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Science of the Mind | SP r = √SSxSSy |
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Science of the Mind | SP r = √SSxSSy |
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Rosalind Cartwright, Ph.D., director of the Sleep Research Center at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, wonders how dreams allow our brains to repair our moods. She developed the theory that dreams provide an extension of thought in order for people to solve problems they face in life. This approach allows people to experiment with, and gain insight into potential solutions. Cartwright suggested that if a personally relevant presleep wish is made then the topic is likely to enter into dreams.
Cartwright suspects that dreams are part of the mind’s emotional thermostat, regulating moods while the brain is offline. She believes that dreams can be brought under conscious control to help people sleep and feel better. She says, “It’s your dream. . . . If you don’t like it, change it.” The limbic system [emotions] is especially active, while the prefrontal cortex [intellect and reasoning] is relatively quiet. This finding suggests that in their dreams, people are working through negative feelings generated during the day but not thought about at the time.
She says you should identify what is upsetting about the dream as soon as you awake. Then visualize how you would like the dream to end instead. Cartwright, a therapist who specializes in dreaming, suggests that people learn to take control of their dreams, changing bad dreams into good dreams through visualization.
Certain of life's difficulties so engage psychological survival that that they are selected for REM sleep processing. In the ordinary course of events, depending on the individual's personality, the themes of dreams may be freewheeling. Moreover, when joined with the intrinsic part of REM sleep processing, the dream's statement may be rather obscure. Some of the more common difficulties of life which appear in dreams are described below.
Anxiety
Many psychologists believe that the perpetually anxious are more likely to interpret an ambiguous statement in a threatening way. Two University of Western Australia psychologists devised a way to test the idea. They had subjects read sentences that appeared sequentially on a computer screen. After seeing and understanding each sentence, subjects pressed a button to blank the screen and display a new, related sentence.
The volunteers thought the study was a test of text comprehension. But investigators were really measuring the interval between button pushes. They reasoned that if a subject interpreted an ambiguous sentence in a threatening way, the follow-up sentence would make less sense. The student, presumably, would linger while trying to make sense of the apparent non sequitur.
Colin MacLeod, Ph.D., and Ilan Lawrence Cohen, Ph.D., note that we constantly interpret others' words and actions. A half-smile, after all, can indicate mild amusement—or derision. The anxious, it seems, tend to assume the worst, and that can only make them more anxious.
Chatterjee
Panic Attacks
Panic attacks can be both bewildering and terrifying, but they're not unusual. An estimated 2.4 million people experience one every year. It may begin as tightness in the chest, shortness of breath or a galloping heartbeat. Many sufferers believe they are having a heart attack and rush to the emergency room.
The cause of an attack can be unclear, but they often arise in the face of major life changes, such as childbirth or a new job. Attacks may also follow trauma.
Prevalence rates have been on the upswing since the 1950s, although many experts believe what seems like a trend is simply better diagnosis.
More than a feeling of anxiety, a panic attack produces distinctive physical symptoms. Each person experiences panic differently, but most people report intense fear accompanied by bodily sensations that can range from a racing heart to nausea and dizziness. Panic can come on suddenly or slowly and usually lasts no more than 20 minutes at its peak.
Scientists believe panic attacks stem from the brain's "fight or flight" system gone awry, often ignited by stress or a traumatic event. In our high-octane society, that response can kick in with no real threat in sight or after the source of stress is long gone.
Research suggests that chronic panic sufferers may be easily flummoxed by their bodily sensations. Someone vulnerable to panic might interpret a rapid heartbeat as a heart attack. If fear overwhelms her, the symptoms intensify in a vicious cycle.
Panic attacks are so frightening that sufferers will do just about anything to avoid another. That may mean staying away from situations associated with anxiety. Someone who once panicked on an airplane might decide not to fly. But the fear often extends to other settings; the plane phobic might start to dread cars and buses as well.
People with full-blown panic disorder, in which attacks are a frequent problem, feel constantly vulnerable, which forces them to be vigilant.
Only about a third of people who get occasional panic attacks will go on to develop panic disorder. Even though men and women report the attacks with equal frequency, women are twice as likely to get the disorder.
Some scientists think Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) may be linked to panic disorder. Because IBS can be uncomfortable and embarrassing, sufferers dread their next IBS attack and become highly sensitive to their digestive system. When something feels awry, their agitation mounts, causing real stomach upset and pain. Since both panic and IBS symptoms are highly stress-sensitive, sufferers of either condition might find themselves trapped in a feedback loop.
