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New insights in the world of Neuroscience have led to the development of revolutionary techniques for moving into an intimate relationship with the neural pathways that define your personal experience of your world.
Are you ready for empowered change? It’s time to live your excellence. Read on to explore how these new advances create opportunities for harnessing the power of neuroplasticity, and create a space for inspiration to flow.
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For Generalized Anxiety
Introducing CPR for the Amygdala and Self-Havening - Tools for Immediate Anxiety & Stress Relief
CPR for the Amygdala is an easy-to-use tool for calming the mind and body in a moment of emotional hijack. Watch this short video and learn how to calm your brain through the engagement of the self-havening touch and brain exercises. This video involves a short demonstration that highlights the impact of the delta wave presence on brain functioning. A fast brain is a reactive brain, a slow brain is a calm brain. Let’s calm the mind and put you back in charge of your emotional state. You can also go to our full CPR for the Amygdala Playlist by clicking here.
A Havening Techniques Guided Meditation to SNAP the Brain Out of Anxiety
In this meditation, Dr. Kate Truitt guides us through a practice for the Havening Techniques CPR for the Amygdala S.N.A.P. Protocol in order to help with generalized anxiety. As always, she begins by asking us to welcome in face havening, palm havening, and/or arm havening to help us deepen this experience.
She asks us to sense inward and give yourself a rank from 0-10 on how our mind and body are feeling. Once we have that rank, Dr. Kate asks us to welcome in havening touch and some guided breathwork in order to calm down our amygdala.
She asks us to once again sense into our state of being and give yourself another rank. If there is still energy present above a 2, she invites us to welcome in the havening touch and preoccupy our brain. She suggests thinking of 3 items that are green, 4 items that are blue, 5 items that are yellow. Then she asks us to identify 3 things with a citrus taste, a minty taste, and a floral experience.
A Therapy Tool Using Neuroplasticity & Journaling to Release Negativity
Dr. Kate Truitt illustrates to us that Amy the amygdala likes to chew on concerns and considerations, especially since her number one job is to work hard to keep us alive. Amy has two primary impacts on the way our brain is functioning: stress-based and thrive state.
Next, Dr. Kate goes on to explain that when we are in a ruminating loop, this is Amy trying to answer one of three questions. Are you safe? Are you lovable? Can you be successful? CPR for the Amygdala and breath work can help our brain and body regulate, soother, and calm down, stopping the ruminating loop. This break can create space for us to get curious about what’s happening beneath the ruminating thoughts.
She suggests that we utilize the Left- and Right-Handed Journaling Exercise. In this exercise, our dominant hand is emulating our thinking brain, and our non-dominant hand is going to be expressing fears and worries. Dr. Kate recommends beginning by asking Amy what’s going on, and then switching hands to answer that question.
A Breathing Exercise for Decreasing Stress
In this video, you will learn a technique for regulating your system, and bringing your parasympathetic nervous system into the present moment. Dr. Kate explains that we want it present because stress makes it more sensitive. She describes this as us being more “sympathetic to threat,” our brain wants us to stay alive. (Dr. Kate notes that our Amygdala is the one that is in charge of this).
Then she goes on to mention that many of the stressors in our day-to-day life are not actual threats to our survival, though our system can still struggle to decrease its sensitivity to them. And as stress spreads, it can lead to activation/vulnerability to future stressors.
Dr. Kate explains that the topic of this video is based on findings by Jack Feldman, a researcher from UCLA who is studying the biomechanics of breath and identified an opportunity to downregulate our system in 40 seconds or less.
This technique is called “Sigh Breath Practice.” She notes that it is taking advantage of the fact that humans are naturally predisposed to sigh automatically. Dr. Kate states that, if we harness these sighs, we can more rapidly change the way our system is functioning, and even regulate our heart rate. Dr. Kate encourages you to practice this “Double Sigh Breath” 3 to 4 times in a row whenever you feel stressed or distracted.
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"Living Your Excellence"
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Most recent blog posts...
Did you know that the experience of anxiety is a part of daily life? Like all of our emotions, it exists to alert us concerns so that we may take action and create change. Generalized anxiety, on the other hand, is just there in the forefront.
Read MoreTransforming Negativity Bias into Positive Empowerment
Did you know that your brain is hard-wired to look for negative, difficult, or painful things? This is called a “negativity bias,” which means that in your data-processing system, anything negative gets priority attention.
Read MoreRejection Sensitive Dysphoria Understanding and Healing
Rejection is difficult for anyone to experience, but some people undergo it with much greater intensity than most others. If that is the case for you, it may be that you are experiencing what is known as rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD).
Read MoreWake Up on the Right Side of the Bed Using Neuroplasticity
Waking up on the wrong side of the bed is a real thing. But we have the power of neuroplasticity on our side. Because of our brains are malleable, we have an opportunity to make changes to our neural connections that can help us experience a good night of restful sleep.
Read MoreDeepening the Relationship With Emotions Empowers Healing
One of the most critical methods for developing a sense of personal agency is learning to be in deep relationship with your emotions.
Read MoreChallenging Difficult Thoughts to Create Personal Empowerment
Anytime you notice that your brain is beating you up to keep you "safe," take a moment for challenging difficult thoughts to find kinder ways of getting safe.
