If you’d like to learn how to relieve stress and anxiety through a few simple but effective techniques, then you are in the right place. The renowned practitioner of energetic healing, Donna Eden,  shows several  techniques that can calm your emotions in less than a minute. Plus, if you practice these techniqes often, you will contribute to building your long-term emotional resilience.

The Constant Flow of Energy and Emotions

The saying ‘Nothing ever stays the same’ applies to everything, and our emotions are no exception. Since our energy is in a constant flow, emotions are bound to fluctuate as well. Everyone deals with this differently – some people have more natural resilience, while others may become extremely vulnerable. To be able to master emotional control is one of the most valuable skills to have, and the good news is that we can use our own energies to gain more control over our states.

Stress and its Effects

One of the most common causes of feeling bad is stress. It has an ability to impact every single system in your body, and its effects can either be immediate and visible, or gradual and not too obvious in the first stages. It often accumulates over time, and then finally hits us in a form of a physical illness or depression.

Many of us go through our day in the state of emergency response without even realizing it, but the stress keeps building up in our body whether we’re aware of it or now, and it will take its toll on our health eventually.

What Happens in Our Bodies During Stress

When our thoughts about everyday problems take over us, we don’t see what is happening in our body: Up to 80% of the blood leaves our forebrain to provide strength to our muscles to deal with the potential danger, and our bloodstream gets filled with stress chemicals. In that state, our biochemistry is not very different from the one of a Cro-Magnon man facing a wild beast. The advanced cognitive abilities that we have developed become dimmed. As the reactive primitive parts of the brain take over, our ability to respond accordingly to our current evolutional stage is considerably inhibited.

Inner Emergency Triggers

One of the clearest illustrations of this concept is post-traumatic stress disorder; People afflicted with this condition can display extreme, exaggerated reactions to seemingly harmless stimuli. For instance, overhearing someone saying something, seeing something on TV or encountering a certain scent can trigger a traumatic memory. This makes their body think they are facing a mortal threat, and they react accordingly.

But similar, if a less dramatic scenario applies to most of us when we get stressed, anxious or angry. Our body sets in motion all the biochemical emergency procedures which are not really required. However, our body doesn’t distinguish between the real-life threat and something far less endangering, and all these stress processes can have a negative impact on your health.

Rewiring Your Nervous System

The good news is that we can gradually reprogram our autonomic nervous system, so it no longer triggers those extreme stress responses, deeply ingrained in us biologically millions of years ago. By teaching our nervous systems these new tricks, we can keep and even strengthen our health.

This reprogramming can be achieved by teaching our nervous system to keep the blood in the forebrain, which will result in a better ability to think clearly even in the midst of a seeming crisis. And when our brain gets used to these new ways of processing usually stressful impulses, we’ll no longer react impetuously, but we’ll rather respond to the situation by a much more down-to-earth way.

The First Aid Kit for Your Nerves: Holding the Neurovascular Points

All this can be achieved by an incredibly simple energy exercise – holding the neurovascular points on your head while thinking of a stressful situation / disturbing memory, which will cause primitive brain centres to respond in a calm way, rather than as in an emergency. The more you do this exercise, the more you’ll notice that manage that the stress-response cycle is not activated when a certain situation or a memory occurs.

This works because your stress reactions are based more on physical responses rather than psychological. When we hold the neurovascular points, blood flows from the reactive brain up into the prefrontal cortex, where we can solve the issue with more clarity and decrease the emotional reactivity. So rather than blindly react, we’ll be able to respond to an otherwise stressful issue with healthy detachment.

Try in Now

Put your one hand over your forehead and the other one over the back of your head. Take several deep breaths, close your eyes and feel the calm pulse in your hand or on your forehead.

You can also try a variation of this exercise by placing the pads of your fingers on your forehead, covering the two slight indents on your forehead, while your thumbs rest on your temples.

Stay like this for a while, ideally for a few minutes – according to the level of your stress. Doing this will help the blood return your forebrain, and you will realise that you are thinking more clearly and that the painful or disturbing emotion has subsided.

Gaining Long-term Emotional Stability

The more frequently you repeat this exercise, the quicker will your brain understand that it is not necessary to activate the stress-response cycle when that specific thought/memory occurs.

