10 Days for Mental Health Free Online Course - Day 6

Today you’ll be trying some techniques to help you cope with feeling fearful.

If we allow fear to enter our lives to an extreme extent it can really take over and make life difficult for us.

When fear takes over, we tend to run away from it. But if you can have the courage to sit with it and breathe through those fearful feelings, you can begin to face down the fears which hold you hostage.

Bear Heart Breathing

Below is a great breathing exercise to try when you’re feeling anxious which will give you the time and space to allow your brain to calm down.

Because if you can try to relax your brain, your fears cannot overwhelm you in quite the same way. It’s a technique used by the Muskogee Creek elder Marcellus 'Bear Heart' Williams who used these breathing techniques every day to keep a calm and peaceful state of mind.

Music for the Soul

One way to get you out of the loop of anxious feelings is to distract yourself. Distracting yourself with beautiful music and images of nature has a profoundly calming effect on the brain which gives you just enough time to stop you from falling into those destructive spirals of fearful thinking.

Classical music is a great to calm you down. If you’re feeling panicky it can take you to another world. If you just listen to each musical instrument in turn and isolate each sound in turn, it can distract your mind away from your fears.

You can read about how a piece of classical music helped LightHearts founder Katya out of a period of depression in our blog post here: How Debussy Helped My Post-Natal Depression.

And below we have a special video clip using the soothing classical piece by composer Vaughn Williams and some beautiful nature photography to focus your eyes on. If both your ears and eyes are occupied by calming images and music, then negative thoughts have a harder time getting through.

Letting go of fear

If you’re feeling brave enough to start confronting your fears, we have a hypnosis session for you to try so you can pinpoint where that fear came from and try and release it from your subconscious.

Often our fears are based on unhelpful untruths that we have held about ourselves or a situation. If we can get to the root of that fear and stand up to it, very often the fear can lose its power. Fear needs our anxious attention to exist. If we face it, it loses its grip on us. Doing these kinds of techniques repeatedly over time will help to lessen that grip until you begin to feel freer and lighter.

So give today’s techniques a good try and we’ll see you tomorrow for Day 7.