Gloria Park is a senior Mind-Body scientist with
the Human Performance Resource Center and Dr. Park is going to
describe for us the effects of anxiety on our bodies.
Hi my name is Gloria.
Karen asked me to talk a little bit about anxiety.
And just to give you a background on what my experience with anxiety is,
I was a professional athlete growing up and I now work
as a expert in sport and performance psychology working with service members,
athletes, parents, anyone who wants to boost their resilience by learning
to have some more control over the different factors that influence performance.
Now we're going to try a skill of deliberate breathing.
So as I said, I was a competitive athlete,
and one of the skills that really helped me to take the edge off a little bit in
those moments where I was feeling a lot of
anxiety so that I can feel composed and at my best,
was the skill called deliberate breathing.
And we're going to try it out. So the first step in learning
about deliberate breathing is to become aware of how you're currently breathing.
So go ahead and put your hand on your heart and put your hand on your belly.
Take a couple of breaths as you normally would.
And note for yourself,
whether the hand on your heart or the hand on your belly tends to move up and down more.
If you're like most of us,
your hand on your chest is probably going to
be moving more because that's how we've learned to breathe.
What deliberate breathing is going to help you do is to breathe from
your belly and by breathing from your belly you're
bringing in all that oxygen to help restore energy to balance out the fight or
flight and you're learning to have
control over your breath in a way that's going to help you manage your anxiety.
So let's try it out. So wherever you are,
at your desk, in a chair,
get into a comfortable position.
So put both of your feet on the floor.
You can have your eyes open or have your eyes closed.
And take a few breaths,
if you want you can put your hand back on your chest and back on your belly.
And what we're going for here is you want your belly to
expand like a balloon and when your belly expands like a balloon,
you know that you are taking in the full capacity of your breath.
And when you exhale you want to push all of that air back out and
contract your belly so that you are
pushing out all of that air that you just took back in.
So if you're a visual person,
you can think of that balloon imagery if you think it's going to be helpful to you.
I'm going to help you by counting off cadence a five.
So I'm going to count for five seconds as you inhale,
and count for five more seconds as you exhale and you
can follow along with my voice or if a different count works better for you,
you can go ahead and use what works for you.
So i'm going to count you off and then have you practice for about two minutes.
So let's begin. Inhale two,
three, four, five, exhale two,
three, four, five, inhale two, three, four,
five, exhale two, three,
four, five, continue practicing for two minutes.
Just focus on the sensation of your breath going in and out of
your body for the next two minutes.
So now that you've tried deliberate breathing for a couple of minutes,
take a minute and think about what changed.
Are you feeling calmer?
Do you notice that you might be thinking a little bit clearer?
Deliberate breathing is this great skill that you can practice anywhere you go.
If you live in Washington DC like I do,
I practice it in the car when I'm stuck in traffic.
If you get nervous going to the dentist office,
you can try practicing it in the waiting room as you're waiting for your appointment.
So this is a great portable skill for you to take with
you wherever you are and the more you practice it,
the more control and the more awareness you'll have over how your breath impacts
your ability to deal with anxiety effectively.
My name is Sergeant Nicole McCoy.
I am a sergeant at University of Pennsylvania Police Department.
I've been here since 2002 and a police officer since 1998.
So the resilience training taught me how to go from
supervisors Sergeant McCoy to mommy, which is hard.
I'm here for 10 hours a day with my coworkers and the people that I supervise,
but I have an 8 year old who doesn't care about any of that,
that mommy is the boss at work.
Mommy's mommy.
So I do the deep breathing and I learn to just stop and refocus.
And I- the technique,
some of the techniques I picked up was listening to music.
I have a whole playlist that is kind of inspirational.
So depending on how my day went,
I'll put that on and I'll sing to myself really loudly when no one else can
hear as I drive through the city to go pick her up and when I get there,
I'm a whole fresh new mommy because I owe her the same 100%.
Whereas, in the past,
I noticed I was empty.
I would pick her up and I would be grouchy and I
wasn't a nice person to be around in the afternoon.
So now, I refocus and I rejuvenate myself- I learned,
and I can give her 100% all the time, which she earned.
Karen Reivich, Ph.D.Director of Resilience Training Services
