 This episode was prerecorded as part of a live continuing education webinar. On-demand CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register at allceus.com slash counselor toolbox. I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation on mindfulness and relaxation. We're going to really focus mainly on mindfulness today, but we're going to end with a little dabble into relaxation just for the heck of it. We're going to start by defining mindfulness and discussing how it can be beneficial, but we're also going to differentiate mindfulness from meditation and explore the concepts of mindfulness. We will finish up, like I said, by identifying some mindfulness activities and also some relaxation activities that your clients can use. A lot of times, at least with my clients and with myself too, when we do practice mindfulness and we notice that we are feeling stressed out, edgy, anxious, whatever adjective you want to use, it's important to have some sort of skill to diffuse that a little bit or to tolerate it if you want to go into a distressed tolerance sort of stance. So we'll talk about some of that and we'll also talk about how relaxation skills can be used as a preventative measure in terms of reducing vulnerabilities. So mindfulness is the act of consciously focusing the mind in the present moment without judgment and without attachment to the moment, which basically means I am going to be aware of where I am, what I'm doing, without trying to change it or hold on to it and say I don't want this moment to ever change or leave. It's going to. I'm going to notice it. I'm going to appreciate it and then I'm going to let it pass. Kind of think of it like cloud animals. If you did that when you were a kid or you do that now like I do, whatever. When you look at an animal in the clouds or some sort of a picture that you see in the clouds, you know that it's going to go away and it's going to morph into something else and that's fine. You're okay letting the cloud do that. So we want to let our minds and our experiences also change as they will without really struggling against them. Mindfulness helps us become aware of our current state, which includes our strengths and our vulnerabilities. A lot of times we talk about mindfulness in terms of being aware of how we feel in order to prevent vulnerabilities. So being aware if we're angry or anxious or this or that. But we also want to use mindfulness to be aware of our strengths. Waking up in the morning, this morning is a good example. I woke up, I had a good night's sleep. I felt really energized and really recharged. So I was ready to go to the gym and I was excited about it as opposed to other mornings. I've gotten up and I've just kind of drugged my happy little self to the gym and happy is probably not the word that would have been appropriate at that time. So we do want to focus on the good stuff too, not just scan to see if everything, if anything's out of whack, but we want to know what is going well. What are our strengths today? Do we feel focused? Do we feel energetic? Do we feel creative? Because that also gives a positive spin to mindfulness. So you're not always just looking for the bad stuff. You do want to check in with yourself emotionally. How are you feeling? You know, just those general feeling words that we use. But mentally, can we concentrate? Are we able to focus on the task at hand? Are we feeling creative? What's our mind doing in terms of handling information and its ability to process stuff? When I start to feel a little bit overwhelmed or I start getting tired, especially, mentally, my focus kind of just goes out the window. And I know that I'm going to have a hard time processing a lot of input all at once. So I prepare for that. But on the days that I'm focused and energized and enthusiastic, it tends to be a lot different. And you can kind of attribute that to higher norepinephrine levels, probably because norepinephrine is your focus chemical and your excitement chemical. But that's a different lecture. Anyhow, physically, how are you feeling? Do you have any aches or pains that you can that you need to address? Or are you feeling strong and in charge and energized? And spiritually and for different people, they're going to define this different ways. When I talk about spirituality with my clients, I talk about hope, faith, courage and discipline. Kind of keep it simple. But how are you feeling in terms of having hope that things can get better? Faith in yourself, your higher power, the world as it is. And we talk more about things like that instead of focusing on necessarily just their higher power. A lot of people, though, get mindfulness confused with meditation. And when you start talking about, well, let's talk, let's learn about how to do mindfulness. They start getting real freaked out because they're like, I don't meditate. I'm not going to sit crisscross applesauce and repeat a sound or do whatever because they're thinking back to different types of meditation that were sort of mainstreamed back in, you know, 60s and 70s. But mindfulness doesn't have to include meditation. And there are so many different types of meditation. You don't have to necessarily engage in a particular type of meditation. Mindfulness every day is a way of living with your eyes wide open, looking in the present, not in the past or in the future. And I'll give you an example and we're going to talk in a few minutes about how mindfulness can help you make the right choice the first time. Got home from the gym this morning, pulled in. I knew that we were going to get our air conditioner replaced today. So the AC guys were going to be there all morning. But I pulled into my normal parking spot. So then when it was time for me to come to work, I go out to the to move my car because I wasn't paying attention. I was just off in my own land thinking about class today and what I had to do at the office instead of being present in the moment. So when I came out to go to work, I was blocked in and I couldn't blame anybody but myself because I wasn't paying attention. I wasn't mindful. So it ended up being an inefficient process. You know, the guys were great about moving their their truck when I finally had to go. But