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Our new collection of guided relaxations for stress & anxiety relief has just been released on Amazon and iTunes. Listen here:
"Just wanted to drop you guys a note to say thanks for the podcasts. They have been a huge help for myself since I found them earlier this year. I am a delivery driver by trade, and spend a great deal of time alone, so these short bursts of relaxation have been a great leveller."
Duncan - Changingmymind.blogspot.com
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"I have found this podcast so helpful while I am struggling with stress at the moment. You are doing an amazing job helping so many people, and I just wanted to say thank you." Nicky - iTunes
"Thank you so much for broadcasting your advice, this has really taught me to step back and relax. You don't know how much of a help this has been to me you're both remarkabe people." Josh - iTunes
March 3, 2011 in stress and anxiety relief
Wouldn’t it be great if we could conjure up motivation, enthusiasm or confidence at the drop of a hat?
In this podcast Shann talks about a useful little technique, called anchoring, that you can use to store good past experiences and set them off to invoke a positive state in times of need.
Listen here:
Image by Camdiluv ♥ AmmyLynn
February 23, 2011 in stress and anxiety relief 
It’s getting harder to sit quietly. It’s as if we’ve become allergic to space and we have to fill it, with noise, with TV, with food, or with chatter...
But we don’t feel good when we fill in all the gaps. We start to feel unsettled, exhausted by our own minds whose wheels are spinning 24/7. We can’t find peace because we’ve drowned it out for so long we’ve forgotten where to look for it again.
In this podcast, Ananga talks about the benefits of building pockets of peace into your day.
Listen here:
Our Yoga Downloads for Stress and Anxiety Relief - in particular Shann's Letting Go Shavasana
Anxiety Breathing Technique - Silent Witness
Restful Awareness - guided breathing exercise for peace
image by niall_alexander
November 24, 2010 in stress and anxiety relief 
One of the many benefits of hanging out with yogi's is that I've been introduced to the wonderful experience of being able to get myself really calm and quiet.
In this podcast I want to encourage you to experiment with settling yourself down for a few minutes each day and see how relaxed you can get your body.
Once you've settled down and you feel comfortable, try watching your breath. Put one hand on your belly and one hand on your chest and feel your breath come and go.
Feel the change in temperature in your nose between your inhalation and exhalation, and play with making your exhalation a bit longer than your inward breath.
Feel your breath coming into your chest and your belly, and then feel it leave and hear the sound it makes as it comes and goes.
The trick is to get really fascinated with your breath, and although it doesn't sound like such an amazingly interesting thing, the idea is to engage your mind in peaceful withdrawal from external stimulus. To feel calm, your mind needs something to focus on or it's going to start complaining and giving you things to think about that aren't relaxing at all; focusing on your breath is ideal.
By being relaxed and curious while noticing your breath you can lead yourself into a very peaceful and contented state.
Listen to the full podcast here:
When trying to learn any skill the best thing you can do is learn how the skill is practiced by people who are already experts. How do your favorite writers write? How do the best soccer players kick a ball? Find success patterns and replicate them. Skellie
My Anxiety Slayer partner Shann is an expert in using her breath to help her feel relaxed and calm. She's also a first class life coach and yoga teacher, which makes her the perfect person to teach you how to enter into a peaceful state.
Her new audio download Letting Go is in the Anxiety Slayer Store now where you can download your copy instantly for the cost of a cup of coffee...
Download:Anxiety Relief Breathing Technique: Breathing Calm
Article: Breathing Your Way to a Calmer Place
Article: Entering the Moment
September 15, 2010 in stress and anxiety relief 
How many times have you reacted to stress by blurting out a harsh response and escalating the situation? It can be hard not to; if you're already simmering, then any extra little stress is going to provoke a spurt of steam. Sometimes your steam just evaporates into the air, but sometimes it scalds people around you and that's not a good thing. So how can you stop those spontaneous eruptions? One way is to gather a selection of stress relief techniques and play around with them. There are a whole variety of ways to deal with challenges and frustrations, and it feels wonderful to know that you can break old patterns and grow new responses that are truly inline with who you want to be.
It's often helpful, when you want to learn a new skill, to look out for other people who've already mastered it. If you know someone who's able to keep cool, calm and collected no matter what's going on around them watch them! You can look at their posture, and their breathing as well as listen and look out for more obvious signs of how they operate.
If someone's good at handling stress, it usually means they know how to relax. Not only do they know how to relax, but they are relaxed. Their shoulders are not up by their ears, their gestures are smooth, and they have an easy going air about how they do everything. I've met a few people like this and they fascinate me.
