Category: Stress Reduction
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Want To Learn To Breathe?
Learning to breathe, meditate, or do biofeedback doesn’t have to be hard. It doesn’t have to cost money. It doesn’t require you to leave your house. It’s BREATHING and focusing. It’s what people did in cold medieval churches and in Tibetan monestaries. It’s what I learned to do – and got me through – labor! […]
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Cyles of Five: Another Way To Disrupt Anxiety
Cycles of Five is a simple technique to break pain and anxiety cycles.
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Learning Biofeedback Doesn‘t Have to Be Hard
Biofeedback is a set of techniques that allow you to exert conscious control over what are normally involuntary biological functions. For example, consciously slowing your breathing and heart rate are common forms of biofeedback. With more practice, you can learn to increase circulation in your hands and warm them up. You can become more conscious […]
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Biofeedback: A Skill Not A Pill
Biofeedback is a skill, not a pill. Unlike medications, it is something that you need to practice between sessions and learn to make it effective. I’ve heard people only try it once or twice and then give up because they got a migraine anyways. It’s not something that works right away. You need to practice […]
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Get Help To Learn To Help Yourself
Friday, after an appointment with my psychiatrist at Emory, it occurred to me that this month marks 13 years of therapy and treatment. I would almost describe those 13 years as an “After” period, denoting a new phase in my life, because it has been so transformative. Before I finally reached out for help, I […]
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How can you use biofeedback?
Biofeedback has many potential applications. Short term, you can embed breathing and conscious relaxation and bodily control into your everyday life. This changes amygdala functioning to reduce pain and can help you foster mindfulness. I combine biofeedback with meditation and sometimes binaural sound to manage my migraines. I can only rarely get rid of them, […]
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Biofeedback: Another Tool in Your Kit
Chronic pain is something that can be treated in many ways. When I first got migraines, they were sudden and devastating. Within six months I went from perfectly healthy to migraines that lasted days to a week at a time. They were incredibly painful. I was unable to move and barely even able to go […]
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Tiny Steps Towards Reducing Stress
Some days are worse than others. That’s just how it works. You can wake up today feeling refreshed and inspired to put your best foot forward. You can do all of your recommended exercises, eat all the “right” foods, think all the “right” thoughts, and still have pain flare-ups throughout your day. We can never […]
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Being Organized Is Even More Important When You’ve Got No Energy To Spare
I write a lot about organizing, because I have too much to do and very few spoons to spare. I also know that if I don’t write things down, they spin around in my head and keep me from sleeping. If we try to keep everything in our head without an organizational system, we keep […]
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Pain, Emotions, & the Amygdala
Pain leads to depression. Depression leads to pain. The amygdala mediates it all.
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Allodynia: Smell the Roses
Focusing all your attention on one manageable area of sensation can drown out the sensation of pain.
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How to Relax in 5 Minutes
Pain, stress, and emotional distress are in the mind, but express themselves in physical tension. You can feel it in that tight neck, those stiff shoulders, and in that clenched jaw and hands. Notice that your back teeth hurt just a little? Feel that twinge between your shoulders? Back ache just a bit? The relationship is […]
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Incomplete Acts, Everyday Anxiety, and Getting Things Done
Four strategies to organize work and decrease anxiety.
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Control Your Focus
I’ll be honest. I spend my life crazy stressed. I have a job that my husband describes as ‘flexible – you can work any 60 hours a week you like’. And then I have two more jobs – I am Editor in Chief of the Journal of Adolescence and I’m also starting this company. And […]
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