being aware and being mindful, being in the present moment helps you make more efficient, effective choices right now instead of acting on autopilot and maybe ending up thinking later. Well, there was a better choice that I could have made. So what is meditation? Meditation is the practice of mindfulness while sitting or standing quietly for a period of time. So that opens up quite a bit of what meditation can be. It doesn't mean that there's any particular school and there are lots of schools of meditation. We're not going to talk about today. But meditation is mindfulness. Mindfulness is not necessarily meditation. So if you choose to meditate, it just means you're taking an opportunity to stop and be still, whether you're standing or sitting. You can be standing and looking at something and meditating on it. But mindfulness itself, which is what we're talking about today, doesn't require meditation. If you want to put them together, you can have mindful meditation in which you pay attention to something, pay attention to an object, pay attention to a cloud. And we'll get more into that as we go. So why do we want to help people learn about mindfulness? It will help you transition from reacting to acting, being proactive. Like this morning, I could have parked in the grass instead of parking in my normal parking spot where I knew I would have known if I was paying attention that I was going to get blocked in. So you can be proactive. If you wake up and you know that you're feeling kind of funky and you're going to have difficulty dealing with people and being patient, you can take proactive steps to do what you need to do to give yourself and other people kind of a wide berth that day in order to not create a situation that's argumentative or negative. To illustrate this, I would ask you to look back over the day yesterday and think about what stressful events could you have prevented? And they don't have to be like catastrophic, but what little irritants could you have prevented? I know one I do on a regular basis is I lose my keys and everybody gets so frustrated at the house. I'm like, kids, help mommy find her keys. But, you know, it's one of those things when I come home because I'm not being mindful and still processing stuff from the day. I may not pay attention to where I set my keys down. On the days that I'm mindful, I set them right down on the foyer table and I can find them the next morning. How about that? So it saves you time. It allows you to make better choices. Other examples of stressful events, if you weren't being mindful, maybe you were having a little being a little edgy. You were overtired. You weren't feeling well. It had been a long day and you ended up being snappy with somebody. Could that have been prevented if you would have been mindful and been able to say, let me take a breath because I know it's me right now. I'm being snappy and I'm being short. So let me take a breath before I create a negative situation. So I kind of led into that second question. If you had been aware or mindful of your vulnerabilities, how you were feeling, something that may have come up, how might you have conducted your day differently? And, you know, somebody suggested that they had an incident at work where their work phone quit. And that can be really challenging because you don't really want people calling your personal phone. And you've got to try to figure out how to handle that. And if the office, wherever you work, doesn't have a backup phone for you. If they weren't mindful ahead of time and plan for it, then you can kind of be left scrambling in order to make sure you can attend to your clients. So there are a lot of things that happen that we can either be mindful of and say, well, there's nothing I can do about this right now and take a breath. Or we can look back and learn from them and say, in order to prevent this from happening in the future, I need to make sure I've got a plan B. Mindfulness makes more efficient and effective use of energy by making the right decisions the first time. Oh, golly, seven habits of highly effective people, and I can't think of his name right now, but one of his seven habits is beginning with the end in mind. And that doesn't mean thinking in the future. But when you are getting ready to do something, think about what you're doing and if it's the most effective choice for what you've got coming up. And we don't always stay like right in the moment. For example, my keys, when I walk in, if I'm being mindful, I'm focusing and I'm putting them down on the foyer table. So I'll be able to find them the next morning. That's kind of the end in mind. And it also helps you act in your wise mind. When you are in your emotional mind, in your emotional mind, you tend to react more knee-jerk. You tend to react more habitually to things because you want to make the pain stop, or if it's a good thing, you want to do whatever it is again. Have you ever been in an elevator with a kid or anywhere for that matter, and they really enjoy riding the elevator and they're like, I want to do it again. And as soon as you finish the ride, I want to do it again. They're just stuck in their emotional mind because it is so much fun. And I mean, they're kids. They're not thinking that we've got to go home and eat dinner and those sorts of things because kids are pretty good about being mindful. They're right there in the moment. As grown-ups, we don't have that luxury, even if it's something that's really fun that we want to do in our emotional mind. Our logical mind, our rational mind is going to say, yeah, but you've got laundry to do and you've got all this other stuff. Our wise mind synthesizes that. And mindfulness is when you kind of combine the two and go, all right, logically, I know all this stuff has to be done eventually. But doing whatever this activity is right now would really make me happy. So how can I accomplish the two of those things? How can I do what makes me happy and still accomplish what I need to get done? And your wise mind is kind of the mediator between the two. But when you're being mindful, you're in the present moment going, I acknowledge what has to be done and I acknowledge what I want to do. Now I've got to figure out my