210. Finding Calm in Chaos: Mindbody Practices for Stress Relief

In times of uncertainty and distress, finding moments of calm can be challenging. 

In this episode of Health Bite, Dr. Adrienne Youdim addresses the emotional toll of recent events, particularly for those affected by the ongoing challenges in California and beyond. 

She guides listeners through the practice of emotional labeling and introduces mind-body techniques to foster resilience and community.

Join Dr. Adrienne Youdim as she shares insights on managing stress and anxiety through mindfulness practices that can be easily integrated into daily life.

What You'll Learn From This Episode:

• The impact of communal and personal challenges on emotional well-being
• The benefits of emotional labeling and how it fosters community
• Techniques to create emotional awareness and resilience
• Simple breathing practices to activate the parasympathetic nervous system
• Guided visualization to promote relaxation and ease
• The importance of self-regulation in a reactive world
• How small practices can lead to significant transformations in personal and communal interactions

"Mind-body practices are really an incredible way to allow us to come together in community." — Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Ways that Dr. Adrienne Youdim Can Support You

1. Join the Monthly Free Mind-Body Workshops: Participate in engaging mind-body practices designed to help manage your stress response. Register here.
2. Sign Up for the Newsletter: Stay updated with valuable insights and resources by subscribing to the newsletter. Sign up here.
3. Freebie alert. Register for our monthly free MindBody Workshop and receive a downloadable guide on emotional labeling to help you manage your emotions effectively.

Connect with Dr. Adrienne Youdim

• Website :https://www.dradriennespeaks.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dradrienneyoudim/

Transcript

So I welcome you all again to this mindful moment together. It's been a challenging week for those of us who live in California and in Los Angeles and I think we have all been affected to some degree, whether we have some have lost their homes and lost their pets. And that's of course terribly devastating and our hearts go out to them, people who have been evacuated. That in itself is a stressor. Those who haven't been evacuated but have been witnessing the distress in their friends and family, it's very difficult to experience somebody else's pain, to witness somebody else's pain and suffering. And of course, I know we have people on this call who don't live in California, but who are still affected, who have still been following the news, who have still been sending their hearts and their prayers to people here. And then, of course, there is the everyday things, the everyday challenges, the everyday sufferings, the everyday minutiae that troubles us. And so mind-body practices are really an incredible way to allow us to come together in community. It gives us an opportunity to process a communal or a personal challenge and it gives us the opportunity to learn some tools in order to manage these everyday stressors and challenges, as well as these unusual, more kind of devastating and catastrophic ones. So my intention today and for this practice is really to create community and I'm going to ask each of you one by one, I'll call you by name, to just unmute yourselves and give me two words. The first word that I hope for you to share is your intention. And the second word that I wish for you to share is a feeling that you are experiencing right now. And I'm going to ask you to try and be really deliberate and distinct in that feeling. So instead of saying bad, perhaps you want to say worried or distressed or fearful. Instead of good, you may want to say optimistic or joyful. So my intention again is community and my feeling is hopeful. I'm going to ask Amy to unmute herself and share. Amy, are you with us? Maybe Susan, since you're already unmuted, can you share with us an intention and a feeling?

SPEAKER_03:

My intention is calm and my feeling is overwhelmed.

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

I can understand both of those deeply. Sabrina, can you offer a intention for this practice and feeling?

SPEAKER_05:

You're muted. Susan and I have the same idea for intention, I think, calm. And the feeling is powerless.

SPEAKER_02:

Amy, thank you, Sabrina. My intention for this is balance. and my feeling is disconnected.

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Thank you.

SPEAKER_09:

Leanne? I was going to say calmness, but also present, to be present. And then mine is anxiety or panic.

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's one that's very common right now. Thank you, Leanne. Leila?

SPEAKER_01:

 Peace of mind, intention, and my feeling is positive.

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Beautiful.

SPEAKER_10:

Patty? I would say interested and concerned. Thank you. Emily?

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

 Emily, can you join us with an intention?

SPEAKER_07:

Yeah, my intention is calm. My feeling is chaos. And Gloria?

SPEAKER_08:

Worried right now.

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Gloria, are you with us? You muted yourself again.

SPEAKER_08:

 I said my intention is to be peaceful and my feeling is very worried right now.

