There are lots of angles to tackling stress/anxiety. The key is to try a few and find which method works best for you as everyone is different. Combining the recommendations often gets the quickest results as the more you can do to shift stagnant energy, the better.
Affirmations
If you are not familiar with them, affirmations can seem a waste of time and you can even feel a bit foolish saying them to yourself. However, affirmations are one of the quickest and most powerful tools for changing your brain, changing your health and changing your life. The brain sets down particular neural pathways that form an unconscious habit (Pavlov’s dogs!) By doing affirmations every day, you will habitually change your brain and mood.
A key part of energy work is to remember the energy that is carried by our thoughts. This is another reason why affirmations are vital. If you go around thinking your life is rubbish and everyone is awful, that is what you will experience.
An affirmations app that was recommended to me and which I found very good for changing habitual thinking is the ‘I am’ app. It flashes up with affirmations notifications like a gentle guiding hand in life. It has a 3 day free trial and has an annual subscription afterwards but will be the best money you have spent in your life for the price of a small round of drinks.
Books
There are plenty of useful self-help books and most people have some kicking around at home unread. Some of the best ones are:
You can Heal your Life by Louisa Hay. This has sold over 50 million copies and has been around for decades. It might not be for everyone but it contains a lot of good advice about setting affirmations and intentions and what might be going on for you internally that is not helping you be in your natural state. It contains some excellent exercises to help you with forgiving others and for boosting your self-worth.
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Another multi million pound best seller for good reason. It is a little weighty in parts but the essence is absolutely true - we get stuck in emotional 'pain bodies' which is dangerous territory to be in and the way to get out is to stop resisting or ignoring emotions, separate yourself from your thoughts and ego and realise your true inner self is none of those things. You do this by breathing properly and forcing yourself to be consciously present in the minutiae of life as much as possible, noticing your body and your surroundings without judgment (rather than whirling over things in your mind all the time thinking you are helping yourself).
Meditations
We all know how important it is we all stop our busy lives each day just for a bit. But it’s finding a way to do it that works for you. There are so many different ways to meditate. Some people find it easy to empty their mind while sitting in nature. Others need to follow more structure to distract their busy minds. The Calm app is an excellent app for this. It has a lot of content – from super relaxing sleep stories tailored to send you to sleep using specific sleep-triggering vocabulary, to ‘daily moves’ rooted in eastern practices such as tai chi to help you unblock your energy pathways, to ‘daily wisdom’ from celebrity monk Jay Shetty. It is excellent.
Another way to immediately quieten your mind into a meditative state in less than a minute is to try a 5 senses meditation. You can do it in less than a minute at any time, anywhere. You simply take a few deep breaths, look above you, close your eyes and ask yourself the following (in this order):
1. What does the place where you are look like?
2. What is the noise that is furthest away from you? (This could be traffic for example).
3. What is the noise that is closest to you? (This might be the sound of your own breathing).
4. What can you smell?
5. What can you taste
Quite a physical way to meditate for less spiritually minded types which is very effective and free is this online NHS meditation. It focusses on identifying each muscle in turn: https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/generalised-anxiety-disorder/self-help/ . I find the narrator’s voice quite funny as he is so deadpan but it works!
Whichever practice you choose, meditation is all centred on being in the Now. We humans (our egos) all prefer to live in the past or the future. We ruminate on past wrongs or worry about controlling future events. However, the Now is all we ever have.
Breathwork
How we breathe is critical to the way our bodies and minds work. For in depth but fun reading about this, try best selling book “Breathe” by James Nestor for your bed time reading.
There are now lots of breathwork classes on how to breathe correctly. A lot of us breathe without using our diaphragm – instead we shallow breathe only from our chest, holding our stomachs in! If you lie on the floor and breathe naturally, ask your partner to lie down next to you and look at your body. It is quite easy to tell who is a stomach-breather and who isn’t!
Breathwork has also been popularised by people like The Ice Man, Wim Hof, who have shown that controlling your breath (and therefore mind) can help you let go of a lot of limiting beliefs and fear/anxiety.
The breath unlocks a lot of answers to the route to health and happiness. When we hold our breath between inhaling and exhaling (or over inhale or over exhale), it usually has a psychological aspect to it. Whether it’s yoga, reiki, acupuncture or many types of eastern medicine, they all agree that past traumas and emotional upset are stored by our bodies in holding patterns that eventually cause us problems physically. This is where the word ‘dis-ease’ comes from (i.e. unease in your body). The breath is the way to let the unease out and the aim is to move stagnant energy around your body (as yoga and acupuncture both aim to do). If you are interested in this topic, look into Conscious Connected Breathing workshops. I can give you recomendations.
