People are often amazed at how quickly their physiology can change from a meditation technique. Continue reading Physiologic Changes with Meditation
All posts by JPA
Breathing for Recovery from Stress
The following instructions are to help with stress and are not meant as treatment for any medical conditions. If you have any discomfort from any technique then stop using it.
Recovery breathing maintains our reserves.
Stress tends to wear us down physically and emotionally. In the model of stress that I use, this comes from our reserves being depleted. When our reserves are depleted we feel physically exhausted or emotionally drained. Even thinking about doing something can feel too much for us.
We need to maintain our reserves no matter what type of stress we are dealing with. Breathing techniques can help us do that.
We can optimize the rate we recover from stress by developing three aspects of breathing. These are
- Enjoying the breath
- Pacing the breath
- Deepening the breath
Unease and Emotions I
In this post I will describe unease, one of the components of stress. I will explain how unease is related to emotions. I will also give an example of a meditation technique to reduce the effect of unease on our nervous system. An audio version of the text is below. A meditation track is at the end of the post.
Tibetan Bowl Sounds
I have a Tibetan bowl that many people have found quite relaxing. However, not all people like the same pitch. This post links to a page that has a number of differently pitched Tibetan bowl sounds. Each link on the page will take you to a 5 min track of a Tibetan bowl at a different pitch. Find one you like and relax.
One purpose of these Tibetan bowl tracks, the paced breathing tracks, and any of the relaxation tracks you can find on this site is to help you relax and recover from stress.
Another equally important function is that they should help you disengage your attention from useless focusing on what is making you uneasy and enable you to shift your attention to what may reduce your difficulty. More on this in a couple of days.
Paced Breathing for Brief Relaxation
Our parasympathetic nervous system helps us recover from stress. When we breathe at a slow pace, generally between 5 and 7 breaths per minute for adults, our physiology shifts into a recovery state in which natural restorative processes become more active. This is associated with activation of the parasympathetic nervous system and it will occur within a few seconds of beginning that breathing pattern.
The link below points to a page with a series of videos that you can use to breathe with. Pick a pace and breathe with it. If a particular pace does not feel soothing then try a different pace. You are looking for a breathing pace that feels effortless and soothing. Your body should settle into it effortlessly. Most people like a pace between 5 and 7 breaths per minute. Continue reading Paced Breathing for Brief Relaxation
Guided Meditation for Peaceful State
This is a guided meditation that uses vocals mixed with nature sounds. The intention is to help you experience a peaceful state of mind and body.
This track was mixed to be listened to on headphones for the best experience.
This meditation uses several nature sounds tracks that are licensed from Karl Hamilton at www.naturesounds.ca
The tracks used are
- Wind in Pines
- Forest Stream
- Relaxation Brook
- Silver Falls
- Broad-Winged Hawk
You can find these and many other excellent nature recordings at his site.
Interview on Stress
I was interviewed by Teemu Karppinen for his Finnish program Successful Mind after my colleague Judith. Here is my interview.
I did like the answer I came up with for his question toward the end of the show on how I would define a successful mind.
Dr. Judith Andersen speaking about stress
Here is a video of my colleague Dr. Judith Andersen being interviewed for a Finnish show, Successful Mind, hosted by Teemu Karppinen. We were in Finland working on a stress-management program with Dr. Harri Gustafsberg. Judith and Harri created a successful program to reduce use-of-force errors by police officers, the International Performance Resilience and Efficiency Program.
Some Interesting Ideas on Pain and Dealing with It.
I wanted to let visitors know about a site by Kevin Cuccaro, D.O.
Dr. Kevin has some extremely important ideas about pain and how to deal with it effectively.
His blog is Straight Shot Health
He also has a free class on ways of thinking about pain that can be transformative at The Pain Class
The free class is can be understood without having a medical background.
I see stress as being a factor in the experience of pain and am working on how the model of stress I use will work with his model of pain. I’ll post more as I make progress on that.
Research Article Published – Finally
After months of work the research article I was working on has been published in Frontiers in Psychiatry. The article describes a new model for stress by breaking stress down into several components. These components are:
- Difficulty
- Unease
- Sympathetic Activation (SMP)
- Parasympathetic Activation (PMP)
- Reserves
These components affect how we experience the world and how we respond to it. Unease has more influence and so learning to modulate unease is the most important part of dealing with stress.
The article is free to read and the link is
Site Revision in Spring 2019
I have not posted here for awhile because I am working on a couple of research articles, as well as developing apps and a training program. Those have been absorbing all the time and energy I have to spare and will continue to do so for the next couple of months.
After those projects are completed this site will be redone to include new material and to make it more organized. Thanks for your patience.
Article Publication
Our team’s work was just published. We showed that errors in high-stress situations can be reduced by using techniques to increase parasympathetic activity under stress.
Reducing Lethal Forces Errors by Modulating Police Physiology
Short Paced Breathing Videos
Stress and Resilience v1
I had taken this video down because I have some important revisions to make, however I received a few requests from people who wanted to review it. So I am reposting it. I hope to get the revisions done by next month.
Stress and Resilience
The video here introduces a model of stress, strain, and resilience. It breaks stress down into three components, pressure, strain and feeling, and the processes from which those components arise, assessment, activation and appraisal. It then introduces some methods for developing resilience. Continue reading Stress and Resilience v1
Changing Habits 3
This is a summary of what we covered in the last class on changing habits. I was impressed by how engaged people were and how many ideas they shared. (I apologize for the delay in posting.)
Everyone caught on to the concepts well. We could all see how the various types of stress, i.e. pressure from demands, distress from negative emotions, and strain from sympathetic activation could all make it difficult to change a habit. With this framework people came up with ideas for reducing these different components in order to make developing a healthy habit easier and more successful.
One of the more subtle and more important points that I want to emphasize here is how the feedback between distress from negative emotions and sympathetic activation can be a major source of difficulty.