3 Tools to Reduce Anxiety Using HeartMath

HeartMath is a research-backed system of scientifically validated and practical techniques, tools, and technology that can increase your mental and emotional self-regulation. With HeartMath, you can pick up various tricks that create lasting changes in how you feel by syncing your heart's rhythm into a state of coherence. Coherence happens when your body's autonomic nervous system, with its parasympathetic and sympathetic branches, are in harmony with one another. To get into this state of coherence, we can shift our focus to the physical area of the heart and generate a sincere positive feeling, like gratitude or appreciation. HeartMath has created easy-to-use techniques to help you flip your emotional switch when you need it. Heartmath tools can help reduce anxiety as well as transform ingrained anxious patterns into healthier, baseline ones. When deciding to use these tools, it's important to make at least one of them a practice every day in order to build up new patterns in your brain and body.

The techniques:

1. Notice and Ease

This basic tool helps you place awareness around name what you’re feeling. Once you have some honest awareness that you're feeling anxious, you start to diminish its power over you. Even a bit of ease can help bring a more balanced perspective. You can learn to reduce anxiety or other stressful feelings which helps stop their energy drain.

Step One: Notice and Identify what you're feeling

Step Two: Try to Name the Feeling

Step Three: Tell yourself to ease, as you gently focus on your heart. Relax your breath and ease the stress out.

2. Power of Neutral

This tool helps you learn a simple yet powerful tool for refocusing emotions. This tool teaches you to use the rhythmic power of your heart to bring your mind, emotions and body to a state of neutral which can lessen many anxiety triggers. This tool helps you to clear your mind and see more options with clarity and flexibility.

Step One: Press pause, breathing slowly and deeply. Imagine the air entering and leaving through your heart area.

Step Two: Imagine disengaging from the stress, anxious thoughts, or worry as you focus in on your breathing.

Step Three: Repeat these steps until the emotional charge feels neutralized

3. Attitude Breathing

This tool is designed to help you shift out of an undesirable emotional state and into a more desirable one. Attitude breathing helps you learn to clear and replace less desirable in the middle of feeling stressed or anxious to gain a greater sense of control over the situation and your emotional state.

Step One: Recognize the unwanted attitude or feeling that you want to change. Some feelings or attitudes may be guilt, anxiety, or anger

Step Two: Identify and breath a replacement attitude. Choose a more desirable attitude slowly and casually through your heart area. Do this until you experience a shift, or experience the new feeling.

There are many HeartMath techniques to help clients gain a greater sense of control over their emotions and improve their emotional states. Emily is certified in Trauma-Sensitive HeartMath to help client's build resilience and the capacity for emotional regulation following traumatic experiences.

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