Willingness as an Antidote to Anxiety - A Weird Exercise that helps you "Get Better at Feeling"

hi everyone Emma macadam here today we're gonna be talking about how to get better at feeling so that means increasing your capacity to feel emotions the ability to experience both joyful and painful emotions without needing to escape avoid or act on them and this is a skill that's been transformational for me and many of my clients and it's called willingness okay real quick before we get started I just want to remind you I've got a couple of courses on udemy.com that help improve mental health so I've got coping skills for mental health and I've got change of brand at ten alternatives to medication to improve depression and anxiety so the length of those is in the description check those out if you want to learn more about how to improve your mental health okay so back to the skill of a willingness so in this video I'm going to invite you to do something that's completely safe but a little bit uncomfortable and that's to hold it your breath so we're going to do this to explore whether willingness can help you sit with uncomfortable emotions so first off I want you to find a timer you can use your phone timer or one on the internet but what I want you to do is get this timer out and I want you to hold your breath as long as you can so when you're ready pause this video hold your breath as long as you can write down how long you lasted and then come on back willingness means the ability to sit with and experience what you're currently experiencing is the ability to be where you're at to feel what you feel and to expand your heart to be able to feel your emotions whether they're comfortable or painful so first we're gonna talk a little bit about willingness and then we're gonna do a little exercise from the book get out of your mind and into your life by Steven Hayes so research has demonstrated that people who can't make room for their uncomfortable feelings have a very hard time with self-control because they feel the need to escape control or suppress painful emotions they often resort to anger blame drug use or other avoidance techniques that in the long run they end up making them pretty unhappy and disconnected from life now on the other hand practicing willingness can help you strengthen your emotional muscles so you get more skilled at feeling and this makes heavy or painful emotions feel lighter it's an approach to emotion management that's sustainable because over time things get better and better instead of harder and harder so let's compare avoidance and willingness real quick when painful emotions come up avoidance says try not to think about it distract yourself and the willingness says notice what it feels like and make some space for it avoidance labels things that are painful or uncomfortable as bad saying this is awful or I don't like this the willingness doesn't judge emotions it describes them it acts like a curious scientist and explores what those emotions feel like and willingness brings your attention back to the present saying I can be here and now avoidance says I shouldn't feel this way what's the matter with me and willingness says I do feel this way but I will choose my actions avoidance is all about escaping avoiding and shutting down and willingness is about being curious and describing and exploring now you're gonna hold your breath again but don't start yet I want you to listen to these instructions first we're going to how willingness can change the experience for you so this time when you do the exercise and the urge to breathe it becomes stronger I want you to do the following so I want you to notice exactly where the urge to breathe begins and ends in your body locate exactly where that urge is now this is going to be a little bit of an uncomfortable sensation so we're gonna practice willingness with this discomfort see if you can allow that feeling to be precisely there and at the same time keep on holding your breath so this is like turning your willingness dial all the way up just feel the feeling and do not breathe pretend this is a special opportunity to feel something you rarely feel now another step of willingness is noticing any thoughts that come up and just gently thinking your mind for the thought without being controlled by that thought so watch out for the sneaky thoughts that can quickly lead you to breathing before you decide to breathe after all who is in charge of your life you or your word machine look around inside of yourself you're feeling this strong intense pressure to breathe but look around and see if there's some other emotions that are there to see if you can make room for the different types of emotions that are going on inside of you and do the same thing with your sensations so survey your entire body and notice that in addition to that urge to breathe your body also has other sensations and continues to function so if you're feeling a really intense pressure in your chest or a lot of pain in your chest you might notice that pain and then also just notice what your feet feel like then stay with the commitment to hold your breath as long as you can as the urge to breathe becomes stronger imagine that you're continuously in creating this urge on purpose that you can replicate this urge in your imagination and with every pain in your chest with every worry that you might have maybe you're thinking oh my gosh I might pass out or whatever instincts you have to breathe shift it from something