Take a moment to breathe

New Year’s greetings to everyone, far and wide!  May it be a year of peace, health and prosperity for all.

Since the beginning of a new year is usually filed with resolutions– which are really thinly disguised attempts to change habits — I’m going to begin the year with a series of posts on habits.

Habits determine the quality of our lives. And they are fundamental if you want to reduce your stress around taking tests.

Life is made up of habits. Think about it. As you are reading this you are breathing (whether you are aware of your breath or not).  As your eyes take in these words do you know whether you are inhaling or exhaling?  Likely not because breathing is such an automatic habit — so much in the fabric of every moment of life -that most of us lose our awareness, or consciousness of it. Yet, it is the single most important tool we have for calming down and staying in the present. Wouldn’t it be helpful if we could use it to our benefit beyond simply staying alive.

Although everyone is breathing, very few of us have any sustained awareness of our breath.  Why is such an awareness important?  Because along the way each of us has adapted and even changed the fundamental habit of breathing so that it corresponds to our own emotional/mental state. Take a person who, every time she hears the word “TEST,” freezes up. In that moment she is stopping her breath. What’s causing her anxiety?  Surely not the four printed letters T-E-S-T. They are merely pixels on a screen, they are not “making” her anxiety. This person’s anxiety comes from her long-time habit of stopping her breath every time she reads or hears the word “TEST.” Her memories, associations and fears about tests have a stranglehold on the one tool that could really help her: her breath.

Try an experiment:  as you read this sentence, exhale deeply.  Keep going until all the air is out. Good.  Now what happens?  The inhale comes in automatically.  That’s the fundamental habit we come in with it at birth (it’s what kicks off life) and it’s what leaves us at death.  I remember sitting with my dear Aunt Rachel when she lay dying at the age of 105.  Over the course of two weeks I watched and listened to her breath, becoming every more shallow, ever shorter, until finally…. it stopped.

Keep your breath going, and keep your attention on your breath. As you click away from this blog xhale, and then inhale on the next thing you do, whether at your computer or away. Sustain your awareness of your breath in any activity you are doing today and forward:  whether it’s cooking, studying, taking a shower, or working out.  When you realize you’ve lost awareness—we all do, most of the time—bring your attention back to your breath. Exhale. Inhale.  Simple.

That’s your first task: just become more aware of your breath.. In a few days we’ll get into the next step of using this basic and most profound tool to our benefit.

OK. Get ready to click away from this blog.  Ready? Exhale.  See you in a few days

Are you all tied up?

As I write this I am in south India at an Ayurvedic retreat.  Ayurveda is the oldest system of healing arts known to man. It dates back thousands of years to the writing of the Vedas, or ancient texts.

One of the pillars of this remarkably comprehensive and far-reaching system is to establish and maintain balance of body, mind and spirit. Since this corresponds so directly with the work I do as a stress psychologist I want to take a moment, at year’s end, review this foundational aspect of good health.  Let’s start out with 

thinking of yourself as a team of three players.  They are called your body, your mind and your spirit. Your body is easy to recognize: it’s your blood and guts, flesh and bones.  Mind is a big word and harder to define. Let’s limit our understanding of “mind” right now to the part of you that comments on yourself (“I’m OK, I’m terrible, I can do this, I’ll never get anything right”). Spirit is the most elusive of the three, yet it is, on our “team of 3”, a player of equal importance. Let’s view spirit as the force that defines your goals and drives you to achieve them.

The model for balance

For an easy visual, consider your team of three like a 3-legged stool: one leg each for body, mind and spirit. When all three legs are equally strong the stool is a sturdy, dependable platform (elephants stand on it at the circus!). But when one of the legs is weak or shorter there is instability and inequilibrium. Not only does the platform give way, but a “shortness” in one leg will effect the other two.  If you are feverish (body), chances are you won’t be able to think straight (mind), and you won’t have much oomph to do anything (spirit).  To function as a winning team you need all three players to be in top form:  strong, robust and cooperating.

Of the three legs, the one we tend to undervalue and pay least attention to is our spirit.  There are two basic reasons for this: we can’t see it, and we negatively associate it with “religion.”  Both reasons are based on faulty premises. Briefly, what I mean is this: over several hundred years, western science has done a good job of convincing us that what we can’t see is not real; and a common belief is that religion is nothing more than a set of rules to which one becomes a mindless slave.

While this is neither the time nor place for a complicated discourse (“It’s New Year’s Eve, Dr. B!), I’d recommend we consider making a new year’s resolution to pay more attention to our spirit. That means taking time to reflect, to quiet down, to meditate and to consider where we are really going with our lives and where we want to go.  It’s easy to get all tied up, but that always leads to imbalance, discomfort and ultimately disease.  Without spirit we would be robots. So if you’re feeling robotic about your life it’s a sure sign that your spirit needs to be rejuvenated.