Antidepressant medication may help alleviate panic. However, cognitive-behavioral therapy may work even better; researchers estimate that up to 80 percent of panic sufferers can be helped by psychotherapy alone.
Therapists often treat panic by exposing the patient to feared settings of increasing intensity. Exposure therapy can also include exposure to the physical sensations of panic—spinning clients in circles to make them dizzy, having them inhale carbon dioxide or breathe through a straw or jog to raise their heart rates. Once clients learn that those feelings do not signal impending doom, they can better withstand panic—and eventually prevent it altogether.
Saxbe
Obsessive Rumination
Rumination is a style of thinking in which, like a hamster in a cage, you run in tight circles on a treadmill in your brain. It means obsessing about problems, about a loss, about any kind of a setback or ambiguity without moving past thought into the realm of action.
The trouble with rumination is at least twofold. As you ruminate, you deepen the grooves in the brain, intensifying levels of anxiety and depression. And your problems remain unsolved, and are perhaps even exacerbated by the failure to move on them.
As Dr. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema has shown, the tendency to engage in rumination exposes a huge gender difference in the handling of emotional experience. Simply put, women are predisposed to rumination, largely because they value relationships and thus devote a great deal of time and mental energy to processing the often-ambiguous content of them.
And there they get lost, obsessing about issues without taking action. Men, in general, take the opposite tack. They are given to launching themselves into action without thinking their problems through well enough. As a result, the solutions they attempt are not always directly or efficiently focused on their problems.
When it comes to thinking styles, men and women need to learn from each other.
You can switch between processing and activity modes as often as it takes to make headway on the issues that otherwise bog you down in rumination. If you are moving forward, you're going in the right direction.
McGrath
Joseph E. LeDoux, Director of the Center for the neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety, over two decades has turned an area of research that most neuroscientists were loathe to plumb - the biology of emotion, particularly of fear - into one of neuroscience's most revealing disciplines.
The amygdala, the almond-shaped structure near the center of the brain, has long been considered the seat of emotions (refer to "Limbic System" on this site). His work, and that of others who have built on his platform since the early 1990s, has shown that the amygdala figures heavily in the more complex human spheres of perception, attention and even social relations. As Ralph Adolphs of the California Institute of Technology, an expert on emotion, memory and social cognition, has put it, the amygdala "pervades the organization of thought and behavior at all levels." Growing evidence indicates that the amygdala enhances and directs our perception and attention regarding emotions other than fear, such as pleasure or disgust. It makes key parts of our brains more responsive, as well as "stickier" in forming memories and associations.
By attunning the brain to all manner of threats and pleasures the amygdala helps to confer emotional significance on a wide range of experiences. The amygdala helps to give life meaning.
One implication is that the amygdala may play a leading role in establishing what consciousness researchers call "salience" - choosing which stimuli we prioritize and therefore of what we are conscious. LeDoux is convinced that the amygdala and its subcortical allies, rather than our consciousness, define who we are. "Consciousness may get all the focus," LeDoux notes, "but consciousness is a small part of what the brain does, and it's slave to everything that works beneath it. I don't think that's what produces our selves." Rather, he says, our identities arise from the unique arrays of learned fears, desires, associations and expectations that are ingrained most fundamentally and broadly in our unconscious.
Even if the amygdala is not the fount of human experience, its function is certainly fundamental to a pleasant life. As LeDoux notes, fear and its more persistent cousin, anxiety, "are the root of almost all our emotional disorders." More than half of mental health visits in the U.S. every year are for anxiety or related conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia and depression. Most often anxiety either drives these conditions or makes them unbearable.
Unlike fear, anxiety does not spring from an immediate stimulus; rather it is from our worries or memories, real or imagined. From a leDouxian perspective, one can view anxiety as a mismatch in traffic capacity between pathways from the ancient amygdala (which appeared in animals that evolved eaelier) and the centers of thought, imagination and planning (which humans have so recently developed). LeDoux and others have found many more neural routes running from the amygdala to the cortex than from the cortex to the amygdala. This imbalance may be why our anxieties often control our thoughts, whereas our thoughts have trouble quelling our anxieties. Our imagination easily amplifies and feeds the fears coming from the amygdala and hippocampus, but we cannot send enough controls back to dampen the anxiety. That is why we can seldom calm ourselves by telling ourselves to be calm.