unwelcome that's being visited upon you to something that you're creating on purpose just for the sake of feeling what it feels like this new urge is essentially the same but this time you're making it see how that feels different so for example one time I was working in the wilderness I'm working with these troubled youth in a youth group we're out in the desert and it was like 110 degrees it's July in Utah it's like a hundred and ten degrees we are sitting and sweating all day but we had this special ceremony planned for the evening called the sweat lodge ceremony and we were going to create a very hot environment inside of a willow shelter and sit with it and the thought of doing an activity that was like really hot after a whole day of being hot seemed awful so what I did to help myself be able to do the sweat lodge that night with these kids because there was an important part of their graduation ceremony also it was a way to acknowledge the really hard things that they had done during their eight or ten or twelve weeks out in the desert so we didn't want to skip it but we were also kind of dreading it so what I did to encourage myself to do this hard thing was very physically uncomfortable and emotionally uncomfortable was I just imagined that all I wanted to do was to feel hot and during the day throughout the day I imagined I was like relaxing in a hot bath which is one way of being really hot that's actually enjoyable so I kind of tricked my brain into thinking I I'm creating this feeling of heat I'm choosing this feeling of heat I'm choosing this feeling of you know being sweaty and it's so relaxing is what I told myself and that made it so that instead of me walking around me like oh my gosh it's so hot I need to escape this I can't handle the thought of doing a sweat lodge this sounds horrible you know that mental dialogue of I can't handle it instead of that I created the belief in my mind that hey this is something I want this is something I'm choosing this is something I am going to willingly experience I can't say that I said like I don't think I ever said like and willingness isn't about liking a sensation because that's a judgement it's about being with the sensation whether it's comfortable or uncomfortable so went through the whole day hundred and ten degrees in July then in the evening as the sun's getting ready to go down it's still really hot we do the sweat lodge it was wonderful difficult experience and then as we come out of the sweat lodge that night the Sun has set and it's cooling down and you get out of the sweat lodge and the air outside feels amazingly cool it was probably like 95 degrees and it felt so cool and refreshing and your whole body just feels amazing because you just asked it to do something hard and you did it anyway so that's an example of pretending that you're creating those uncomfortable sensations for a purpose and when you do that they don't seem so awful number seven you're gonna feel some discomfort can you notice and describe those feelings thoughts and sensations without needing to act on them right away now we're gonna start this exercise I'm gonna leave the screen up on the screen for two minutes and you can read through it as you hold your breath so you can glance at this list and remind yourself of the things to do while really feeling what it feels like to want to breathe while not breathing you're ready to see if it's possible to control your behavior which is holding your breath by learning to accept and make room for your thoughts and feelings so go ahead and pull out your timer and get ready to start take a deep breath and hold it as long as you can when you're finished write down how long do you held it you now the purpose of this exercise was not to hold your breath longer so it doesn't actually really matter how long you held it but rather the purpose was to experiment with what it felt like to want to breathe but not breathe what was that like for you were you able to get a small sense of what it feels like to sit with painful or uncomfortable emotions without needing to act immediately to make them go away initially most people feel like they want to escape that feeling of not breathing so did that aversion tend to come and go and did it go up and down how did your mind try to persuade you to breathe before you really had to what was the sneakiest thing your mind did for a lot of people their brain is convincing them all this is a silly activity or I don't really need to try or you know it's no big deal no one's gonna notice now do you see any possible implications that this simple exercise might have for how your life has been going especially in any area that you've been struggling with when we feel uncomfortable emotions our strongest desire is to escape and avoid them but learning to sit with emotions sensations and thoughts without needing to escape them is a powerful skill that can help with depression anxiety and other mental health areas willingness allows you to feel more peace in the present moment and be calm enough to find solutions in the future I'm gonna make some more videos on willingness so keep your eye on this channel if you'd like to learn more and please share this video you never know who might benefit from it thank you for watching and take care

Channel: Therapy in a Nutshell

Views: 121,493

Rating: 4.9379711 out of 5

Keywords: therapy in a nutshell

Id: -kRL7wfqYb4

Length: 13min 23sec (803 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 13 2020