The Importance of Baby Steps

A blogger friend made an important observation about my post Five Things You Can Do To Feel Better About Yourself. She said that in her experience, using tools such as those I wrote about is a great way to help yourself when you’re feeling pretty good but can be hard to implement when you’re in a negative space. So how do you make these tools “reliable when (you are) in an unreliable state?” I believe my friend was correct when she said she needed to take baby steps.

This means you have to give yourself a break. When you’re depressed or just feeling down about your life it’s easy to be hard on yourself for everything you do, or don’t do, without any regard for what’s truly important. Part of you is complicit with the negativity and will do all it can to continue the negativity (see my post on the Anti-Me). If you are aspiring to implement new tools into your daily life you could very well beat yourself up every time you realize you’ve forgotten to acknowledge yourself or taken a step to feel better. So you have to give yourself attainable goals and start slowly. And above all, BE GENTLE with yourself.

Here are some practical things you can do to start taking baby steps towards feeling better:

1. Choose one new skill to focus on and don’t try to add anything else for at least a week, maybe even a month.

2. Give yourself credit for doing it when you do and if you start beating yourself up for not doing it, try to find a voice inside yourself that can simply repeat: Be Gentle.

3. Make a sign (this could be as simple as using a sharpie on a piece of blank paper or the back of an envelope) that says “Be Gentle With Yourself” or a reminder to use another tool of your choice.

4. Remember that in the beginning you may only try your new tool once in a whole week. This is still very much an accomplishment.

Every step gets you closer to feeling good about yourself.

 

The Journey

As a psychotherapist, one of my most important tasks is to give clients tools to take with them into their daily lives. We all have gaps in our knowledge of how to best approach and live life. For thousands of years different traditions have taught people how to relax and thus experience life more fully, make better decisions and get in touch with innate wisdom. Yoga, meditation, tai chi, and visualization come to mind immediately.

A year ago I discovered an excellent tool for learning the skill of relaxation that I now use personally and offer to clients. It is called The Journey to Wild Divine-a biofeedback program for the computer that guides the user through a virtual realm where he or she is prompted to engage in various exercises using breath and mindfulness to complete tasks. Sensors are placed on three fingers of one hand to monitor the variation between heartbeats and something called SCL (skin conductance levels), which in short is the measure of activity of the sweat glands on your fingers. These two different kinds of sensors together measure how relaxed a person is.

The program is set up like a game but offers direct feedback on the user’s level of relaxation through visual cues. Tasks vary from using laughter to juggle balls in the air, to entering into a deep state of relaxation to make rain fall. While the visuals are stunningly beautiful and the tasks challenging and fun, the tool the user is learning is to become more conscious of how breath and state of mind effect our ability to approach each moment of life with greater awareness. As we begin to know this and remember it when we’re going through the day, we can use the breathing techniques to make ourselves calmer and more present when we might otherwise feel anxious and overwhelmed.

Obviously this is just one of many resources out there for learning and practicing mindfulness and relaxation. The reason I love it and offer it as a tool for clients is because it’s fun and can be used by anyone, regardless of how coordinated or limber they are. It does involve spending some money and having a computer in your home. For those in Boulder, Colorado curious about it, please feel free to contact me regarding the use of my program and office space for a small fee.

Happy Journeys!