Lately LeDoux has been investigating reconsolidation - the controversial but exciting notion that memories are vulnerable to change, or even erasure, when we recall them. Strengthening the synapses - the junctions between neurons - that hold long-term memories requires protein synthesis, and LeDoux and other researchers have recently found that if this process is disrupted while a long-standing memory is being recalled, the memory can actually be made fleeting.
"The backside of every positive emotion," he says, "is the fear that you'll lose what makes you happy."
"Mastery of Emotions," David Dobbs, Scientific American Mind, Volume 17, Number 1, February/March 2006.
Milton H. Erickson, MD was an American psychiatrist specializing in medical hypnosis and family therapy. He was founding president of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis and a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychopathological Association.
Psychological problems exist precisely because the conscious mind does not know how to initiate psychological experience and behavior change to the degree that one would like. In many such situations there is some capacity for desired patterns of behavior, but they can only be carried out with the help of an unconscious process that takes place on an involuntary level. We can make a conscious effort to remember a forgotten name, for example, but if we cannot do so, we cease trying after a few moments of futile effort. Five minutes later the name may pop up spontaneously within our minds. What has happened? Obviously a search was initiated on a conscious level, but it could only be completed by an unconscious process that continued on its own even after consciousness abandoned its effort.
This process of an unconscious search and an autonomous processing of information is evident in many phenomena of everyday life. According to one folk saying, "The morning is wiser than the evening." After we have slept on a problem, we find the solution comes more easily in the morning. Evidently an unconscious search and problem-solving process has been taking place while the consciousness was at rest. There is evidence that dreaming can be experimental theater of the mind, where questions can be answered and new life possibilities synthesized.
Metaphor and analogy can be something more than artistic devices: They can evoke new patterns and dimensions of consciousness. New meaning developed within the unconscious is brought over to consciousness by means of metaphor (e.g., warm hearted, cold hearted, soft hearted, a stormy relationship).
Research in hemispheric functioning suggests that the effectiveness of these approaches may be in their appeal to the right, or nondominant, hemispheric functioning. While the left, or dominant, hemisphere is proficient in processing verbal communications of an intellectual or abstract nature, the right hemisphere is more adept in processing data of a visuospatial, kinesthetic, imagistic, or mythopoetic nature. Since the right hemisphere is also more closely associated with emotional processes and the body image, the view has developed that it is also responsible for the formation of psychosomatic symptoms. These symptoms are expressions in the language of the right hemisphere. Our use of mythopoetic language may thus be a means communicating directly with the right hemisphere in its own language. Working directly with the unconscious may be a means of communicating directly with the right, or nondominant, hemisphere, which is responsible for psychosomatic symptoms.
Hypnotherapy, Milton H. Erickson and Ernest L. Rossi. Irvington Publishers, 1979. (ISBN 0-8290-0244-7)
Dr. Kenneth R. Pelletier is a Clinical Professor of Medicine, Department of Medicine, at the University of Arizona School of Medicine; and, a Clinical Professor of Medicine in the Department of Family and Community Medicine and in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco (UCSF).
An important function of the unconscious mind is regulation of the autonomic or involuntary physiological functions (i.e., heart rate, blood pressure, brain-wave activity, skin temperature, involuntary muscle contractions, etc.). What is needed is a more harmonious integration of the conscious and the unconscious minds. More precisely, allowing communications between the conscious and unconscious minds.
Inherent in any system of belief is a self-fulfilling prophecy: what is expected is observed, and what is observed confirms the expectations. Any experience occurring outside this cultural, social, and individual matrix is dismissed. One immediate implication of this principle is that when you alter your belief system, you become aware of vast new realms of possibility.
Dialogue with the unconscious allows you to become highly attuned to unconscious symbolism and allows you to interrogate your unconscious to resolve problems and profound internal dilemmas.
Mind as Healer Mind as Slayer, Kenneth R. Pelletier. Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1977. (ISBN 0-440-55592-2)
Memory
The content of dreams reflects aspects of memory consolidation taking place during the different stages of sleep. Dreams reflect a biological process of long-term memory consolidation, serving to strengthen the neural traces of recent events, to integrate these new traces with older memories and previously stored knowledge, and to maintain the stability of existing memory representations in the face of subsequent experience (Winson 1985, 2002, 2004; Kali and Dayan 2004). Dreams can be thought of as windows onto the inner workings of our memory systems, at least those of which we can become conscious. Sleep stages vary across the night: Early sleep is rich in NREM, but late sleep is rich in REM. These stage changes relate to, and are caused by, neurochemical fluctuations during sleep. Sleep has multiple purposes, including analysis of the .residue. of recent experiences, and integration of the outcome of that analysis with previously stored .knowledge.. Dreams reflect activity in brain structures concerned with (a) processing, storing and/or representing recent experiences; and (b) the knowledge an individual has built up over a lifetime of experiences. Dream content reflects which of these brain structures are active. Variations in activity over the course of the night reflect processing, or .memory consolidating,. occurring within different neural systems(refer to "Function of Sleep" on this site).
