from the ears, reaching behind the head. These muscles are responsible for moving or grinding the jaw, moving the ears, and pulling the face taut.
It may take a little while for you to fully gain control over these, often unconscious, muscle-groups, but try if you can, to let them relax. Very often they will take a little coaxing, especially if you have been under stress. You will find that by calmly placing your attention on them and allowing them to relax with a feeling of ‘letting go’, they will begin to unknot.
Next, move your attention onto your forehead, where you may find that you have been frowning. Again, loosen these muscles by calmly allowing them to let go.. When you have done this, move your focus onto your eyes, and then your cheeks and other facial muscles. You may find that you were grinding your teeth or setting your jaw in an uncomfortable position. This, in particular can lead to chronic headaches.
Next, we are to move onto the neck. Of course, the neck, like some other of our core muscles, are crucial for our posture. If we relax them totally, our head will flop loosely around. This is not ideal! But we may indeed find that one particular side of our neck, perhaps the back portion, has been taking most of the strain for a prolonged period. Remember, your head is as heavy as a bowling ball, and if one of the neck muscles is asked to work harder than the others to hold it in place, it will soon begin to tire and even injure under the strain.
When we relax the neck muscles, what we are aiming to achieve is the optimal balancing of our head upon our shoulders, so that each of our neck muscles share the load equally. This means that they are only under the minimum of tension. You may find that this requires you to change posture. You can imagine your head being pulled gently upwards with a string attached to your crown. This, as well as slightly tucking in your chin, will help you find the desired balanced posture.
Next, we move onto the shoulders. Become aware of your shoulder muscles and if they are tense, loosen them. Let the weight of your arms sink down freely.
Continue this process throughout your body, letting go of all the tension so that your skeletal frame is doing ninety percent of the work to keep you in your posture. It’s good to keep visualising that string pulling you upward so that your spine remains in a good position, without slouching. It should feel as if your body is suspended and hanging from an invisible thread, which means that your back muscles need not be over worked, tense or strained in order to maintain your posture.
Continue this process right down to your fingertips and toes. After you have finished, you should have rid yourself of any unneeded muscle tension, and should feel that pleasurable relaxed feeling that your body weight is hanging from your strong frame, in perfect balance. So much so, that you should be able to maintain your current posture with minimum effort for an indefinite time.
As you return to your activity, try to be mindful of what your muscles are doing. The more you perform this body-scan, the more often you will spot when one particular muscle group is having to take more than its fair share of strain—and you will be better able to prevent muscle ailments before they develop.
Tense your muscles then relax
A quick technique that can be performed in many situations is to tense all your muscles at once, hold, and then relax them.
If you feel yourself becoming caught up in the tension and stress of the moment, try imagining yourself as a ball of tight, impenetrable muscle. Clench your fists, your biceps, your core abdominal muscles. Screw up your face, curl you toes, clench your buttocks. Tense up every muscle you are consciously in control of, without going too far and straining yourself, or raising your heartbeat towards unhealthy levels.
Once you are a ball of strength, hold that pose. Imagine that all the stress and tension cannot get through your strong defences, no matter how much the outside world is trying to get in.
After a moment or two, let go of all those clenched muscles, and let your tension melt away. Relax every part of your body simultaneously and breath out, imagining that all the stresses have been pushed away at speed, in one blast. All that is now left is complete relaxation and a sense of quiet confidence.
Stop rushing
In the previous chapter I talked about how, most of the time, the moment we are in is not dangerous or threatening. We merely allow our thoughts to dwell on those things that make us stressed. Well, one of the techniques that can help us to maintain an appreciation of the moment, is to stop rushing.
In modern life, we are often pressured to cram in too many activities into our time. As we rush to get out of the house, we might be trying to do several things all at once—often not very well.
I remember a day when I found myself madly sweeping the kitchen floor, in preparation for some visitors who were coming round. I wanted the house to be reasonably tidy, and so I had been rushing round trying to cram in too many tasks. I reminded myself to return my awareness to the present and just enjoy the activity I was doing. It was then that I realised that I couldn’t enjoy it, because of the very fact that I had given myself too little time and was having to rush.
Oversubscribing our time is so easy to do. We either say yes to too many things, or perhaps we don’t place realistic expectations onto what we can achieve in a given time. Either way, sweeping at top speed meant that I was neither enjoying the process, nor doing a good job.