The word “spirit,” after all, comes from the Latin inspirare, which also means to breathe. When we breathe, the circle is complete: our body relaxes, our mind calms down, and our spirit can fulfill its direction, which ultimately is to be a healthy, balanced, giving member of society.

Christmas and Hanukah celebrate light:  Jesus, the light of the world, and the Hanukah, the eternal light in the holy temple.

What does this light mean to us?  It is the light of our spirit, the sustaining force that gives us each the illumination and power to clear the darkness within, to light up the path and kindle the energy (fire) to power us through.

When we are anxious, fearful and tense our world is dark.  We crouch down in a corner, afraid. This often happens before or during a test:  we constantly think,  “How will I get through this? I’ll never make it.” In such moments we can’t see our own light.

But remember the expression, “the light at the end of the tunnel”?   Light is always here.  Put your focus on that. Remember also that you have come through difficult, dark, challenging times before.  That strength, courage and determination you had before have not left you. They are shining bright within you.

Close your eyes and see the light inside of you. See it spreading and creating a circle that encompasses you and any test you are facing.  See yourself, in the light, facing the test with strength and resolve.

Now, open your eyes, and see it with open eyes. Take action.

You need some energy to perform well

Today’s question is:  How do I get rid of my anxiety before an exam?

Answer: You don’t get “rid” of anxiety. A little bit of anxiety has been shown (in over a hundred years of research) to be a good thing. Remember the “Yerkes-Dodson curve” (see illustration).  Yerkes and Dodson were two psychologists who showed, at the beginning of the 20th century, that there’s a direct relationship between stress and performance. Too much or too little stress and performance suffers. You need just the right amount of stress to perform well. The trouble is students think that their “anxiety” before an exam is a bad thing. Yes, it is, when it incapacitates you. In other words, when it’s too high.But if you think about it as “energy” you need some to give you the boost to get you launched. Think about those big spacecraft — the rockets are fired and the energy propels the rocket into space. The big hulking parts of the spacecraft fall away eventually and the small capsule does its thing once it is out of the earth’s gravitational pull. You are just like that before an exam. Your jets are fired, you are ready to launch. Don’t confuse anxiety with energy.  If you are truly anxious and you are not remembering things, you are doubting yourself, you are distracted and you are physically tense, then you’re going to slide quickly to the right side of the graph. You are unable to perform the way you ought to be.  Too much stress = poor performance. Use the tools in the book. Get yourself back on track. Learn to become calm, confident and focused.

Tell us your stories and send in your questions.

Afraid? Again?

I’ve recently started coaching three very different people who have exactly the same issue with tests: they’re all afraid of failing.  To be accurate, they’re all afraid of failing again.

Each of them (a high school, college and graduate student) had a bad experience in the past with a test—one didn’t finish in time, one didn’t get the score she wanted and one actually failed.  I’m using the word “bad experience” instead of “failure.”  While every one of us has had a bad experience with a test none of us is a failure because of it.

Following what I wrote in my last post: when you have a bad experience you have two choices with how you are going to hold that experience.  Choice #1: You say to yourself, “Oh, no,  it happened before and it’s going to happen again. For sure. No way I’m going to succeed.”; Choice #2: You say to yourself, “Yes, I did have a bad experience, but  I learned from that experience and what I learned is actually going to help me do better this time.”

So why do so many people – certainly the ones I see in my practice—so readily adopt choice #1?  I think it’s a combination of  things. The “bad” past experience was painful. No one wants to score low, not be able to finish or actually not passing the test, but sometimes these things do happen and the bottom line—and please read this carefully – is that we are meant to learn from all our experiences.  ‘Learn’ means: what did that experience teach me that will help me the next time around?  As soon as we start to uncover the answer to that question, the more quickly and determinedly we can move ahead.

So here’s my challenge to you: think of of a time when you did not do well on a test. What did you learn from that that you can apply to the next time you take that test, or any other test?

I’m going to provide you with some common responses to that question, but first I’d like you to do the work and answer that question for yourself.

In part 3 of this series of posts I’ll not only answer the question, but show you how we can get through previously traumatic experiences in a new, better, and much more fulfilling way.

Do you really have to be so frightened every time?

When I was a young child — 9 years old to be exact– my parents sent me on a plane, alone, to visit my beloved aunt in Florida. It was exciting to travel by myself and I was treated royally by the flight crew.

Somewhere along the way the plane got into a big storm and started bouncing around terribly. This was in the days of prop planes, much smaller than the ones today and much more vulnerable to bad weather. The turbulence got worse and worse and the plane was now getting thrown around in the sky, People started screaming. I was so scared. My aunt said that when I got off the plane in Miami and ran into her arms she saw that I had bitten clear through my bottom lip.

This event had a terrible effect on me for years every time I went into an airplane . For days before the flight the scare built and built and by the day of the flight I was invariably nearly petrified. All through every flight I clutched onto the arm rests and if there was even a slight jarring of the plane in the air I completely froze.