choice of action. Mindfulness encourages self-awareness and compassion. It encourages us to seek first to understand ourselves and what we're bringing to the mix. Like I said the other day, if we are, well, let's use a positive example today because I'm just obnoxiously happy. If you are obnoxiously happy and you go into a situation and you are smiling and you are talking and you are reaching out to others and you're energetic and you're focused, how does that impact other people? Now if it's 7.30 in the morning, it might not be so well. It may look at you and be like later. But you know what you're bringing to the mix. So you can understand a little bit better people's reactions to you. If you're not mindful, you may not be aware of what you're contributing to the situation. In recovery, a lot of times we talk about when you are pointing the finger at somebody else, there's two fingers pointing at them but three pointing back at you. So mindfulness encourages you to be aware of what these three fingers are bringing in terms of not only your attitude, but also your perception of the situation. Two different people can go through the exact same business meeting or counseling session and interpret what happened very, very differently. So first you have to understand what your interpretations were. And then seek to understand what others' interpretations were. That way you can walk that little path because the truth is found by synthesizing multiple points of view. So we want to be self-aware but we wanna be compassionate with others and understand that they have their own points of view. It doesn't mean they're wrong, it just means they're different. So let's figure out what truth or reality is at this particular moment. Mindfulness also helps us remember, you know what, it's not always about you. I do a lot of volunteering with Animal Rescue and we are in kitten season and I haven't gotten call number one. And I noticed that and I also noticed that, you know, I hadn't seen many messages on my social network from my fellow Animal Rescue people and I started thinking, gee, I wonder if I offended somebody. And then I started putting the pieces together realizing that none of the rescue business boards or groups that I'm in had been very active either and other clues that gave me an awareness that, you know what, probably not about me but recognizing that because a lot of us and I'm guilty of it, will drop back in punt and go, okay, what did I do to create this situation? And taking on everything and taking responsibility for everything is not helpful but when you're mindful, you can be aware of the other possibilities. In this very moment, why might I not have a house full of kittens? And you know, I love the little critters but it's okay that I don't have them right now because I've got a lot going on. And then I said, it isn't always about you until it is. And there are those times that, you know, you may have said something or done something that offended somebody or made somebody angry or created a situation and being mindful, you can look at it, maybe you get called to your boss's office and your boss says, I need to see you at two o'clock and you start fretting and wondering what's gonna happen and you're afraid you're gonna get in trouble. You know, it could be, you're getting a promotion, it could be there's a project that needs to be done but if you're being mindful, you might think and go, you know what, I haven't been given 100%, I've been late the last six days, so it might be about me. So being mindful and aware of your contribution to every situation and then figuring out where to go from there. Mindfulness reduces inefficiency through planning and prioritizing. It helps us figure out in the moment, I'm feeling energetic and confident and clear-headed. So what can I get done today off of my list instead of just kind of spinning in circles? I'm taking advantage of how I feel in the moment. It also helps us maintain awareness to prevent or mitigate discomfort. So when we start feeling like we're getting the sniffles or if we feel like we may have slept wrong and our back hurts or we're a little achy and creaky, we can take steps before we end up getting full-blown sick or having a really bad headache or backache. It helps us balance and renew our resources, energy and health to create a sustainable, long-term effective lifestyle. Think about sustainable gardening or sustainable farming. The earth, every time a plant is planted, it sucks up certain nutrients from the earth and different plants suck up different nutrients. So if you plant the same type of plant, like if you plant brassicas, which are your broccoli and your cabbage and your mustards and stuff, in the same place every single year, eventually they're going to fail to thrive because you're taking the same stuff out of the same place and you're not giving it a chance to renew. But after you plant them, then you can follow with something else like corn that uses different vitamins and minerals. So that's still plentiful. So being mindful is kind of like maintaining our own renewable resources and succession planning, if you will. So asking yourself, what do I need right now? What do I need in order to feel happy, healthy and keep moving toward whatever my goals are over here? And what options do I have to meet those needs in the present while still moving towards those future goals? I mean, there are options of not doing anything. There are options of doing something completely unrelated and using your energy and going in a backward direction, or you can choose things that'll help you move in a forward direction. Remembering that goals are not only work goals, so to speak, or emotion goals, but they can also be relationship goals and bucket list goals. So what is it that your destination is? And what options do you have right now to meet your needs that'll help you keep moving toward that destination? Now, one thing we haven't talked about in other videos is the beginner's mind. And I love this concept. Each moment is a new beginning and a new unique moment in time. If you've ever had one of those days, and I think we all have, and you just go to bed and you're like, you know what, I'm gonna go to bed