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Richard Grant: Hello, my name is Richard Nick Grant. I’m a psychologist, and I’m associated with the Wizard Academy, and I’d like to share with you some methods for dealing with stress. I divide stress and do moderate stress, that we all kind of deal with every day, but also extreme stress. That is sustained stress, that’s inescapable, and we tend to have different responses to it, which are kind of like the opposite of our characteristic way of dealing with things. When we go through an extreme stress response, what are some things to do? One of them is getting some rest. That’s very important. Unplug, get some rest. Do things that are recreational for you, especially that are physically and sensorily engaging. Dig in the earth, smell the earth, plant some flowers, go for a walk, and so forth. If you can’t get away and get outside, imagine that you’re in a place that is enjoyable.
I know people that have gone to one of the greens that Pebble Beach and they can totally imagine being there, and doing a putt, and they feel the ocean spray on their face. They feel the wind on their face, they see the beautiful trimmed grass, and they feel the peacefulness of it. When we have an imagination of a sustained fantasy, that that’s backed up by some kind of vivid experience, we go to our right hemisphere, we go to our right brain, we get out of our left problem-solving brain. That’s why you do an imaginary experience. It’s a way to unplug, and so if there’s ever a contest between willpower and imagination, imagination almost always wins. Try to imagine something vividly. I know people that go to travel magazines, like Conde Nast, or National Geographic, for pictures, and they put pictures up in their cubes, where they’re working or their workplace, some favorite place.
If it gets just really terrible during the work day, or just boring. or in any way stressful, they look at the picture and they’re able to go there. They go to that relaxed area, that restorative area in their right brain. That’s one of the ways to cope with stress. Another is knowing that there are four physiological responses that are antagonistic to muscle tension. Did you know that? There are four things about your body that if you’re experiencing one of these four, you cannot be muscularly tense at the same time. These four are swallowing. You cannot swallow and be muscularly tense at the same time. That may be why people gulp when they’re nervous. It’s relaxation. Also, it’s why people eat and overeat when they’re really anxious about something, but that’s not good stress management because you gain weight, and probably eat a lot of comfort food.
Here’s the second thing, is calisthenic exercises of some kind. That is, here, you increase muscle tension voluntarily, and you pump up your aerobic benefit by getting your heart rate up. Because you increase muscle tension, you get a deepened relaxation effect when the exercise is over. That always works, even for moderate exercise, like 20 minutes of walking is very good for people. You don’t have to go and jog and run if you don’t have cartilage. I know one guy who said, “What do you want? What do you want for your birthday?” I said to him, he said, “Cartilage,” and I say, “If you don’t have cartilage anywhere, you can always walk.” You can go somewhere and so go out and walk vigorously, and you can get that good aerobic effect, and get that relaxation response. That’s the second calisthenic exercise.
The third physiological state in which you can’t be muscularly tense is following sexual intercourse. You just can’t do that everywhere, so I do recommend a fourth area which you can do everywhere, which is deep breathing and controlled exhalation. We teach people who are going into court to do testimony, who are being called upon as witnesses to do this, in order to manage their anxiety where they’re sitting in court waiting to be called on. Believe me, it’s an anxious experience for most people. Here’s the method, and if you’re watching this sitting down, do this with me, okay? The way you do it is you breathe in deeply, by hyperinflating your lungs and diaphragm, breathing in through the nose like this. You’ve got it really hyperinflated, and you hold it for a little bit, and then you do slow release through pursed lips. A little jet of air. A tiny jet of air. The longer the acceleration, the better, the better the effect. We’ll do it one more time without me talking. I could do this for about 20 seconds. Notice if you’re doing this with me, how your head is feeling, how your upper back is feeling.
You are relaxing. You are now passing out. No, not really, but do you notice your head feels a little bit lighter? That’s because CO2 is building up in your system, and that acts as a relaxant. You have to breathe wherever you are so you can be really discrete about breathing in, and deeply, and exhaling through pursed lips a little jet of air. When your mom may have told you, “Well, when you get really nervous, take three deep breaths,” that’s half right. The other half is the control to exhalation, which is a mini form of yoga in terms of controlled breathing, actually increases C02 in your system, and leads to relaxation. You can do that anywhere, and it really works. Okay. One of the other ways to do stress management is to remember what really worked for you as a kid when you were having fun.
The reason for this is that there is a kid side of you still as an adult, sort of a semi-conscious part of you, that’s you’re spontaneous, the emotional side we call the inner child. This inner child, or spontaneously reactive part, knows what’s fun. The kid really does know, and as kids will tell you, this isn’t any fun, right away. So will your inner kid, and so if you remember back to being a kid before you were six, what you did to have fun, go do that as a stress management technique. It can really help. You will access things that are restorative, kid,-like, energetic, imaginative, creative. All that can be made available to you if you engage in those activities. For me, I had a marbles collection. Now I’ve lost my marbles, but I had a marbles collection and I, we played marbles a lot when we were kids, and I collected them and had aggies, and we would call them steelies, ball bearings, and so forth.
It was great fun. It was a lot of fun, playing marbles and if I can remember doing that, that was a lot of fun. I also liked to fish as a kid, and just remembering fishing for a little perch at Encanto Park in Phoenix, Arizona was a wonderful time, and just dropping the line in the water, and seeing the ripple effects go out, and the way the sun played on the water, and the little fish deciding to nibble at the bread ball on my tiny hook or not, and then the feel of the fish pulling that little electric field when it pulls on the line, and then pulling it out. We used to string them up, take them home and clean them up and cook them. It was delicious food. That kind of thing was very stress-reducing if I remember that from my childhood. You undoubtedly have some kind of experiences that you have from your childhood that you can recall. Those are some of the particular physiological things that you can do to do stress management. Now, what I’d like to do in the next presentation is to talk about attitude adjustment. That is internal things that you can do for stress management that in fact are called the four Buddhist practices, that is infinitely expandable, i.e., they get better with practice.