Payne and Nadel
What is memory consolidation?
As the record of a particular experience moves from working memory through short term memory and into long term memory, the memory trace, or engram (those changes in the brain that code memory), gradually changes from being fragile and easily disrupted to being more stable. This transformation process takes time and has been given the name consolidation.
Many complex functions such as language and social reasoning emerge in the cortex, but I believe there are two key brain functions that are the basis upon which these higher capacities are built. These are memory and emotion - and the interaction between the two. Emotion is a signal that an experience is particularly important when the brain consolidates memory. When you have feelings of fear or joy or love or anger or sadness, these mark your experiences as being particularly meaningful. These are the memories you most need to store and keep safe. These are the ones that are most likely to be relevant in future situations. These are the building blocks that form logic, reasoning, social cognition, and decision making. These are the memories that confer your individuality. And that function, memory indexed by emotion, more than anything else, is what a brain is good for.
The Accidental Mind by David J. Linden
Guided Imagery Or Hypnosis
Hypnosis has been defined many different ways. Many authorities, such as the American Medical Association, explain that hypnosis is an altered state in which the subject is highly suggestible. Others talk about increased access to the subconscious mind, a term which may be objected to as an inaccurate concept. A preferred definition is that hypnosis is a state where a person's critical faculty is bypassed and selective thinking can occur. This was David Elman's definition. There is another definition that is based upon traditional thought as well as recent innovations in mind/body health and neurology. According to this train of thought, hypnosis is the process whereby resistance to change is reduced and selective thought becomes more efficient. It seems that final definition more closely explains why the phenomenon produces results. Note that with this view an altered state may occur. However, it is not a requirement.
So where does guided imagery fit in? First, let's define it. Guided imagery is a process as well. You can use your imagination without assistance - to experience a series of imagined images. This experience may be more than just visual. It may also incorporate sounds, smells, and tastes. The general theme will be your modified dream narrative. The images can be very direct and specific - such as visualizing a successful solution to a problem - or metaphorical - such as visualizing a friend or hero helping you to conquer a perceived threat.
Hypnotherapists are very familiar with guided imagery as they use it frequently during a session. Once they have their subjects to the point that resistance to change has been reduced, which is a byproduct of the induction step, then they may eloquently use guided imagery to suggest alternatives. Then they may choose to add specific and direct suggestions such as dream rehearsal. So what is the difference between the two? To many people it is merely a matter of semantics.
Tim Brunson
What is Guided Imagery?
A mental image can be defined as .a thought with sensory qualities.. It is something we mentally see, hear, taste, smell, touch, or feel.
The term .guided imagery. refers to a wide variety of techniques, including simple visualization and direct suggestion using imagery, metaphor and story-telling, dream interpretation, drawing, and active imagination where elements of the unconscious are invited to appear as images that can communicate with the conscious mind.
Once considered an .alternative. .or complementary. approach, guided imagery is now finding widespread scientific and public acceptance, and it is being used to teach psychophysiological relaxation, alleviate anxiety and depression, relieve physical and psychological symptoms, overcome health-endangering habits, resolve conflicts, and help patients prepare for surgery and tolerate procedures more comfortably.
Mental images, formed long before we learn to understand and use words, lie at the core of who we think we are, what we believe the world is like, what we feel we deserve, what we think will happen to us, and how motivated we are to take care of ourselves. These images strongly influence our beliefs and attitudes about how we fall ill, and what will help us to get better.
All healing rituals involve manipulation of these images, either overtly or covertly, and thus guided imagery can be considered one of the oldest and most ubiquitous forms of medicine. The healing rituals of various cultures that have persisted over time all have a certain level of clinical efficacy, and while we may attribute these therapeutic benefits to .placebo effects., they have real and measurable effects with important implications for our understanding of the healing process.
Academy for Guided Imagery
So, How Does Dream Therapy Work?