early. I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna start again tomorrow because I'm done. That's kind of like the beginner's mind because you're saying tomorrow will be better. But the beginner's mind is even cooler than that because it says every moment is a new beginning. So if your moment right now was not so pleasant or if you had struggled getting on with your internet connection or something and it was like, oh, so frustrating, that moment was frustrating. It didn't mean the next moment necessarily had to be. So you had the option once you got past and solved whatever that problem was, you had the option of having a new moment and having a new feeling. But remembering that progress is not perfection. So whatever it is, if we're working with clients who have anxiety, or depression, or addiction, they may have some times where they take a couple steps backwards. And they may, often likely do, feel very frustrated about that. One of the things I wanna point out to them is that how much progress they had made and okay, they took a couple steps back. We're looking for progress, not perfection because they're learning these new tools right now. And they're not going to have them mastered right away, but they've done really well. So let's get back up on the bicycle or the horse or whatever metaphor you wanna use and start again and encourage them to improve the next moment, not wait till the next day or the next week, but sure, let's do it right now. So I don't want somebody to have a bad day and feel like, oh, well, after I see my therapist six days from now, then I can get back on the right path. No, I want you to be able to stop and look and go, okay, I've got that problem taken care of. How can I improve this next moment and get back on the right path right now? So with that, there are two different types of practices and opening the mind can be very, very difficult for many people to master and it can be kind of frustrating because we're kind of like this fish that's swimming by and he's noticing everything and he's got an open mind, I'm assuming. And then all of a sudden he sees a worm and he latches on to it and he gets hooked and he can't get free. And that's kind of what we're talking about with opening the mind. It's like watching a conveyor belt going by, noticing what's going on, but not shutting off the belt to examine objects more closely. And with the fish, he would just keep swimming and noticing, okay, there's a worm, there's a little fish, there's a big fish, oh crap, there's a shark and just keep swimming and not really get hung up on any one particular thing that he's noticing. Ideally, we can do this, but in reality, even if you're doing something like watching cloud pictures, you can watch it, but I know myself, I'll find one that particularly interests me. And then my mind will go off somewhere about how that reminds me of, if I see a little bear, it'll remind me of Winnie the Pooh and then I start thinking about all the characters and that's not where you're supposed to be because then I've quit noticing and I've quit being open to what's going on in the moment and I'm off in my own little La La Land. So opening the mind can be helpful to increase people's awareness of what's going on around them and just being conscious of it, but it's difficult. So if it's really frustrating for people, then we go to focusing the mind, which is much easier. You can focus your attention on internal or external events. So internal events might include thoughts like mantras. If you're having a bad day, you can be saying something to yourself like, I've got this, it's going to get better or whatever your mantra is in your self-talk and repeating that. That's one way of focusing the mind. You can also focus on feelings or sensations. So what are you feeling when you're sitting in the chair? When you're outside, one of my favorite things to focus on is feeling the warmth of the sun beating on my skin. You know, help them find something that they can focus on that will help them take their attention from going six different ways until Sunday and hone it in on one thing and kind of help them get grounded and calm down. External events can include objects outside of the self like a leaf or a painting or a candle. When I was little, we used to live in Florida. And, you know, we have hurricanes and when we'd have hurricanes and the power would go out, one of the things that we would always do is light candles and I could sit there for 30 minutes and watch the little flicker of the candle flame. Who knew? If you can encourage clients to find something that they can center their focus on, what this does, not only does it help them kind of get grounded but it helps the adrenaline wear off so they can get out of that rush of the emotional mind and then access a little bit easier, that rational mind so they can start synthesizing it. Encourage your clients to make a list of things that they might want to focus on. I have mine pick a mantra and we can change mantras week to week if there's a particular change in what they're focusing on in treatment or you can have people keep the same mantra, whatever works for them. It is what it is. Mine's Hakuna Matata, you know, big surprise. I'm gonna pick something from a Disney movie but finding something that's meaningful to them in 12-step treatment. They have a lot of different mantras that people can choose to use which will help remind them to stay focused and keep working on their relapse prevention plan and things like that. So have them pick something that can help them focus their mind because if they're doing that then they're probably not going to be reacting on autopilot. So once you've gotten the open or the focus, now we go to observing or becoming and I break this up between different sessions with clients because it can get overwhelming when you start talking about all these different dimensions and with my younger clients, we don't talk about the different dimensions at all. I just present it in a couple of different ways so they can explore and figure out what works best for them. How do they feel when they are opening their mind? Does that work, doesn't it? Then we'll do an activity where they're focusing their mind. How does that