Use Your Body to Quickly Calm Your Brain

In this video, I'll discuss some of the body-based techniques that you can use to quickly calm your nervous system.

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Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll discuss some of the body-based techniques that you can use to quickly calm your nervous system.

If you've watching some of the earlier videos in this series, you already know that I talk with my clients a lot about neurobiology and specifically about the brain-body connection. For a long time, psychologists have ascerted that in order to feel better, we have to change the way we think. And that can certainly be true. However, we now know that calming the body also calms the brain -- and this process is far faster and more efficient than the reverse. In fact, for every 1 signal that your brain sends to your body, your body is sending 4 signals to your brain. So, although you can TRY to get your body to calm down by changing the thoughts from your brain, it's far more efficient and effective to work on your body to calm your brain down. I think of cognitive work as a one lane country road and body calming as a 4 lane highway -- one gets you to your destination a lot faster. But how do we go about using our bodies to calm our brains?

Breathing - By far the most commonly used body-based calming method is breathing. Breathing in speeds your heart rate and stimulates the sympathetic nervous system which brings on fight or flight. Breathing out calms your NS and brings on rest and digest. I like to teach my clients 7-11 breathing which helps us calm down when we are amped up. It's breathing in for 7 beats and out for 11. Let's do this together right now: start with 7 beats in -- breathe in 234567 and out 234567891011. Do this style of breathing until your nervous system starts to calm down. If you are depressed or unmotivated, you can reverse that to 11-7 breathing -- which helps to stimulate more energy. If your nervous system is too amped up to even get to a count of 7, breath in fully, then take one more quick breath in, and then breathe out for as long as possible.

Body check in - Okay -- now we are going to do a quick body check in. Just close your eyes and take several deep breaths. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth and in through your nose and out through your mouth. And as you do this, think about how you are feeling right now and specifically, where you are feeling that emotion in your body. If you are anxious -- do your shoulders feel tense? Do you feel a buzzing in your chest? Is your jaw clenched? If you are sad -- do you feel pressure in your stomach? Or your chest? If you are angry, do you feel it in your arms or in your throat? With my clients, we try to locate the feelings and then put those feelings into words. And the more granular, the better. Instead of just angry -- we dig beyond that to frustrated, hopeless, or irritable. As Dan Siegel says, for an emotion you have to "name it to tame it."

3 body-base calming methods - I teach my clients a variety of body-based calming methods. If you are nervous for a test, worried about a friend, or amped up during a fight with your spouse -- how do you get to a point where you are thinking and feeling at the same time? How do you use your body to quickly calm yourself down? I give three options since everyone is different and has different preferences. The first is the
- Heart hold - put one hand on top of the other, right in the middle of your chest and apply a little pressure. This is the heart hold, but I like to call it a self hug. This lights up the same part of your brain that lights up when you receive a hug. The next is the
- Gamut point - on the outside of your hand between your ring finger and your pinky finger, just under the knuckles is a triangular-shaped depression called the gamut point. Rubbing this helps to calm your nervous system. And finally, the
- Sore spot - below your collar bone and outside of your pectoral muscles is a spot that is a little sore when you press on it. Did you find it? For women, it's kind of under the bra. You can tap this sore spot to regulate your emotions.

So, those are just 3: heart hold, gamut point, and sore sport. And the truth is -- you can hold, rub, or tap any of these points and still have it be effective. Body-based calming is not particularly precise, but it is very personal. You just have to figure out what works best for you . . .

[cameronvalles]

Excellent, thank you for these great ideas and the way you have explained body based calming. I am wondering what can be added to these “immediate” calming methods to facilitate relational wellness, … especially when we are in hostile family / work systems?

[debreale]

Thank you. This should be helpful if one of my students needs to calm him or herself. I tried to find it on your website, but I couldn’t. Help?