Once, when I was returning to college from a holiday break, my father drove me to the airport. I never told anyone how scared I was of flying, but, for some reason on this drive to the airport I couldn’t hold it in anymore and I confided in my dad. He was a psychologist. He said, “You know, every time you have to fly you get so scared, but then the plane ride is fine. In your mind you have come to believe that in order for it to turn out fine you have to be so scared before the ride and during it.”

I thought about what he said and I calmed down. Yes, I had a terrible experience as a child. And he was right, somehow I had it wired up that in order to get through the ordeal of flying I had to be so scared– just as I was as a 9 year old. But do I really need to keep that going every time I travel by plane?  Is it really necessary to tie myself into knots in order to get through every flight fine and okay? Do I have to make every flight such an ordeal.  Clearly, no.

So what does this have to do with tests, testing, and test anxiety?

Think about it.  And stay tuned for part 2!

Richard Wyne and Nora

At the Apple store in Seattle I got into an interesting conversation with Richard Wyne, from Whistler, B.C., Canada. Richard is the head of a company called Polar Solutions, which is in the business of disaster management and emergency preparedness.  They save people’s lives. Talk about stress and performance!. Locating and saving a person trapped in a building, or under an avalanche of snow requires the epitome of being calm, confident and focused.  I met Richard with his trusted partner, Nora, a Senior Avalanche Rescue Dog (German Shepard, Border Collie X). I would love to see them in action.  If your job requires you to keep stress at an optimal level let us know what it is.  I’d love to see Richard and Nora in action (check out their website), and the necessity for them to remain calm,confident and focused. Richard was interested in The Workbook for Test Success, and I look forward to sharing ideas an experiences with him, and with you. Tell us about your stress-related work.

There was a time when I was afraid to ask a taxi driver to turn the radio down or off (“It’s their cab!”). But I got over that: why be afraid to ask?  So I did, and I do, and for the most part taxi drivers comply, though a few give me the “I’d rather not” vibe.

This driver turned the radio off. The cab was quiet. I settled back in the seat and let go of the day’s cares.

The morale: do what you can to achieve the quiet you need.

And if the driver had said “No!”?   Well, there’s always another taxi. I look at it as a learning moment. A moment to build confidence. A moment to turn away from the mental chatter that disconnects me from my spirit.

What can I learn?

Finding myself all worked up about not hearing back from a colleague in response to an email I’d sent a week ago, I started feeling disregarded, marginalized and unimportant. In a word, “angry.”   My wife and I talked about this situation at length and concluded the best thing to do was to face the situation directly: talk to the person I’d sent the email to and find out “wassup?”  Even though I don’t like fault-finding and placing blame, I found myself finding all kinds of things wrong with the other person (“What’s the matter with them? It’s rude not to answer emails!”).

As I considered the situation in a more methodical and detached manner I felt more settled in my breath. in another word. I calmed down. then a thought came, ” I’ll check to see when I sent my email out.” Made sense, right?

So I searched through my “Sent” folder and, after considerable hunting I discovered there was no record that I’d sent out that email!  I stayed cool. I moved on to the next logical action. I switched over to the “Drafts” folder and there it was– still sitting, on my computer.

Whoops!  I had made a mistake. I had gotten all worked up about someone else for something I had done, or not done. I took up a lot of mental and emotional hard drive all because I made an error.

So what did I do next? I quickly sent an email of apology, and I learned something from my wife. When she sends out an email she routinely checks, right away, if it went out or not. At first I thought, “Oh, I don’t have time for that!”  But on reflection, aren’t I taking up a lot more time, and energy, over my own mistakes that could have been avoided?

Think about it. What was your last “mistake”? Did you stay calm? What did you learn from it?

Take the time...

I was on my bicycle yesterday and I came to an intersection with a red light.

Before being hit by the taxi, when I was biking around town I would routinely sail through red lights and stop signs if I didn’t see anyone coming (well, full disclosure: even if I saw someone coming, if I judged I could sail through the intersection before they got there, I would).  Post-taxi, I honor every red light and stop sign.

So here I am, facing a red light, at a completely quiet intersection, no one coming in any direction.  The light says “Stop!”, and stop I do. Suddenly, I feel

something racing inside and an impatient voice  saying, “But I have to get to my meeting! (grumble, grumble)  This red light is holding me up! ” (more grumbling).

Then came the new, unexpected switch. The “little voice” said, “Why not treat this as a pause – an opportunity to rest, to breathe, to take in what’s around you?” In short, to be in the moment– to be present. So I sat on my bike, I took a deep breath, and with that took in the surrounding sounds, sights and smells. I had a moment of rest and inner peace.

Next time something tells you to stop– whether it’s a light, or a sign, or — well, you tell me— treat it as a gift. An opportunity to calm down.   Let me know what you discover.