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Yes. So we see kind of the common threads in our feelings and in our intentions. And this practice is called emotional labeling. And actually just merely labeling our emotions has a positive psychological effect. One of them is in this setting, as you can see, is creating community. because when we share our intentions, when we share our feelings, we can see how universal they are, how very similar we all are. Another benefit of emotional labeling is that it creates a little bit of detachment. When we're feeling distress or anxiety, we tend to get wrapped up in those feelings, right? We tend to identify, maybe overly identify with the feeling. By labeling it, you create some distance. So you yourself can be separate from the worry, separate from the disconnect, separate from the anxiety. Another benefit is that it reduces the intensity. Just merely saying it out loud reduces the intensity of that feeling. And then finally, it increases awareness so that we build emotional resilience. I don't know if you guys can relate to this experience of having a feeling, but not really being mindful of what it is. So you kind of feel in your body this sentiment of like, something's going on, but what is it? What is it? I don't know really what it is. When you take the time to really discern your feeling, to name it in a really specific and accurate way, it gives you that ability to have greater awareness. And in doing so, it allows you to build emotional resilience. So the first tool that I want to share with you is to get in the practice of naming your feelings. Try and be very specific and try and use a single word to identify it. And through that emotional labeling, you create awareness, resilience, you reduce the intensity, you detach from that feeling, and then you're also able to create a sense of community. We're going to do two mind-body skills today. And mind-body skills or practices are basically a series of skills and practices that help us regulate our nervous system. So we are created to be reactive. Our neurobiology is created for reactivity. Why? Because when we experienced a stress, when our ancestors in the wild experienced a stress, that stress was usually a predator or something that was life-threatening. And so we didn't have the luxury or the time to think. Our nervous system has been created in a way that when we detect a threat or a stress, we react immediately. And in the body, that happens in several ways. Number one, your heart rate goes up and your blood pressure goes up so that you can supply a greater blood flow and oxygen to all of the muscles so you can flee. Your liver releases glycogen stores or sugar in the bloodstream. And that allows us for the energy in order to move out of the way our eyesight narrows and then non essential functions like. digestion like reproduction are turned off, are shut down because they're not essential in a stress. Now that makes a lot of sense when the stress is quick to come on and then quick to go off like a predator. Once you get out of the way, you are no longer in a stressful situation and your nervous system can regulate. But what happens when you're in a circumstance where you go from the pandemic, to quarantine, to political upheaval, to October 7th, to war in the Ukraine and the Middle East, to natural disasters and catastrophes, and again, all the little things in between. Our bodies react to those stresses in the very same way. The problem is that it is prolonged. It's not quick. And that can go on to develop cardiovascular problems like hypertension, palpitations, digestive issues, because again, your digestion is turned off, reproductive issues, it reduces our immunity. The good news is that we have skills to help us self-regulate so that we can bring ourselves out of that state of stress and overwhelm. And so that's what we're going to do together. I'm going to ask you, if you're not muted, to go ahead and mute so that we can reduce the noise while we go into the first practice. And the first practice is going to be a breathing practice. Now, there are many different kinds of breathing practices. We're going to do the most simple, which is called a soft belly practice. Essentially, what I want you to do is soften or loosen your belly. If you're wearing elastic pants, I'd even ask you to slip them under your stomach, under your belly. What we are doing here is allowing, particularly with the inhale, for the belly to rise. Oftentimes when we breathe, we breathe into the chest. The chest is where those sympathetic or fight or flight fibers reside. It's like panting or panicking. What we actually want to do is bring the air all the way into the belly so that we can activate the parasympathetic or the rest and relax. So I invite you to get comfortable in your chair. You can bring your head down. You can close your eyes if that feels comfortable. Assume a upright but comfortable posture and slowly take a deep inhale through the nose and out through the mouth. Again, a slow inhale through the nose and out through the mouth. And I want you to continue at your own rate and rhythm in through the nose, perhaps pausing at the top of the breath to slow yourself down, and then prolonging that exhale. So really exhaling like every single molecule out of your mouth. And in doing so, bring your attention to your belly. Envision the air coming in through the nose, down through the lungs, to the very bottom portions of your lung that resides in the abdomen. Soften your belly so that the abdomen rises with that inhale and then falls flat with the exhale. soft belly in, and then let the body or let the belly flatten or deflate with the exhale. I'm going to give you a few moments to do this on your own. You may find that as you're doing this practice, a thought or a concern bubbles up in the head. This is absolutely normal. because again, our bodies, our minds are scanning for threat. Notice in a nonjudgmental fashion that the thought has come up, and then allow the thought to go by, bringing your attention back to the breath. And finally, you may want to use a mantra like soft belly. So say soft on the inhale, belly on the exhale to remind yourself of the intention of this practice. And I'm going to give you two minutes to do this on your own. Now keep your eyes closed, keep breathing, and we're gonna move into a body scan meditation. And in this practice, we bring our attention to the body and bring some sense of ease and relaxation from top to bottom. So first I want you to bring your attention to the top of the forehead, actively relax or drop your eyebrows, and relax your forehead. Relax the facial muscles. Imagine that you're allowing your facial muscles to melt. Relax your jaw, where we tend to hold a lot of tension. You may want to even slightly open the jaw, releasing tension in that area, and keep breathing. Bring that sense of ease and relaxation down through the neck, down through the shoulders. Drop your shoulders down. You may even want to shrug your shoulders up and then drop them. Sometimes we're unaware of all the tension that we're holding in that area. Bring that sense of ease and relaxation down your biceps, your triceps, down the