Read MoreWelcome to the New Year Reframing the Difficult Into New Opportunities
The new year is upon us—the time where we traditionally review the previous year. In this article focus on the opportunities that await you in the coming year.
Read MoreFinding the Inner Motivation to Overcome Procrastination
Productive procrastination seems productive, so it can feel good, but if you are putting off tasks that need to be done to do other tasks, it could be building your stress level, and if that continues to build you could be heading for burnout.
Read MoreObsessive-Compulsive Disorder Get Unstuck from the Cycle
Research shows that ERP is effective in treating obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. Mindfulness techniques and self-havening touch provide added support.
Read MoreCompassionately Leaning into Failure to Create Success
Failure can hurt—our egos and self-brain often have a hard time dealing with it, but failure has helped us learn and grow since the earliest days of our lives.
Read MoreBreaking Unhealthy Habits: Change Through Finding Purpose
Finding our purpose significantly increases the ease with which we are able to create sustainable change. It helps us more readily link into new behaviors that align with our desire to live our purpose.
Read MoreOpening-Up Anxiety Door Creaks Open on a Different World
“Opening-Up Anxiety” is about how we deal with change. If you are uneasy about restrictions being eased after many months of isolation, you’re not alone.
Read MoreShame and Self Judgment Opportunities for Self-Healing
Shame is awful to experience, whether we are being shamed by others or shaming ourselves, but as humans we are hard-wired to experience feelings of shame. Learn about the opportunities for self-healing in shame and self-judgment.
Read MoreDomestic Violence: Emerging Safely From the Pandemic World
Some people are not safer at home, and in fact, the home setting is a real place of danger for many who live with the threat of domestic violence. If you are one of those people, you may be in need of help and support. If you are not one of those people, but think you may know one...
Read MoreThriving Through Pain
The experiences of physical pain and psychological trauma go hand-in-hand. In order to create empowered change and self-awareness around chronic pain, we need to explore the connection between the mind and body.
Read MoreCalming the Fear Brain
Recognizing when your survival brain is throwing up warning signs from your past can empower you to find balance between what your fear brain would have you do, and what you would choose to do. In this article I want to show you some tools for resilience and explain how they work.
Read MoreSetting Boundaries in Your Relationships
In this article Dr. Kate Truitt helps you explore the survival mechanisms you employ in relationships, how much you value what you need in your relationships, and what you can do to help create boundaries that lead to the relationships you want.
Read MoreTraversing Our Gradients of Emotions
As humans, we are naturally moving in and out of different brainwave states every day, and much of that is driven by emotions. This is a sign of a healthily functioning brain. There is a good argument to be made for intentionally experiencing different emotions, whether you might consider them to be “good” or “bad.”
Read MoreWelcoming Gratitude Throughout the New Year
This may sound counterintuitive, but the journey toward creating success and well-being requires leaning into the difficulties you are experiencing. I suggest that you bring a little bit of 2020 with you on your journey in 2021.
Read MoreHow do You Plan to Top This Year?
Has 2020 been a challenging year for you? I will take a guess and say that it has. Are you looking forward to brighter days ahead? Have you started thinking about what your new year will look like?
Read MoreHugs and Home for the Holidays During Challenging Times
With everything that has befallen all of us in 2020, we must assume the holiday blues may be more widespread than usual this year. This means we must get creative when it comes to getting together, but we do need to stay connected.
Read MoreOvercoming Worry by Deepening Your Relationship With It
Why do we worry? So often my patients will tell me that worry is dumb, and that there is no need for it. Actually, we do need to worry, but we need to put it into an appropriate context. It is important to go back to the beginning of the worry process and notice the “Why” of it.
Read MoreNeuroplasticity Overcome and Create a Resilient Brain
The opportunity you have to heal your brain and keep moving forward is made possible by something called neuroplasticity—the key to building a resilient brain. We show you how to show you how to seize that opportunity in this in-depth article.
Read MoreNeurofeedback Training the Brain to Calm
We introduce Neurofeedback: a tool we teach that allows you to create your resilient brain, addressing stress and anxiety, compensating for past damage that has been done, enhancing learning capacity, and even healing through the difficulties brought on by our new challenges.
Read MoreOvercoming Burnout: Self-Compassion Provides the Healing Touch
Have you been feeling lately like you’re not living up to the expectations you have for yourself? Do you feel you are losing some of your former optimism? You may be on the road to burnout. In this article we help you ways to successfully managing the stress that can lead to burnout.
Read MoreLeaning Into Grief and Loss to Create Healing
Grief is an experience of mourning and deep honoring. One thing I have learned through my own journey is that the experience of grief and loss has a softening effect: it is so important for us to save space, be conscientious and kind toward our feelings and ourselves as we navigate these deeply painful times.
Read MorePandemic Anxiety Healing Power is in Your Hands
The COVID-19 Pandemic and its associated stay-at-home orders and social distancing have the potential to induce various manifestations of anxiety and stress. Health anxiety and anxiety-induced stress are normal reactions. You have the power in your hands for self-healing and creating calm around you.
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