It is comparable to resetting a device to its original factory settings. Your mind will become free of disturbing information written by your life experience. I’d recommend trying this exercise with a number of different stressful memories, thoughts or pressing issues. The brain’s unwanted response to any of these categories will gradually ease out. You’ll soon notice you have acquired much more emotional stability when you experience a stress-triggering situation or a disturbing thought.

Three Techniques with Donna Eden

The renowned teacher of energy medicine,  Donna Eden, and her husband, clinical psychologist David Feinstein, show how we can work with our own energies to release stress and anxiety. Holding the Neurovascular Points is one of those techniques (Donna talks about it from 1:23 onwards.)

David and Donna are also the authors of the book ‘The Healing Power of EFT & Energy Psychology’, where they present a large number of techniques for emotional healing. In his clinical practice, David Feinstein uses Donna Eden’s energy medicine techniques as well as EFT, which stands for ‘Emotional Freedom Techniques’, and consists of tapping on specific meridian points. This technique has been used with tremedous success for all kinds for phobias and traumas. War veterans, for instance, have been succesfully treated using EFT tapping.

The ‘Kettle-Trick’: Energy-Test Yourself

It is very interesting to try the following experiment, based on the method used in energy psychology and kinesiology:

Fill a jug or a tea kettle with water, and try to lift it with your arm straight in front of you. You should be able to raise the kettle in front of your eyes. It should be moderately heavy, to make your muscles work. If it’s too heavy (if you can’t lift it in front of your eyes), pour some water out until it reaches an optimal weight.

Now think about something that makes you feel nice. It could be pleasant memory, or something you’re proud of or grateful for.

Lift the kettle in front of your eyes again. It should be relatively easy.

Now think of something that bother you, stresses you or makes you anxious. Try to lift the kettle again. You’ll notice that your arm gets considerably weaker after the negative thought. This shows the instant effect stress can have on your energy flows. Your energy is not feeding your muscles at its full power while you are stressed (or, as in this case, tricking your brain by pretending to be stressed).

You can use this experiment is more useful way than a fun parlour trick. If you know of anything in your life that stresses you or triggers negative or anxious thoughts, do this experiment to confirm it.

Then follow Donna Eden’s techniques, especially the Neurovascular hold by placing your palm on your forehead for one to three minutes while thinking of the pressing issue.

Don’t worry about ‘negative thinking’; this is a method that uses the truth that you feel inside, rather than fooling yourself with positive affirmations. And while acknowledging the uncomfortable or painful truth, you are sending a physical message to your brain, which reads something like ‘Even though I’m thinking about all this bad stuff, there’s no need to go into a fight or flight mode.’

When you have finished, try to lift the kettle again while thinking about the same unpleasant issue.

You’ll hopefully get a nice surprise by being able to stay strong – which indicates that despite a usually stress-triggering image in your mind, your energy remains balanced and you are now responding to stress much more calmly, rather than reacting through the instinctive emergency response. The more you do these exercises, the more your naturally adaptable brain will ‘cooperate’.

Energy-testing with a Friend

Instead of using a kettle, you can get a friend to energy-test you by pushing your arm down (raised sideways, up to the level of your shoulder) while you offer resistance.

Rewiring Your Brain

The amazing characteristic of our brain, neuroplasticity, can cause radical rewiring of your brain’s old reactive patterns, allowing us to start experiencing more peaceful and joyful states of mind, and become much more emotionally resilient.

Gaining Long-term Emotional Stability

The more frequently you repeat the exercises presented in this article, the quicker will your brain understand that it is not necessary to activate the stress-response cycle when that specific thought/memory occurs.

It is comparable to resetting a device to its original factory settings. Your mind will become free of disturbing information written by your life experience. I’d recommend trying this exercise with a number of different stressful memories, thoughts or pressing issues. The brain’s unwanted response to any of these categories will gradually ease out. You’ll soon notice you have acquired much more emotional stability when you experience a stress-triggering situation or a disturbing thought.

Share Your Thoughts

If you would like to ask about anything in this article, or would like to express your opinion about this field, leave a comment below. I’d also be very interested to learn about your any other techniques for relieving stress, so feel free to share your knowledge or experience.