forearms. down through the palms of your hands and keep breathing. Bring your attention now to the back and imagine that you are relaxing the muscles around each vertebrae of the spine going down one by one by one, all the way down into the pelvic area. Relax the muscles in the pelvic area. Relax the sphincter in that pelvic area. Really let the sit bones sink into the chair and keep breathing. Bring that sense of ease and relaxation down through the legs, the hamstrings and quadriceps. down through the calves and to the feet. Connect to the floor beneath you. Connect to the earth beneath you. And keep breathing. Let's bring our attention to each other and give one more collective breath together in through the nose and out through the mouth. And when you're ready, you can open your eyes. So if any of you have a smart watch or a aura ring, you can go back and look. But even within a few breaths, within the first minute of a breathing practice, You have already activated the vagus nerve, which connects the gut to the heart and to the brain. Almost immediately, the heart rate drops, blood vessels dilate, and the blood pressure drops. That sends a message to the brain, a message of ease and relaxation. It also sends a message to the gut through the vagus nerve. Digestion approves. And when we do this regularly, we can negate the negative effects of chronic stress and improve those symptoms like palpitations and digestive problems, and even remedy reproductive issues. Now, there are always organic reasons for these things, so I don't wanna dismiss medical concerns, but this is one way to try and at least mitigate the stress impact. So I want to do one more practice now. And we're going to do a guided visualization. Now, the brain is really curious and interesting. And for me, as a very medical Western-trained doctor, I found this quite fascinating. Because in our world, we really believe mostly what's concrete and tangible. The reality is though that our brains can register things that are not concrete, that are not even real to the same degree as something that is real and before it. So what I mean by that is that when we visualize or envision something, The brain does not discern whether we are seeing it for real or whether we are imagining it or pretending that we are seeing it. It has the same effect. Even in rehearsing, so if speakers will rehearse in their minds, athletes will rehearse in their minds, And they've shown that you can even increase the strength of muscle fibers by really visualizing your muscle strength while you're exercising. It's fascinating. So what we're going to do today is we're going to do a visualization practice that's going to give us a sense of ease. And so once again, I want you to get comfortable in your chair and to bring your forehead down. and to close your eyes. And for those people who will be listening to this audio recording on the Health Byte podcast later, I hope you're pulling to the side of the road if you're driving. Let's take a couple breaths just to get our heads back into this intentional space. And now I want you to envision that we are going for a walk. We are walking towards an orchard. You see in front of you a vast, green, expansive space. In it are many, many trees. They have really sturdy, thick trunks and large green leaves. In those trees, you see bright yellow lemons. And as you walk towards the lemon orchard, you can smell the lemons off the tree. The temperature is temperate. The sun is out. There's a nice slight breeze on your skin. You may even feel a little bit of prickliness as the hairs on your arm stand up. You look up in the sky, you see clear blue sky with beautiful fluffy white clouds. And all of a sudden, a flock of birds pass across the sky. Take in this scene with all of your senses. Sight, smell, touch, maybe even taste, and keep breathing. Across the way, you hear the sound of water. You walk towards the sound and find a waterfall. with a stone bench alongside it. You sit down on that stone bench and you lean back and you feel such a sense of ease and comfort in your entire body. You close your eyes and bring your attention to the sound of the waterfall. It's slow, it's faint, and it's rhythmic. You can also hear the sound of some birds who have now accompanied you and are feeling the warmth of the sun on your face as you lean back in this stone bench. You lift up your sleeves, and bring your hands in front of your legs so that you can take advantage of the warmth of the sun. And I want you to take this experience in as well with all of your senses and keep breathing. And I'm gonna leave you here for just one more minute envisioning the scene. And I invite you to now take your last couple of breaths and bring your attention back to the room. So we spent a total of, I believe, five or so minutes on the breathing and the body scan, and perhaps another five minutes or so on the visualization practice. These are things that you can take home with you and you can do every day, multiple times a day. You can start a practice of waking up with a visualization. You can start a practice of breathing before bedtime. Or you can do what I do and just take it wherever you can. between patients in the office, in the car before coming home to the family, just a little moment of reset to bring yourself back to the present and to regulate your nervous system. Many times when I tell patients or when I'm speaking at corporations, I ask, you know, CEOs and professionals to engage in these practices, people will say one of two things. either that it seems too indulgent to take this time or that they don't have the time. And so what I wanna remind you is that, again, our bodies and our nervous system is wired for reactivity. And in the current climate, there's a lot of reasons to be reactive. When we become reactive, we don't only impact our own health and wellbeing in the many ways that I've already discussed, but then we are more reactive with the people around us. We're more reactive with our husbands or our wives or our partners who then go and become more reactive to their coworkers and employees. We become more reactive with our children who then go to school and become more reactive and exert that or discharge that reactivity on their peers. When we are reactive and we treat the barista at Starbucks in a way that is not palatable, she too will go on and react with every one of her customers in a negative way. The corollary to that is that when we have capacity over our own nervous system, our own feelings and emotions, and our reactive response, and we treat that barista with kindness, And then she goes on to treat all of her customers with kindness, who then go on to treat their spouses or partners and children with greater kindness and less reactivity. These practices really have the power of transforming not only our personal lives, but also transforming the world around us. And I think our world could use that transformation right now. So in our last minute or so, I'm going to ask each of you one by one to, again, unmute yourselves and to share one word for your intention going forward in the day and one for how you're feeling in this present moment. And I'm going to start with Susan.