A better approach is to reign in our expectations about what we can achieve with a day. It’s no good pretending we are superhuman, if that’s just going to cause us stress, or perhaps feelings of inadequacy should we fail. Instead, promise yourself:
“I’m going to not rush, and I’m going to enjoy the activity I am doing right now.”
I know, it sounds easier to say than to do, especially if we need to be some place at a certain time. It may take a little while to get into the habit. It will definitely mean giving yourself more time to get ready to leave the house, or to make an evening meal, or to perform parts of your job. But when the world places unrealistic burdens onto us, sometimes we need to push back a little and exert our boundaries.
By choosing to take on a little less, we can then focus on the activity we are on, and make a good job of it. When sweeping the kitchen floor, it will be much easier to enjoy the process, slip into a more mindful state, and take pride in doing a good job if I first accept that I am not going to rush.
In short—keep your to-do list at a manageable level. And if plans change because a task took longer than expected, then it’s okay. The other tasks will simply have to wait. Take your time in this moment and focus on the here and now. Remember: you are human, not superhuman, and if you pretend outwardly to be more than that, then the world will naturally expect you to achieve the impossible.
Picture yourself in a safe-place
This technique isn’t for every situation, but it’s great if you are at a workstation, or by yourself, or find you have a few spare minutes. This idea stems from the fact that our imagination has a direct line to our physiology. Your body has a hard time distinguishing between something that is imagined and something that is happening for real. This is why stress is such a dangerous mental state—because our body responds similarly to perceived threats as to how it would if we were actually being threatened by a life-threatening danger. But there’s a way to turn this to our advantage.
Sports people have known for a long time that imagining scoring a goal or performing a perfect 10m dive, for example, has a measurable positive effect to their real-world abilities. It’s as if they had really put in a session of practice at the training ground. We can use this same technique to bring down our stress levels and create a sense of calmness and well-being. Here’s how:
Your private sanctuary
Take a few moments to imagine a place and situation where you would feel completely happy and at peace. It can be a real place or it can be a fantasy—it really doesn’t matter. It could be a sunny afternoon at a street cafe in Paris. It could be your favourite childhood hideout. It could be a fantasy medieval temple. It could be your dream house—anything! You are creating the perfect calming fantasy for your mind to escape to—whatever flavour you like.
Because your body cannot easily distinguish between imagination and real life, the more clearly you can picture your safe-place, the more your body will begin to let go of all those stress-related responses and start creating feel-good hormones. Your pulse will slow, your breathing will slow, your posture will relax, and your state of mind will improve. But how do you utilise this safe-place?
There are a couple of ways you can employ this useful fantasy once you’ve created it. First of all, if you find you have a few minutes in the day to spare and have some relative privacy, take a five minute break, engage that imagination and really step into your safe-place. Close your eyes if you can and try to see every detail, hear every sound. Touch, taste and smell the elements in your daydream. Can you feel the breeze on your cheek? Hear the birds sing? Smell bread baking in the oven? The more you do this, the more realistic your sanctuary will become.
Every time you step into your safe-place, try to introduce more and more details. Explore the environment as if you found yourself really there. Push out the boundaries of the place you have created, so that it becomes a living world in your mind.
If you are working, and are able to, perhaps listen to some ambient sounds with earphones, to help bring this fantasy to life. Birdsong, perhaps, or the sounds of a busy cafe. There are so many ambient soundtracks available at places like YouTube, or downloadable sound files at freesound.org. Over the years I have built up a large catalogue of sounds I can listen to on my mp3 player.
The great thing about your safe-place is that it is portable and flexible. If you are tired of the office environment, use your sounds to let you mentally slip into your private world while you work. You will notice your productivity increase. If you are at home, at the end of a busy day, lie down or find a quiet corner and close your eyes. Listen quietly for twenty minutes to your sounds, or simply imagine vividly, and enter your private world.
Safe-places are a great way for your psyche to rest and recover from stressful situations, or to change the feel of a real-world environment that might otherwise be emotionally challenging.
Fascination
Sometimes, things become too overwhelming and stressful because there’s lots going on—either in our direct environment or inside our thoughts—and we find it hard to cope. In situations where your safety doesn’t depend on your outward attention—e.g. driving a vehicle—then sometimes it can be useful to simply tune out all that unneeded clutter and focus down on one thing.