work for them? The next session we'll talk about observing and becoming. Observing is getting distance from your emotional reactions by pulling back and watching whereas becoming is moving forward and becoming kind of what is, becoming one with the feeling. When I was in graduate school, I had a professor that explained the difference between empathy and sympathy in a way that made sense to me. He said it was like standing at the edge of a well and sympathy, the person is standing at the edge of the well looking down going, wow, must be pretty cold. I hate to be you. Must be kind of scary down there. Yeah, at least the person's there but not totally getting that connection. Empathy is when somebody straps on the repelling gear and goes down there in the well to experience how cold it is and experience the fear and then be supportive until the situation can be resolved. So when we're practicing mindfulness, sometimes and depending on your clients and their particular issues if they have self-injurious behavior or addictions, becoming is going to be something that is a little bit more challenging because we're increasing their anxiety levels and encouraging them to basically practice distress tolerance where they are sort of one with the emotion, they are feeling angry and they're acknowledging that anger and they're telling you how it feels to be angry and then we're talking about how to deal with that. So that would be something I would probably work on later. You can practice becoming with the happy emotion stuff and it's easier to start with becoming when you introduce this lesson to have them become and give an example of what it feels like when they're happy. Talk about like their greatest achievement or the thing that they're proudest of or best surprise that they've ever experienced whatever makes them happy. And have them talk about how do I feel when I'm in that moment? What am I thinking? What am I feeling? What are my urges at that point in time? So they know what that emotion is and they become one with happiness because we want them to recreate that. That's what kind of most of our clients are striving towards is happiness. So we want them to know what that feels like and want to embrace that. And then the next unit, I wouldn't present this all in one day to any level of group. Because like I said, I really want them to master each particular concept. So I present it generally one per week. So people can practice it, figure out what works, what feels right and understand a little bit more about the difference between for example, let's see going back here between observing and becoming. So we'll talk about observing and I'll give them exercises to practice observing certain emotions. But then like I said, during that first week, I'll also have them maybe practice becoming one with some of their happy feelings whenever those occur. That also increases their awareness, their mindfulness of those happy feelings during the week. So your core mindfulness, and I've already talked about this a lot leading up to this particular slide. Your emotional mind is typically your heart driven process and responses are based on emotional reactions, anger, fear, sadness, elation. This is when your mind is kind of going on autopilot and going, I wanna make it stop or I wanna do it again. The reasonable mind is the scientist or the judge or whatever you wanna think about it as or Jiminy Cricket, if you wanna imagine that is mind driven, it's the detective, it's more like a robot, it's the feelings don't matter, it's thinking about what's the next logical choice and it's not paying attention to, sometimes the most logical choice isn't necessarily the best choice because there can be a compromise where you can be happy and make a good choice at the same time. So the wise mind is the one that helps you figure out how to be happy as possible, balancing your wants with your needs. So briefly, opening or focusing the mind helps people become more aware of their surroundings. So you're opening your mind in order to become aware of your surroundings but you can focus your mind in order to become more aware of what's going on inside you or become aware of a particular situation. People with attention issues may have difficulty, like I said earlier, when they open their mind because everything catches their attention. I've told you before about one time I was giving a lecture, holding a group for my adolescent unit and there was a door in the back that had a window and it went out to where they took the garbage from the kitchen and beyond that door was this great big oak tree, beautiful oak tree. And I'm sitting there doing group and it was a psycho-ed group, it wasn't therapy. And I was talking and all of a sudden I was like, squirrel. And this was right after the movie Up came out so they were all like, what? And I'm like, no, really, seriously, that's the biggest squirrel I've ever seen outside on the oak tree. And they all just kind of shook their head. But my staff as well as most of my clients knew that, my attention could get drawn really, really easily by extraneous, especially extraneous visual stimuli. So I have to know that when I'm going into a situation, whether I'm teaching or driving or whatever the case may be. So being aware of your surroundings is important but it can be frustrating. Focusing the mind helps you stay a little bit more focused on what's going on in that moment with a particular thing. Observing or becoming one with the moment. So once you've, while you're observing and opening that mind or focusing it, then you're also observing your reactions and you're either doing it from afar and sort of narrating it like you're telling a story or you're becoming one with how you're feeling in that situation and you're really fully experiencing it. As you do this, you're taking all this input and noticing with the reasonable and the emotional mind what's going on in order to make your next decision about what's the best choice. Remembering that with the beginner's mind each moment is a new opportunity. So if you're opening your mind and you get distracted, okay, let's try it again or let's try something else. Each moment is a new opportunity to learn a new skill or learn something