SPEAKER_03:

My intention for the day is to be relaxed and not push myself because it's because of this and because it's Shabbat, and I'm going to actually honor Shabbat and give myself that break. And I'm feeling more calm and relaxed and centered.

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Wonderful. Sabrina.

SPEAKER_06:

to hold on to the sense of calm. And I'm spending a lot of time today with different friends and family and to just really soak in the connection and really just hold the joy that I get from being with the people I love.

SPEAKER_11:

I love that. Amy? My intention is to incorporate these practices and more into my daily life which brings me back to my first intention of balance. And I'm feeling a greater sense of ease with my pair of sympathetics kicking in and a greater sense of community with you all.

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Beautiful.

SPEAKER_09:

Leanne. My intention is to be more patient with myself and with others and to be more in and I feel right now more intentional, which is more present, or at least I correlate that with presence.

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Yes, that correlation is certainly there. Thank you. Lila.

SPEAKER_01:

My intention is to take these two practices that you just taught us and to teach it to my family. and really pass this kindness that you're talking about to other people and because it's so true what you're I mean I feel it when you come to the cashier at Ralph's that's been working hard all day and you just smile to them back and you say how was your day and just these two words makes them so happy I'm gonna practice that more. That's my intention, to practice what you just taught us and to teach it to my family, my kids and my husband right now, after we're done with the Zoom.

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Beautiful. And your feeling, one word to describe how you're feeling right now?

SPEAKER_01:

Very calm.

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Wonderful. Wonderful.

SPEAKER_10:

Patty? I'm feeling very present. And I think a lot of that was put the phone away, just take this time. So I'm really feeling the effects of that. And my intention is to just be more present, I guess, and be more intentional with whatever I'm doing, wherever I am and whoever I'm interacting with. Yes, I love that.

SPEAKER_07:

Emily? My intention today is to kind of piece my life and my apartment back together after evacuation. And I am feeling a little calm and a little sense of relief right now.

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Wonderful. I'm glad to hear that. And Gloria.

SPEAKER_08:

My intention is to stay grounded and connected, and I'm feeling very relaxed. And I'm also feeling very thankful to have shared this time with this amazing group of people. Thank you.

Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Wonderful. Well, I thank you ladies for joining me. I too needed it this morning. And to remind you again, that these are very simple practices that you can take to yourselves, to your families, naming, breathing and guided visualization. And I do, I offer many offerings on the podcast. This will be recorded if you want to listen to it again on the Health Byte podcast that will come out on Monday. And who knows, maybe we'll make this a monthly ritual. Let me know. Okay, have a wonderful day. And thank you again for joining me. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00:

Bye everyone.