Dream Therapy uses your own personal imagery, as expressed in your dreams; modifies the narrative to neutralize the negative aspects and reenforce the positive aspects as engrams are formed. Knowledge that current experiences are consolidated and integrated into memory during sleep suggests the methods proposed by Dream Therapy. Your relaxed state and focus on your positive imagery (positive dreams are great because all you need to do is rerun them) enables you to be more receptive to suggestion. Perseverance. Slow and steady wins the race. Steadily introducing favorable imagery at sleep onset gives more positive associations for current experiences to make with existing memory. Gradually, your general mood will become elevated and improved in a positive way. Relax and run your dream imagery any time you have an opportunity, but especially before sleep onset. Remember, memory consolidation and integration, during sleep, is the most effective time. Is it necessary to remember your dreams for Dream Therapy to work? No. It is helpful to at least occasionally remember a dream to monitor your progress.
A technique has existed since the 1960s that allows conscious to unconscious communication. Biofeedback is a method long used to treat stress-related disorders. In biofeedback, people see or hear physiological measurements that can indicate stress, such as increases in blood pressure, heart rate, or muscle tension. Receiving such information from monitoring devices makes normally undetectable body functions accessible for conscious regulation. One can realize from listening to one's racing pulse, for example, that one is under strain and then learn to bring one's heart rate down purposely.
For our current endeavor we will use our dreams as feedback from our unconscious and guided imagery or visualization as a means of communication to our unconscious. The dream provides us with the imagery (in its own language) to work with to input or reenforce positive outcomes. A dream that frightens us or makes us uneasy is used through visualization to rewrite the script to make it a positive experience. Dream rehearsal. Before sleep we run our revised script through visualization for a positive outcome.
Let's run a simple thought experiment to demonstrate how this technique works: Imagine that you have a lemon in your hand. Look at it. Feel its texture, see the vividness of its yellow peel. Now, place the lemon on a cutting board and take a knife, holding one end of the lemon and slice through the middle of the lemon with the knife. Notice the lemon oil and juice spritzing as you slice the lemon. Now, raise the lemon slice in your hand and squeeze the lemon half onto your tongue. Notice your taste buds as they react to the sour juice coursing over them. Your salivary glands are activated (by your unconscious mind) and you are salivating profusely.
By using the unconscious mind's own symbolization and revising the dream script (it's your dream and your visualization) you can strengthen the associations for a positive reenforcement.
Let's use the following dream, this might be a typical anxiety dream, as an example of how visualization works:
"I am standing at a window looking at a deserted street. A young girl is rolling a hoop up the street toward a building where a shadow of a person is looming from around the corner of the building across the street from where I am watching. The girl is rolling the hoop toward the corner of the building where the shadow looms."
In the dream I don't see what happens, but it makes me anxious during the dream. In my revised script the shadow emerges from around the corner and it is a friend of mine. The friend smiles and waves to me and the girl continues rolling the hoop around the corner out of sight.
Try making friends of the things in your dreams that make you uncomfortable or frighten you, but failing that you must defeat them. Use friends, family or characters you may have seen in movies or read about to help you. Whatever you do, change the course of your dream to a positive outcome. Use visualization during the day as often as you can but especially at night as you relax while going to sleep. The following are suggestions for learning to use visualization:
Using Imagery
Imagery is the language that the mind uses to communicate with the body. You can't really talk to a wart and say 'Hey, go away,' because that's not the language that the brain uses to communicate with the body. You need to imagine that wart and see it shrinking. Imagery is the biological connection between the mind and body. As we will see, this is extremely useful in mind body healing.
Imagery has five basic ingredients:
Imagery is very powerful and crosses many disciplines. For example, good leaders are visionaries. They can "visualize" potentials and possibilities. They will plan every detail meticulously in their mind before executing. When they do, usually, it will be done flawlessly, because, most of the glitches would have been worked out during the visualization phase.
Most visualization techniques begin with relaxation, followed by summoning up a mental image. In a technique called guided imagery, you visualize a goal you want to achieve, then imagine yourself going through the process of achieving it.
Concentration is very important to achieve great results and be able to actually feel the event that you are imaging. If you lack concentration you will not be able to visualize effectively. Relax, breath deep and then start visualizing.
Thinking. You need to think very deeply on the events that you are imaging. Focus and concentrate to achieve your results. The first time you try it, it might seem weird or difficult to accomplish but just relax and think strongly about what it is that you desire with all your heart.