that's not gonna work for you because you know what? Not everything works for every client and that's okay. And I repeatedly tell my clients this that even if it works for eight people out of 10 in the group, that doesn't mean anything's wrong with you, it just means it doesn't work for you. Your core mindfulness skills. So in order to get to that wise mind, you've got your emotions, you've got your logic, what do you do? Well, your wise mind is non-judgmental and it observes what's going on. It's one mind focusing on the task at hand and helps you clear your mind of everything else. It says, okay, everybody just give me a second because I'm gonna take all this data and I'm gonna synthesize it and I need a minute. So it's like going into your office and shutting the door and reading the client file before you go into session. And then you do what works, choose what's effective for you to handle that situation to get the best result, to meet your needs and your wants. Remembering you need to be compassionate with yourself because sometimes you're gonna try to do this and you're gonna have monkey mind, which is why our little friend the monkey's here. You're gonna try to sit down and read that file and synthesize everything and maybe write your comprehensive summary and you just can't figure out how to put all the pieces together. Sometimes that's your cue that you just need to take a break for a second, step away from it and then come back to it. Your wise mind skills want you to observe, describe and participate. So you're gonna become a detective, take in the whole situation, what's going on in the big picture. And this is more than just opening your mind. This is kind of observing, thinking as if you are a detective going into a crime scene and you walk in and if you watched Colombo or Monk or even Psych, I hate to say it, they would walk in and they would notice all kinds of details that most of us don't even pay attention to. So be observant what's going on around you, but also within you. Ask yourself what might I be missing? If you're feeling kind of wonky and you're looking around going, I don't know why I feel this way, ask yourself what might I be missing? And you might not have an answer right away, but that's okay. You ask the question. You can also ask, how might someone else perceive this situation? So if you walk into a room and all of a sudden it falls dead silent, we've had that happen before, hopefully, you wonder what's going on and I'm a parent. I walk into a room with my kids and it'll fall dead silent. And my first question is, what are you doing? But it may not be anything. So I've gotten past that. And I observed the big picture. Maybe they're just being polite to pay attention and see what I need or I want. So what might I be missing? Maybe they're just being polite. And how might someone else perceive this situation? If they walked in and the kids got quiet, what would they think? So that gives you a couple different perspectives even if you don't have another person to bounce ideas off of. So you're getting as much information as you can, then describe and name your experiences exploring that emotional mind. This situation is stressful, odd, curious, whatever word you're gonna use. And I feel about the situation. Okay, that's fine. Participate, be actively involved in the moment. So once you've figured all this out, you ask yourself, what can I do to either continue the good stuff or improve the next moment? If you walk in and it's an unpleasant situation, okay, it happens, it's thanks. So what can I do to change the situation in the next moment? Right now, my car is stalled on the side of the road or my tire is flat or my phone won't work. And that's frustrating. So I can stay frustrated and throw my phone across the room or I can figure out what's the next best step to meet my needs and improve the next moment so I don't have to stay frustrated and phone-less. So what gets in the way of being mindful? And this is another one of those things that can be fun to do as a group activity, putting the little poster boards up and having people go around to stations. But start out with observing. What keeps people from being effective observers? Well, we know that when there's an adrenaline rush, whether it's good or bad, when you've got a rush of adrenaline, you've kind of got tunnel vision. If you've ever ridden on a roller coaster, you're not looking around at the site. Most of us aren't. You may be holding on for dear life, but you are not probably taking in all of the possible stimuli. You've got some narrowed focus. When something bad happens, the same thing happens. When law enforcement, when cops go out and they first start running code, as soon as they hear the tones, they get this adrenaline rush and they can feel the flush and they kind of get tunnel vision going on. And they have to work through that to get to the point where they can kind of tone that down so they can be safe and do what they need to do. But adrenaline can get in the way of observing. So being aware of that, mindfulness helps us do things we need to do in order to give ourselves time for that adrenaline to bleed off. Fear can get in the way of observing. Sometimes you don't wanna see what you saw. So you may be afraid that you're gonna get in trouble if you tell something that you saw or you may be afraid that if you observe something that you don't like and you speak up about it, you might get rejected or ridiculed. So, and that kind of goes down to describing too, but fear of repercussions can get in the way of effectively observing. People who grew up in harsh or unpredictable households, often in new situations especially, will be really stressed out and may not observe as many things as they could. On the other hand, there's the opposite end of the spectrum where there are people who are super hyper-vigilant and they notice everything. But fear can get in the way of being able to accurately observe not only the good but the bad or vice versa in a situation. Describing, if you are on autopilot when you're doing something, driving home after work and if you're on autopilot, you're not gonna notice the birds on the power line or the trash on the side of the road or maybe even the