This podcast features five of my favourite lessons I learned by observing others who handle stress brilliantly...
Photo by Meredith_Farmer
July 28, 2010 in stress and anxiety relief 
One of the worst things about panic attacks is the feeling that they can happen to you at any time. The reality of the situation is that there tends to be a formula for panic. In the same way that we are taught simple equations at school such as: 2 and 2 equals 4, different events and circumstances can also add up to provoke an anxiety attack.
If we take care of just one of those aspects of the equation, then we can reduce the possibility of x + x equaling an anxiety attack. For example the simple equation of 2+2=4 doesn't work if you change one of those 2s to a 3. One of the most rewarding and empowering things in dealing with panic and anxiety is learning to master it by learning to notice the circumstances that tend to come before an attack then taking steps to change some of those precursors so that you can protect yourself.
Time Travel & Clue Hunting
Whenever you experience an anxiety spike, allow yourself to travel back mentally over the last few hours and see if you can notice what may have built up below the level of your awareness to induce that state of anxiety. It never is as mysterious or as random as it seems, the confusion that comes with anxiety is one of it's symptoms, and the feeling that you are under attack and that you are an hapless victim of circumstance is also one of it's symptoms. It's not your fault, it's simply that anxiety messes with your head and your nervous system so much that it's hard to see the wood from the trees.
So firstly just start noticing - when anxiety peaks, what was going on before that peak? Were you under any additional stress? Were you feeling particularly tired? Hungry? Were you alone or with someone else? Were you in a new situation? What kind of mood were you in - think back. Were you already beginning to feel a little bit anxious? Were you feeling sad, excited, irritated? Had you had a quarrel with someone? What was your body temperature like? Were you restless or calm? Had you had caffeine or sugar just before your anxiety spiked? Or can you think of any other circumstances that might have caused an increase in your stress levels - below the surface, below your conscious awareness, but that could have contributed to a state of anxiety?
Start watching yourself and monitoring any time you experience an increase in anxiety level, by doing this you can look into altering the circumstances of your daily life in a direction that supports you and reduces the odds of anxiety increasing. It can be overwhelming to try and tackle this alone and to try and change everything, so to begin with just try to look out for definite triggers.
Sometimes our bodies can manifest the subtlest physical sensation that the mind will begin to worry over and interpret as the beginning of an anxiety attack. For example a dry mouth, keeping water with you to sip regularly stops that dry sensation from occurring. Otherwise this sensation can trigger the mind to manifest other symptoms too. Carry some gum or boiled sweets, if your mouth is relaxed and not experiencing dryness then that's one symptom of anxiety taken care of that you mind can start to worry over.
For myself, when I used to suffer panic attacks in my teenage years I used to get really hot, and for years afterwards if I felt hot I would feel that niggling beginning of an anxiety sensation - sometimes I still do. I don't suffer from anxiety attacks any more, but the nearest I'll come to one is if I feel over hot and contained, and I'll have to immediately tell myself, "you haven't had a panic attack for years, you're just hot and your mind is making that connection because it got so sensitised by that before", and then I just have to take a few deep breaths, calm down and cool down and it's over in seconds. I can preoccupy my mind and get on with what I need to be doing.
Begin to develop awareness of the things in your day that may add up to increasing your anxiety and seeing which ones you can change, start with the easy ones. If heat begins to provoke anxiety feelings for you too, carry a fan, carry a cool drink, carry some lavender spray or some rose water - something pleasant and refreshing that you can use to counteract the feelings of heat.
Sometimes people feel anxious after their heart begins to race due to exertion, they may not even be in a stressful situation. I know of people who engaged in heavy digging or lifting can begin to feel panicky because their heart races and their breathing becomes short, and their mind latches onto that and thinks, "this is what happens when I feel anxious", but at that time they were not anxious, they were just doing something that made the heart go faster and their breathing rate increase, and the mind latched on to it.
By knowing yourself you can understand - this doesn't have to be a panic attack, I was just puffed out because I was doing this, so you sit down, take some deep breaths, take a drink and allow yourself to recover, your heart to slow down, your breathing to slow down. It's a very comforting feeling to be able to sort those things out, to be able to discriminate between physical symptoms that might feel like anxiety but aren't.
The more you notice and begin to adjust, the more you can gain mastery over anxiety states. Even by just committing every day to sitting down and practising some slow deep gentle breathing, just for five minutes you can begin to teach your nervous system it doesn't need to be on red alert all the time. You can use your intelligence and awareness to step above your mind and tell it, "I'm taking control of this, you can begin to calm down now because I'm changing my anxiety equation and learning to do things differently".
photo by *Zara
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