Visualization is creating a mental picture of something. Visualization is important because it makes the future become more clear. Seeing yourself already achieving your goal makes your brain believe that attaining that goal is possible. Focusing consistently on any given goal will enable you to manifest it far sooner than if you don't focus on it at all. Focus brings the goal closer to you.
Have you attempted visualizing, but find it difficult or impossible? Try this. Pick up a photo and study it closely; then close your eyes and relate what you see. If you see anything resembling the picture, you are visualizing. It's that simple. If this doesn't work, or if you want to improve your visualization skills, take the same picture and while looking at it, close your eyes and open your eyes and close your eyes again. Do this as many times as possible for a few minutes. Soon you'll be seeing the picture, but you won't know if your eyes are open or closed -- and you will be visualizing better than before. Practice this technique often. You can focus on anything: people's faces, pictures, buttons. Get creative and have fun with it. You may have more success visualizing with your eyes open. Some people do.
If you daydream, you have used visualization. Guided imagery is daydreaming with a purpose and a script.
Guided ImageryProgressive Muscle Relaxation
Muscle Groups
You will be working with most all the major muscle groups in your body, but for convenience you will make a systematic progression from your feet upwards. Here is the most popular recommended sequence:
Tension.Relaxation Procedure
Step One: Tension. The process of applying tension to a muscle is essentially the same regardless of which muscle group you are using. First, focus your mind on the muscle group; for example, your right hand. Then inhale and simply squeeze the muscles as hard as you can for about 8 seconds; in the example, this would involve making a tight fist with your hand.
It's important to really feel the tension. Done properly, the tension procedure will cause the muscles to start to shake, and you will feel some pain.
Note. Be careful not to hurt yourself, as compared to feeling mild pain. Contracting the muscles in your feet and your back, especially, can cause serious problems if not done carefully; i.e., gently but deliberately.
Step Two: Releasing the Tension. This is the best part because it is actually pleasurable. After the 8 seconds, just quickly and suddenly let go. Let all the tightness and pain flow out of the muscles as you simultaneously exhale. In the example, this would be imagining tightness and pain flowing out of your hand through your fingertips as you exhale. Feel the muscles relax and become loose and limp, tension flowing away like water out of a faucet. Focus on and notice the difference between tension and relaxation.
Note. The point here is to really focus on the change that occurs as the tension is let go. Do this very deliberately, because you are trying to learn to make some very subtle distinctions between muscular tension and muscular relaxation.
Stay relaxed for about 15 seconds, and then repeat the tension-relaxation cycle. You.ll probably notice more sensations the second time.
Now, take several deep breaths, inhaling slowly and exhaling rapidly (like a sigh).
The Shortened PMR Schedule
In the shortened form of PMR, you will (a) work with summary groups of muscles rather than individual muscle groups, and (b) begin to use cue-controlled relaxation.
The four summary muscle groups are as follows:
Instead of working with just one specific part of your body at a time, focus on the complete group. In Group 1, for example, focus on both legs and feet all at once.
Cue-controlled relaxation. Use the same tension-relaxation procedure as full PMR, but work with the summary groups of muscles. In addition, focus on your breathing during both tension and relaxation. Inhale slowly as you apply and hold the tension. Then, when you let the tension go and exhale, say a cue word to yourself (below). This will help you to associate the cue word with a state of relaxation, so that eventually the cue word alone will produce a relaxed state.
Many people find that cue-controlled relaxation does not have to depend on only one word; it may actually be more helpful in some situations to use a particular phrase. Some suggestions for cue words/phrases are:
Now, take several deep breaths, inhaling slowly and exhaling rapidly (like a sigh).
RelaxationReferences
"Dreaming Up a Good Mood," Camille Chatterjee, Psychology Today, Sep/Oct 99, World Wide Web.
"The Fear of Fear Itself," Darby Saxbe, Psychology Today Magazine, Nov/Dec 2005, World Wide Web.
"The Rumination Rut," Ellen McGrath, Psychology Today, 11 April 2003, World Wide Web.
"Mastery of Emotions," David Dobbs, Scientific American Mind, Volume 17, Number 1, February/March 2006.
Hypnotherapy, Milton H. Erickson and Ernest L. Rossi. Irvington Publishers, 1979. (ISBN 0-8290-0244-7)
Mind as Healer Mind as Slayer, Kenneth R. Pelletier. Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1977. (ISBN 0-440-55592-2)
"Guided Imagery or Visualization," Holistic online.com, World Wide Web.
"Progressive Muscle Relaxation," A Guide to Psychology and Its Practice, World Wide Web.