May 2020
Mental Health Challenge: Practicing Guided Relaxation
Relaxation is a skill, and something that each person needs to practice in order to truly master. Now I can already hear you saying, "but I relax all the time, I don't need to practice how to do that!". While that may be true, what most people do when we are relaxing is practicing passive relaxation. Doing something that we find comforting and soothing so that we can zone out and distract ourselves momentarily from our daily stress. What I want to focus on for this month is more of a purposeful, active, and mindful approach to relaxation. When we are doing guided relaxation exercises, we are focused on the exercise and are actively learning about what your body feels like when it is relaxed. Often by the time our mind is completely relaxed we are no longer paying attention to what being relaxed actually feels like. By practicing guided meditations we train our conscious minds to develop an awareness of what our relaxed bodies feel like. Once we start to understand what it feels like to be in that state, we actually have more control and can help to guide ourselves there when we notice we are starting to get overwhelmed or distressed. If you click on the image above, you will be taken to a guided meditation. I encourage you to try and practice it at least once a day and see if you can start to identify the difference between your body and mind when it is relaxed versus when it is tense and stressed.
Mental Health Tip
Above we talked about becoming more aware of how we feel when we are relaxed. It is also important to begin to identify how our body feels when we are experiencing other emotions. A lot of people nowadays struggle with identifying what they are feeling. This can be for a number of reasons whether they have experienced a trauma and feel disconnected or were never taught about their emotions or were encouraged not to express their emotions. For some people they may also express most of their emotions as anger. Or at least react to most of their emotions like they are angry.
This month I would encouraged you to stop every so often and ask yourself how you are feeling. If you notice yourself consistently feeling angry check in and see if there is something below that anger. Is it possible that anger is covering shame, fear, anxiety, sadness, or some other emotion. You may also notice that you do not know what you are feeling at any given moment. That is ok. Ask yourself then what do you feel in your body. Like relaxation our emotions can be felt in our body and sometimes beginning to identify how our body feels is the first step in understanding what emotion we are experiencing.