speed limit change, oops, you may not even be just be able to describe your trip from one end to the other. And that lets you know you weren't being mindful. So if you're trying to recount what happened and you're like, you know, I don't really remember, you were on autopilot, improve the next moment, try to be more aware the next time you make that drive. And some of our clients don't have the words. They just are alexthymic, they don't know how to use feeling words, they don't wanna use feeling words. So help them figure out different ways to express themselves. With children, you can have them color or do art therapy with other people, they may express themselves in terms of reactions. Listen for how they express their emotions and try to mirror those words to them. And participating, so you get all the information, then you've gotta make the next right choice for you. But if you don't know your destination, how do you know what that next right choice is? So you need to know your destination, which is one of the reasons that when we do treatment planning, we set goals, you know, where are you going? How will you know when you've achieved this goal? People may not participate, stand up and notice something because they fear rejection or they fear being wrong. So all of those things can get in the way of being mindful. Sometimes they just don't wanna see it because they don't wanna have to say something and then deal with all the fallout from it. Because, and a lot of that, a lot of times that comes back to self-esteem issues and assertiveness issues, which are other things we can work on in counseling. So an activity that you can have clients do and you can even do if you wanna see kind of how it goes, practice observing, describing and participating, watching a sitcom or television show. It's a nice, neutral way to do it if you do it in group. Find a scene where a person has to make some kind of a choice about what to do. And then pause it and practice observing what's going on, describing the situation, describing how the person feels and then imagine participating and making what you think would be the next right choice for that particular character. A little more personal way is to look back over your week and identify a time you felt irritable and practice those skills again, observing, describing and participating. So you might look back and once you observe and describe, figure out in retrospect, there were other options to participating to improve the next moment that you didn't choose. The good news is or the awesome thing is you can learn from it so the next time that option is gonna be more readily available to you. Body scan is when you just take a second or 30 seconds and scan from top to bottom or bottom to top and figure out how do I feel physically? What's my breathing like? What's my heart rate like? Do I feel anxious? A lot of times based on our physiological sensations we can put an emotional label to it. Practice mindful breathing, breathing in, focusing on the breath and breathing out and focusing on the breath noticing as your abdomen preferably and or your chest rise and fall. Too many of us are chest breathers and that's not effective breathing. So encourage clients when they practice mindful breathing to try to breathe through their abdomen in order to get the best bang for their buck, if you will. Mindful observation, pick a specific object and focus on it and really try to identify as much about it as you can and try to notice something new each time. You can also practice environmental awareness which is again, opening your mind, going and sitting in a park or sitting in a cafeteria or the mall, people watching and just keeping your mind open and being aware of everybody that passes. Mindful appreciation. Notice five things in your day that usually go unappreciated. I love this one and it can be something for someone who's struggling to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Identifying some of these positive things that happen like somebody held a door for them or somebody let them in in traffic. That's a huge one in a lot of places. I know when I was in DC people didn't want to let you in in traffic. So it was a big deal when they did but a lot of times you just kind of take that for granted. So noticing things that go unappreciated or maybe the bumblebee, I love bumblebees that are on the flowers. Normally you probably wouldn't appreciate that but if you notice it, you can notice how it's like a little teddy bear with wings. Four plus four, four senses plus four stimuli. So identify four things you see, four things you hear or things you feel and four things you smell. Four things you smell can be kind of hard unless you're like in a food court. Tactile mindfulness. I don't like the pinching one but you can be aware of sensations if you pinch yourself. I prefer the ice cube less harmful. Holding the ice cube, what does it feel like? This is an interesting one to notice how people deal with the stress too. What happens when it starts to hurt and what do they want to do? And this is a way to help them figure out what their knee jerk reactions or their automatic reactions are to when they start to feel angry and distressed. The I and you exercise. Pay attention to how often you use the word I in a sentence. I feel, I am, I will, I, I, I, it's all about me, me, me. And also concurrently, pay attention to how often you use the word you. A lot of times we use it in a blaming, directing or accusatory fashion. You need to or you shouldn't have instead of using it in an inquiring or compassionate fashion, like how do you feel about that? Just noticing how you use your words and being mindful of how you interact with others with those two simple prepositions. Cause and effect, play out the story for everything that you do for a given period of time. So start with the beginning of the day is one anchor point. I got out of bed because, well, my alarm went off and I knew I had to get to the gym and keep going through it. The effect of my getting out of bed, how did I feel about that? And what was the next thing that I did? This can help people identify and when you get to backwards chaining, it can also help them identify links in their chain where