MY THREE FAVORITE MENTAL WELLBEING TOOLS

Hi everyone! I hope you all had a great thanksgiving, filled with yummy food, family time and feeling grateFULL! ( lol) With the holidays happening, I wanted to share my favorite tools to help any type of anxiety or panic attack! I know we all are busy, trying to balance work/family/relationships/etc but these three tools below are extremely easy, quick and will have you feeling more calm, grounded and confident in no time!! Enjoy!!

1.) EFT tapping- When I was 14 years old, I started seeing a few different therapists( all throughout High School) I first started with a cognitive behavioral therapist that allowed me to open up, feeling very safe and get to the root of my anxiety. Which I discovered was me having a fear of change. Then, after the cognitive therapist, I saw an EFT specialist. EFT stands for emotional freedom technique! EFT is very powerful because when you start tapping on the side of your hand, collarbone, top of the head, above your eyebrow or under your eye- you take the attention away from your thoughts. You start focusing more on the tapping rhythm. Click on the link below to watch my favorite EFT tapping 101 video! It’s so simple and you can tap in your car, in your office, at home, on a trip or anywhere!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tdk6hX1Hq50&t=575s

2.) Funnel Thinking- My first, cognitive behavioral therapist, as well as my hypnotherapist both taught me about a technique called, funnel thinking! Basically, if you were to imagine a funnel… you think of a wide top then it gets more narrow at the bottom. Imagine you are feeling anxious and want to get to the root of why you are feeling this way? Well, firstly you would start by saying in your head, asking yourself outloud, writing it down on paper or telling someone else, “ Why am I feeling this way?”. That is the most broad, general question one could ask. So, as you get more and more specific, or “narrow” you can eventually get to the root of your stress. Click on the link below to watch my favorite video on funnel thinking and the power of getting to the root of your problems!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRO0jvXo-NQ&t=75s 

3.) EMDR- I recently( within the last two years), came across EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing after realizing that I still had some minor PTSD from my health scare. Truly, a lot of people can suffer from PTSD and not even think that what they went through is “valid” enough to classify as something traumatic. But PTSD isn’t just for army veterans or people who have been raped( something extreme). To sum it up, our brains are very smart beings. Anytime we, as humans, experience something too traumatic to handle, our brain can “block it out” or reprogram itself to avoid feeling that way again or we can develop chronic nightmares, physical pain or intense phobias. EMDR, is a great and simple way to help create new neuropathways in our brain and to almost take the power away from a traumatic event that could still be lingering in our subconscious and controlling our behavior/thoughts. I found EMDR on youtube, where they have free videos that have the bright dot in the middle of the screen and your eyes follow it while the dot moves in certain patterns across the screen. It’s important to remember to keep your eyes focused on the dot! Click below to watch my favorite EMDR video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOghtQKOP2g

Xoxo,

Megan G