Sometimes, all that is needed is a reset button. We feel our stress responses starting to elevate, we recognize that we are not thinking clearly, and we are making silly mistakes that compound our frustration or anxiety. In these cases, it can be helpful to pick something in your immediate environment and place all your attention to it.
Let’s say you are having a tea-break, but your thoughts are running away from you and your begin to obsess about a stressful meeting you’ll be having later that day. Try picking one thing, anything, and become fascinated by it—your cup of coffee, for example. Really notice every detail about it. Here, in this cup of coffee there is a complex world unfolding, just sitting there on the table. Trillions of molecules. The complex swirls of cream that undulate and slowly spiral into ever-thinner strands—it’s like a miniature weather system. And the tendrils of steam that escape the cup to wind their way into the air, creating beautiful, silky structures in the space before you, each droplet catching the sunlight from the window and glinting in captivating ways.
When you focus your attention on something other than your problems, something seemingly trivial, you begin to see beauty everywhere. You notice that your stressful situation is just one thin slice of what’s going on. In fact, there are complex, fascinating things all around, just waiting for you to appreciate and experience them.
Being transfixed by something—the texture of a stone wall, or the grain of wood on a nearby door, or the way the light bounces off the puddles in the street—helps to break the cycle of stressful, anxious or obsessive thoughts. Fascination calms the mind. It can even induce a form of soothing trance, and encourage your mind to reach a state of flow, which is great if you are wanting to increase your productivity and creativity.
When mountain climbers talk of the daunting task of climbing a summit, they speak of focusing entirely on ‘the next step’. Obsessing over tasks that seem too huge to cope with can leave you feeling overwhelmed. Instead, by focusing entirely on what’s directly before you, being fascinated by each and every step, one step at a time, helps us to achieve things we thought impossible. The mountaineer, when battling exhaustion and the enormity of her situation, will focus down on the ground before her. She fill find fascination in the terrain, in the small details of a rock or drift of snow. She will take it one step at a time and not waste her thoughts on the mountain as a whole.
Try this yourself, when things seem too much. When all that you need to do is take your next footstep, focus your attention on what you are doing in that moment. Let yourself become fascinated by it. Fascination has the ability to trump stress and anxiety and frustration. And it can realign your thoughts into a calmer, more productive mode.
Focus outward
Finally, a variation on the previous exercise is to take your awareness out of yourself and place it onto something distant or completely removed from your current situation or environment. Again, the purpose of this exercise is to break the cycle of negative or stressful thoughts that either effect your mental well-being or hinder your effectiveness at the tasks that you are performing.
Sometimes, it’s simply good to remind ourselves that there is a wider world out there, largely unconcerned by our own individual problems. Sometimes, it gives us a different perspective on things. It helps us to understand that, even though our situation may seem overwhelming and all-consuming, it is in fact just a small part of something much, much larger.
So, every now and then, change your perspective—look out the window, look to the hills or down the street, or at the people going in and out of the train station, or at the birds hopping around and pecking at the ground—something completely outside of your situation. Place your empathy onto that other person, creature or thing. Try to imagine what it is like in their situation, whether that’s a the postal worker delivering a parcel to a house across the road, or the person washing windows down the street, or a cat slinking into the alleyway.
Often, I might be digging away at my allotment, focusing down on one patch of earth, getting frustrated at how many weed-roots there are in the soil; and then I realise that I haven’t looked up for ages. So, I make a point of raising my gaze and looking around. I realise I am in the middle of a beautiful environment. There is a robin, hopping around a few feet away, waiting patiently for me to expose an earthworm with my digging. There are trees nearby, swaying in the breeze, filled with the chatter of songbirds. Beyond and in the distance, there are beautiful hillsides, with little sheep grazing peacefully. Looking outward, I try to imagine what it is like for them on the hill, quietly munching away, trying to find the best grass to eat. I realise that my own situation is small—a square foot of upturned earth.
Yes, I still have my task at hand to get on with, but placing it into a wider perspective gives me a better frame of mind in order to tackle it. Now, as I dig, I can keep some of my awareness on the sounds of the birds, and the knowledge of the sheep in the distance, or the clouds scudding by. The wider awareness has brought me a calmness and a sense of flow.
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