things might have started to go awry and they started to get a little cranky or irritable or stressed out. Devil's advocate, act as if you believe the opposite of what you believe and make a note of how you feel and the new perspectives you gain. So really argue it like you're in a debate. Even if you don't believe it going into the debate become one with it and believe it. And then when you get finished, now you've got two different realities or two different truths that you can try to synthesize to walk that middle path. But I said we do need some relaxation skills because it's helpful to relax just to prevent distress. Emotionally, increase the pleasant cues in your environment and we can do this in our offices, you can do it even if you can't do it in your entire house because you live with other people. Have a corner or a space that you can go that is your retreat. What sounds do you like to hear? And it may be sounds from a electronic birds music. There are all kinds of YouTube videos that are like eight hours long that are babbling brooks and different sounds that you can play if you want to hear that in the background. What sights, pictures, colors, what do you want to see when you walk into a room? What makes you happy? What's cheerful to you versus what's overwhelming or depressing? And some of that can also go into organization and safety. Feng Shui, you can look into that a little bit but some of the things are you don't want to have your back to the door or to a window because your mind knows that potentially someone could approach through either one of those and it tends to add a little bit more stress. What temperature do you prefer? And what texture do you prefer? If you've ever worn an itchy wool sweater, you'll know kind of what I'm talking about here. So what can you do to increase the pleasant cues in your environment? My daughter and I, when we go shopping, one day she was, we were doing our normal and we were going through the linen section and there was this fluffy pillow and we both like ran our hands through it. And she's like, why do we have to pet every pillow we see? I'm like, I don't know, but it's so soft. Make your environment pleasant and smell. Smell is a big one because it's a memory trigger but you can also just increase energy and all that kind of stuff with different aromas and you can look into aromatherapy for that and you can also try just simple things like opening a window because sometimes just cool crisp air will improve the mood and improve the feel of the environment. Cognitively, encourage people to take five minutes not to think, to just be, to sit still. And yes, this is meditation. So not everybody's gonna go for it but you can throw it out there. Guided imagery, going to their favorite place in their mind, but using every single sense they can, what do they see, hear, feel, really getting into the scene. Reading something enjoyable, non-stressful or learning a new hobby, it takes a fair amount of energy but it can distract you from other things like when I go out gardening, it takes out a lot of energy but I'm not thinking about anything else when I'm out there except for the weeds that are mocking me and growing between my strawberries. Physically, relieve pain and muscular imbalances and regulate blood flow with stretching and massage. You can try hot tubs, most people like them. Progressive muscular relaxation, there are lots of prerecorded scripts online, just type it in and you can get a prerecorded script for progressive muscular relaxation and breath work. Social environments that promote calm tranquility and happiness obviously are gonna help you relax more than excessively stimulating ones. Make sure you laugh every day, it's important. So schedule it in. Extroverts may be more comfortable around a group of people where interruptions are welcomed or introverts may get stressed out with a lot of interruptions. So when you're in a social setting, know which kinds of social settings help you relax and gain energy and which social situations drain energy from you. Judgers don't like surprises and need to plan for the event. So, I'm a judge, I like to know ahead of time what's gonna happen, plan it out sometimes meticulously. Whereas perceivers, and again, we're talking about Kiersey Myers-Briggs inventory, perceivers love surprises and prefer to be a lot more spontaneous. So your social relaxation is really gonna depend a lot on your temperament, how much planning you want, how many people you want there, whether you wanna be alone hiking in the woods, or you wanna be at a concert with 20 other people. Environmentally, what makes the environment relaxing for you? And we talked about this one earlier, colors, sights, light level, temperature, location, sounds and organization. So mindfulness involves increasing awareness of our emotional, mental and physical selves. It also helps us develop an understanding of external stimuli that influence us. So we become more aware of the lights that are bothering us or the things that make us happy in our environment. Relaxation is a technique used to restore equilibrium after a period of stress and also to help us just maintain equilibrium so we're prepared for stress. As clients increase self-awareness, they will be able to identify distress earlier, implement relaxation strategies to prevent upheaval because that's gonna be one of their options to them and that participate, observe, describe and participate and learn their own stress triggers and effective interventions. Are there any questions? Well, everybody have an absolutely amazing weekend and I hope you get to enjoy some of the weather. Hopefully it's good weather for you and enjoy your Easter weekend if you have anything wonderful planned. If you enjoy this podcast, please like and subscribe either in your podcast player or on YouTube. You can attend and participate in our live webinars with Dr. Snipes by subscribing at allceuse.com slash counselor toolbox. This episode has been brought to you in part by allceuse.com providing 24 seven multimedia continuing education and pre-certification training to counselors, therapists and nurses since 2006. Use coupon code, counselor toolbox to get a 20% discount off your order this month.