Tips

Learning to meditate and making it a part of your life are two very different things and a lot of people reading this are now going to struggle to adopt this new behavior in a meaningful way.

The first issue is that a lot of people get frustrated when they feel that their meditation isn’t ‘working’ and they thus give up. This is entirely the wrong way to look at meditation – this is not a means to an end but rather a relaxing place you can come and visit whenever you need it, or a great interlude before you start your day.

This extends to how you start out. A lot of people want things to go perfectly right away and they’ll wonder why they haven’t achieved enlightenment as soon as they close their eyes! Then their hair gets in their face, they become stressed that they aren’t doing it right and they get up. Then they need to itch. Then they’re not comfortable.

Don’t worry about it. It’s fine to move. It’s fine to open your eyes for a moment. All that’s important is that you then bring your attention back. In time, you’ll find you are less distracted. But to begin with, you won’t be ready for that yet and you mustn’t get frustrated when you find that distractions do arise.

The next tip is to think carefully about how you’re going to sustain your meditation training and make it a feasible part of your routine. A lot of resources will tell you how easy it should be to take 10 minutes out of your day. They’ll claim that ‘everyone’ has five minutes.

In reality though, it’s not easy. If it were, then everyone would already be doing it! Most of us are so busy that we legitimately struggle to find five minutes of free time and so we need to be realistic about what we can and can’t achieve.

Look at it this way: it’s much better to practice for two minutes twice a week and actually stick with it, than it is to try and practice for an hour a day and to give up after day two.

The best thing to do is to find an opportunity when you waste time in the morning or the evening. This might be while your partner goes through the shower in the morning, or it might be when you get home from work. Whatever it is, most of us have a few short periods of time in our usual routine and the great thing about meditation is that you can do it anywhere and with no props. Even if it’s on the train to work, or if it is when you get into work 10 minutes early. If you can find a ‘slot’ that already exists, you’ll find it’s much easier to fit meditation in and to stick with.

Correct Breathing for Stress Reduction

When meditating it is important to try to remember to breathe properly. And better yet is to try and make this into a habit so that your breathing is better during your waking day as well.

The thing is: a lot of people don’t know how to breathe well and are unintentionally breathing incorrectly most of the time. Theory has it that the reason for this is closely linked to the way we sit at work.

This is a big deal if you’re trying to reduce stress, seeing as your stress levels are closely related to the way you breathe. We’ve already seen that there is a strong connection between physiology, feelings, emotions and psychology. When we are stressed, we breathe more quickly and not as deeply. But likewise, when we breathe more quickly and not as deeply, we become more stressed.

Right now, take both hands and place one on your stomach and one on your chest. Now breathe normally. Which hand is moving first? Is it the hand on your chest or the hand on your stomach?

For most people, the answer is the chest. But to be optimally healthy, it should be the stomach. When we’re infants this is how we breathe and it’s also how animals breathe. Years of sitting in an office desk though, or on a sofa, mean that we’ve spent too long with our stomachs compressed and learned to breathe differently.

Stomach breathing means that you are relaxing your abdominal muscles, thereby opening up your abdominal cavity and allowing your diaphragm to drop down into that space. This then creates more room for the lungs and they will automatically inflate as they enlarge. You then bring your chest in and open that up to take in even more oxygen and as a result, you breathe a lot more deeply. This oxygenates your body and it calms your heartrate and helps you to feel less stressed.

In fact, one of the very best ways to help yourself feel instantly less stressed, is to start taking deep, controlled breaths. This puts you in a rest and digest state and stops the fight or flight response in its tracks. So if you’re about to go to an interview or give a presentation, practicing some controlled breathing for a while is the perfect antidote to the stress you’re probably experiencing.

CHAPTER 5: MINDFULNESS AND CBT

Meditation is not only a fantastic tool, it’s also great way to practice being more aware of your own thoughts and feelings, such that you can then take full control of them.

This brings us to the concept of CBT – or cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT is essentially a type of psychotherapeutic intervention that teaches people who struggle with anxiety or other issues, how to better control the nature of their own thoughts.

This all starts with perception, and this is where you can use mindfulness. Remember the part of the meditation we discussed where we mentioned that you should ‘watch’ the contents of your thoughts? Try doing this the next time you’re stressed: what are you actually thinking?

What you’ll find is that when you’re stressed, you are imagining the worst and this is what is causing you to get worked up.

And this is the big secret to stress: other than the physiological response that we’ve discussed, stress is really a result of your perception of what’s going on around you.

Put it this way: if you’re faced with a lion you will get a stress response as soon as you notice it. But if you believe the lion is your friend, then you won’t get the same stress response. Or if you think the lion is a hologram, you won’t get the stress response.

The reality doesn’t matter here: what matters here is what you are thinking.

And the same is true for all those sources of chronic stress we’ve discussed so far. If you are struggling with debt and with work, then your perception is that there’s a great big lion ahead of you. But if you can convince yourself that there’s no benefit to being stressed and if you can convince yourself that it’s not worth getting worked up, then you can overcome that stress and your response will be the same as if there was no pressure in your life.

Cognitive Restructuring

So how do you do this?

The first step is to note the thoughts that are making you more worked up. If you’re stressed about talking in public, then perhaps you are filled with thoughts like:

•         What happens if I stutter?

•         People are going to laugh at me

•         I won’t be able to talk

•         I don’t know my script

None of this is helpful – it makes that lion seem bigger!

You want to replace these for more positive thoughts but simply telling yourself it’s all alright won’t work. You need to genuinely believe it.

To do this, you use cognitive restructuring. A big part of this is ‘thought challenging’, where you challenge your assumptions and test just how accurate they’re likely to be.

Are you really likely to stutter? Do you normally stutter?

Would people really laugh at you? Are the people in your audience that rude and unkind? And if they do laugh at you – why does it matter? You won’t have to see them again. Everyone knows that people stutter from time to time. And a little embarrassment never killed anyone: it will just make you a better public speaker next time.

If you can do this as you go through your routine and be more aware of your state of mind, then you’ll find that you can prevent the stress response before it arises and rob your anxieties of all their power over you.

For more serious anxieties and phobias, you can even take this one step further and try what is known as ‘hypothesis testing’. Here, you simply test your fears by standing up to them and letting them happen. For example, you would go out onto the stage and purposefully stutter.

You’ll find that no one laughs and nothing bad comes from it!

CONCLUSION

 Hopefully at this point, you have all the tools and knowledge you need to begin reducing and combating the stress in your own life.

This isn’t going to be an easy ride. Stress for many of us has become a normal part of life and habits are hard to change.

But by using meditation, you’ll find that you can reduce your base level of stress and rebuild some of the damage to your brain caused by anxiety. What’s more, is that this will teach you to be more aware of your thoughts and better able to control them and thereby steer your emotions.

It’s time to wrestle back control of your mind. You tell your body when it needs to wake up and when it needs to focus. You decide what’s worth worrying about. And when you’re home and work is over, you use this power to allow yourself to rest, recover and forget all about the stresses of the day.

Once you can do all this, you’ll find your mood improves, your productivity skyrockets and your health is greatly enhanced in both the long and short term.

Stress less, live more.