Hello. It’s Barb Earle Neurotransformational Coach and health and well-being expert on a mission to help you get to know your brain better and why it matters.
Welcome to day two in a four-week special edition entitled Boost Mental Health and shift your perspective—pandemic related or not!
To help remember it more easily, I call it the Four Ps:
Pause. Perspective. Practise. Patience.
This week the focus is on the first step-Pause. Yesterday’s suggestion was to pause each time you sensed stress-related emotions. How did your it go? What did you notice?
Today we go a little deeper and look at a layer to help reinforce this first step called pause. When you get into the habit of pausing, spare a moment and name your emotion.
Say it out-loud.
Write it down.
Draw it.
Give it a nickname.
Play around with this. See what works for you.
Perhaps simply naming the emotion out-loud is good enough.
Neuroscience research shows this simple action decreases activity in the region of your brain responsible for the fight, flight and freeze response. A simple and easy tool, it helps reinforce the action of pause, getting you closer to an effective solution.
To maximize this action, consider expanding your emotion vocabulary. Learn new ways to say how you feel. As you refine the name of your emotion, it becomes more specific, giving you a deeper insight into what’s behind it.
For Example:
“I feel terrible about this pandemic,” can be a little vague.
“I feel isolated,” gives more meaning and a greater interpretation behind this emotion.
Dealing with feelings of isolation gives you better direction on how to proceed, over the less defined statement of feeling terrible.
Your mission today is to pause and name your emotion, each time you sense stress-related emotions.
Let the neuroscience of your brain and body do the rest.
The next post looks at another layer to help enhance this step called PAUSE
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Until we meet in Person.
Brain to Brain.
Heart to Heart.
Ciao!