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Transcription
The speaker welcomes listeners to their first podcast, where they will discuss techniques for living with a calm mind and heart. They share a personal experience of a scary incident on the road and how they used a technique called box breathing to calm themselves down. They explain that box breathing activates the vagus nerve and helps the body relax faster after stress. They guide listeners through a box breathing exercise and suggest practicing it daily for natural stress relief. They also mention that future podcasts will cover topics like anxiety, sleep patterns, and managing life events. The speaker ends by encouraging listeners to share their gratitudes and expressing a desire to connect with them in future episodes. Welcome to Tea with Granny. Some of you may know me as the Therapeutic Coach and I welcome you to my first podcast. Today and future podcasts I'll be commenting on the human experience with techniques on how to live with a quiet heart and a quiet mind. These bite-sized podcasts will provide you with techniques to help you through your day and move towards the best version of you. The format for each podcast will include a short piece of psychotherapeutic education as a pre-frame for each technique, a story, visualisation or hypnotherapy experience for healing and closing with the day's gratitudes. I'm going to begin with a story with something that happened to me this morning. A truck was coming towards me on the wrong side of the road and there was no escape route. This caused me to go into the fight, flight and freeze response. I couldn't fight, I couldn't take flight so I froze. Fortunately the driver swerved and missed me. Lucky escape you may be thinking. Well it was for both of us. The after-effects were predictable though. I was shaking and my heart was racing. My brain went into overdrive with what-if scenarios. However I quickly employed one of the calming techniques, a technique called box breathing which we can practice together today. Some of you may know this technique as 748 breathing and for those of you who practice yoga this will be a familiar exercise but you may not fully appreciate what happens to the body when we practice this type of breath work. So here's an explanation of how this simple technique works. The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in the body and connects your brain to important organs such as the heart, gut and lungs. It influences the digestive function and the heart rate all of which have an impact on our mental health. When we practice box breathing it increases the vagal tone activating the parasympathetic nervous system which means that our body can relax faster after stress and it's the slower out-breath that reduces the heart rate. So let's practice and just see how you respond. So make yourself comfortable, there's no rush. So sitting up with both feet on the floor take a moment to become aware of the air going into your body and the air going out of your body. Just sit quietly for a moment and just be aware of the air in going your body and out of your body. So breathe in and hold and breathe out very very slowly. Breathe in and hold and breathe out very slowly. Breathe in and hold and breathe out slowly. So let's try breathing into the count of seven, holding for four and breathe out for the count of eight. If any of you are finding the seven four eight breathing too challenging you can enjoy the same results by using five two six or a combination that's comfortable for you. Remembering that the out-breath needs to be longer than the in-breath and if we look more into the technique with the in-breath your shoulders should be still not moving up towards your ears and focus on filling up all of your lungs with air all the way to the bottom of your lungs and then try to fill your lungs out to the left and to the right. So let's begin. Breathe in to the count of seven, one two three four five six seven. Hold to the count of four, two three four and breathe out to the count of eight, one two three four five six seven eight. Breathe in to the count of seven, two three four five six seven. Hold to the count of four and breathe out to the count of eight, one two three four five six seven eight. So we'll continue to breathe the seven four eight breathing or whatever combination is good for you and we'll sit quietly together and I'll breathe with you. So so So I recommend you practice this exercise twice daily so it becomes very natural. You will then be able to use this technique spontaneously should you find yourself getting stressed or anxious. The technique will help to slow the heart rate, quiet the emotional part of the brain, the amygdala. You'll find that you're more easily able to respond to a situation instead of reacting from the emotional part of the brain. This means you'll be better placed to make better decisions for yourself and you'll feel more confident and people around you will experience you as a more confident person. There is more information online and free on YouTube should you want to learn more about the polyvagal theory and the research from Dr Stephen Porges. So we're coming to the close of today's podcast. Hope you've enjoyed our time together. Future podcasts will include subjects such as anxiety, poor sleep patterns, managing change and key life events, the stories we tell ourselves and imposter syndrome, fear, shame and guilt and much much more. If there's a subject you'd like me to cover please go to and include your request and I'll include it in future podcasts. So thank you for joining me today. I'm going to end by sharing my gratitude. I met with a friend for coffee this morning and reminisced about the adventures we'd shared in the past. And the birds nested on my balcony this spring so all the little babies are out chattering on the balcony and they will need feeding again. So what's your gratitude for today? You may have one small gratitude or many. If you'd like to share please go to. And you may hear your gratitude mentioned on my next podcast. Your gratitude may help a fellow listener who's struggling. We all need a friend and gratitudes when shared would of course be anonymous. So I hope to meet you on future Tea with Granny podcasts where we can share a cup of tea and experiences. So bye for now.