Yoga nidra
There are many different types of yoga. Some of it is focussed on strengthening your body. Other yoga practices are more spiritually focussed. Yoga isn’t actually a set of postures (asanas). It’s a way of being.
Yoga nidra is a particular technique which immediately shuts down your parasympathetic (fight or flight) response that is on overdrive in stressed out people (most of us in modern life) and which is to blame for a lot of our issues as we have forgotten how to distinguish between real and imagined threats. You will have the best night’s sleep of your life afterwards. It starts with some extremely gentle yoga poses and affirmations and then you lie down, cover yourself with a blanket and follow the teacher as they guide your focus around your body without moving a muscle. It is excellent for the immune system too.
Shamanic work
Shamans are energy workers who are a bit like a combination of the wise village elder and the medicine man! They have very powerful healing abilities and are aligned to nature and Mother Earth (Gaia/Pacha Mama). There are quite a few Shaman practising in the UK but be careful you choose someone who has come personally recommended. That applies to any healer or therapist in my view. ‘A Book for Life’ by Jo Bowlby is the book by a shaman that started me on my energy journey. It is written by a British shaman who has spent decades travelling and living in the Andes and Amazon meeting all kinds of spiritual elders from many fellow shaman to the Dalai Lama. Try the Qi Gong style exercise in the book which shows you how to feel energy tangibly if you are feeling sceptical! I really recommend buying the book because it covers so many different energy principles from Qi Gong to square breathing exercises she taught the Navy SEALS to Buddhism to Shamanic journeying and fire ceremonies. Make sure you practice the exercises as you read and you will get much more out of the book.
EFT
You can try to re-train your brain through techniques such as EFT where you tap (yourself) on particular energy meridians (like acupuncture points) to break habits and change the energy. This is a technique that is becoming increasingly popular and is, for example, one of the techniques used by hypnotist Paul McKenna (his apps are also good)! Google will reveal lots of techniques and EFT tapping points you could try and there are some excellent kinesiologists I can recommend.
Journalling
This makes gratitude a habit and you start to build gratitude and also plan more small moments of joy in your day which is a great quick boost to get you on the right path back to health and happiness. The 6 minute diary on Amazon is excellent.
Gong/sound baths
Gong baths are also becoming popular. They are not for everyone as some people can find the deep vibrational sounds they make quite disturbing. I love them if given by the right person.
Ice baths/cold showers
Not for the faint hearted but if they are good enough for Wim Hof….try starting with an ice cold shower for a minute and working your way up to longer. There are also nationwide Wim Hof workshops that teach you how to do this. https://www.wimhofmethod.com/activities/activity-map Cold water is an excellent way to get the energy flowing well in your body and great for mental health and immunity. If you are brave! It’s free and worth a try.
Nutrition
You can get lost in the contradictory lists of supplements you ‘absolutely must’ take for stress, anxiety, sleep, menopause, you name it. Usually I buy something, take it for a few days and then the pots accumulate in my cupboards like The Triffids! I tend to think unless there is something very wrong with you (identified by blood tests with your GP) then you are better off improving your diet first before you buy some supplements. Whatever works for you here though. I like Tim Spector’s approach of only eating foods your grandmother would have been able to eat. I.e. natural. Or Louisa Hay – if it grows, eat it. If it doesn’t, don’t. But obviously I blow this rule most days! There is quite a strong correlation proven now between gut health and mental health (see the articles on this website: https://zoe.com/ ). The key is to get as many different natural plant foods as possible. Even spices and herbs count. Also, I have lots of friends who swear by this probiotic but it is really expensive: https://www.symprove.com/.
Bach flower remedies
I really didn’t expect these to work. But they do! They help re set your energy. You can look at the Bach websites yourself and try whatever resonates with you or you can visit a kinesiologist/Bach flower expert. Rescue Remedy is freely available but the individual ones are better if you can spend some time and think about what might resonate with you or perhaps see a Bach flower healer. Agrimony helps people who are masking their feelings by putting on a brave face. Larch if you are lacking confidence. Mimulus if you have named fears. Red Chestnut if you are always worrying about others. Have a look at the website and see what resonates as describing you. They are quite different. https://www.bachcentre.com/en/remedies/the-38-remedies/
TV shows
If you aren’t ready to try any of the above, you could just dip into it by watching some of the following TV shows:
Freeze the Fear with Wim Hof – BBC iplayer
The Goop Lab – Netflix (especially the John Amaral energy healing episode).
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