Coming to your senses to disrupt stress

- If you're feeling overwhelmed right now, there's no point in discussing why it's there or how to keep it from happening in the future until we get your brain to come back online. I could give you a thousand possible ways to feel less overwhelmed, and sorting through them would be totally overwhelming. In my coaching and consulting work, I almost always find that clients know exactly what they should be doing to make things better once they're able to get unstuck. So I want to focus on strategies to release the pressure so that you can feel better, see things more clearly, and essentially be the boss of your own brain and use it to your benefit. Recent neuroscience teaches us that the brain processes energy and information in a specific hierarchy from the bottom to the top. At the base of the brain, we process sensory information, controlled a large part by how we're breathing and nonconscious cues from our environment. In the middle section of the brain is where we process feelings and our connection to other people, and at the top, we have our logical, rational, problem-solving abilities. So you can imagine how if you're too amped up on stress or stimulation, if you have tightness in your body or tension with the people around you, it could cause disruptions in your ability to think well and navigate challenges successfully. To circuit-break stress, we can use the same process in reverse, first sensing, and then feeling, and then thinking. This is what we call bottom-up training, and for many people, it's much more effective than trying to work top-down. For example, have you ever tried to talk yourself out of feeling stressed? Chances are it didn't work very well, or you're one of the super-resilient minority. For most of us, coming to our senses first with a circuit-breaking technique that uses cues like sight or sound, smell, movement or touch can shift our state just enough to get the ball rolling in a better direction. And as you learn what works best for you, you can integrate different techniques at the same time for a synergistic effect. For example, in my beach brain meditation, I have clients breathe in rhythmic wave patterns while listening to the sounds of ocean waves crashing, smelling a special beach blend aromatherapy. We even have them take off their shoes, put on flip flops, or rest their toes in a specially crafted sandbox they keep under their desk. Now I realize that may sound pretty extreme to some of you, but the impact of really engaging all of your senses simultaneously is pretty fantastic, and our research is showing some exciting results. I'll share some specific techniques with you in upcoming videos, so for now, just consider how you might engage sensory cues like sights, sounds, and smells, physical movement, or using tactile objects like rocks or fabrics to help you to circuit-break the sense of stress and overwhelm in the moment. If you'd like some examples to help get you started, check out the document called "Coming to Your Senses" in the exercise files.