When You Feel Overwhelmed, Come Back To Your Body

With everything going on in the world right now,

It's easy to feel overwhelmed.

Our nervous system is detecting threat and has gone into a survival mode.

We start holding our breath.

We feel very anxious.

The best way to work with this is through our body,

Not through reasoning.

A simple thing we can do is to look around the room.

Notice if there's anything that you need to respond to immediately.

The answer is usually no.

Very often when we feel overwhelmed,

We start holding our breath.

So it's good to let our body have a few deep breaths.

We get a little more oxygen,

But also it signals to our body that it's safe enough to breathe,

It's safe enough to move.

Bring your attention to your feet,

Your seat.

You can hold your own hands.

Anything to bring yourself back into awareness of,

I'm here in my body right now.

It's easy to be impatient with ourselves,

And it's really important to be kind.

Offer yourself some compassion.

This is a difficult world to live in right now.

We can use our senses to come back into this moment.

5-4-3-2-1 is a practice where we look around the room and we name out loud five things we can see.

I could see the trees out my window.

I could see.

.

.

Name five things you can see.

Four things you can touch.

I can feel the softness of my shirt,

The coolness of my desk.

Three sounds you can hear.

Two things that you could smell,

Or two favorite smells.

And one thing you can taste.

Using our senses brings us back into our body,

Into this moment.

I have other videos with tools around working with compulsive thoughts.

Catastrophic thinking,

Where we go into worst case scenarios about the future,

Can be very alarming to our nervous system.

We can bring ourselves back.

If we have a lot of nervous system generated thoughts,

Create uncomfortable energy in our body.

There's a feeling of I'm not safe.

There's a feeling of doom.

We can work with those as well.

Bringing ourselves back into our body,

Understanding more about how our nervous system works,

And using some tools to come into this moment in time,

Very specifically,

No matter what the danger is in the external world,

Right now in this moment,

We could come back into our body,

Relax a bit,

Take a few deeper breaths,

Let ourselves have the experience of feeling safe right now.