CHAPTER 4
Calming the Body Being aware of how your body responds to stress and worry is very important. It is also important to know that different types of strategies work for different levels of body activation. For example, if you are very worried, breathing exercises do not always work well and may even make your worry bigger. If you are at a medium to high level of worry, try a strategy that involves more movement. You can use a scale of your choice to show how much worry you notice in your body, in the sample below I have a scale with 1 to 5 representing low to middle levels of worry and 5 to 10 for high levels of worry. It might help to think about how much worry is in your body as your volume. When are feeling worried, we need to turn down the volume in your body. Breathing and muscle relaxation will be work in the low to medium range (0 to 5 on the sample scale) while moving your body will work better in the high range. I have had many people tell me that breathing doesn’t work for them and makes their worry worse. Usually this is because they have tried to use breathing strategies when they are very very worried and their body is very very full of worry. There are many different breathing and body calming activities. I will outline only a few of them here. I encourage you to add your own favourites to the list. Below, I will share some ideas of strategies that will help you to turn down the volume in your body. Most important is to find body calming strategies that work for you. You must practice these, starting off by practicing them when you are already calm, so that you can learn to use them when you are worried. You will need to practice for a few weeks before you are able to use the strategies really well. Also, keep in mind that everyone is different and you need to find the strategy that works for you. Keep practicing until you find what works best in your 3A Toolkit! Before we get to the strategies, consider what kind of stressors or situations correspond with where you end up in terms of the amount of worry you notice in your body, which we are calling your volume, where 10 is very high (e.g. panic) and 0 is very low (e.g. asleep). Write down a few of the situations and events that tend to lead to lots of worry for you and some of the situations and events that lead to a little bit of worry for you. Imagine that the number 0 to 10 represents how full of worry your body is (the volume) with between 0 and 5 being a low to middle level of worry and 5 to 10 being a high level of worry. The body calming strategies will help you turn down the volume in your body.
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