The holidays are upon us once again. And so if you’re looking around, you’ve probably seen a lot of people stressed out. So let’s talk about dealing with stress from a brain based perspective, utilizing what I like to call autogenic training. Now, it’s not what I call it. It’s been around since 1932, but autogenic training is a form of self hypnosis.
That’s how it’s actually phrased in the literature, basically involves focusing on creating specific sensations in your body, like, okay, I’m going to, uh, my right leg or my right foot is first of all, warm and heavy. So this is a, a technique where you’re going to sit in a chair, you’re going to lie down and you’re going to think about different areas of your body.
You know, try to visualize them becoming heavy, becoming warm. And autogenic training, however, goes beyond that. There’s actually seven stages and you, progressively work through them. Now what’s very, very interesting about this particular technique is that we want to compare it to the big rage around the world right now in terms of, of mental training, which is mindfulness.
If you have ever used like the headspace app or other apps that are focusing on meditative disciplines, most of them are very focused now on what is called mindfulness. Mindfulness is kind of defined as sitting non judgmentally and evaluating your sensations and thoughts. And it’s a, you know, it’s great.
But here’s the deal. Mindfulness and autogenic training do not impact the brain in the same way, which means that you cannot, as a movement coach, particularly a brain-based movement coach, randomly tell people, Hey, you should do mindfulness training, or you should do autogenic training because they impact different areas of the brain and they impact people with different presentations separately.
What this means for a lot of us is that maybe you’ve tried mindfulness meditation, right? You bought the app, you sit there 20 minutes a day, and maybe it made you feel somewhat better. But it didn’t make a big impact on you or not as large as you were anticipating. That could be because you need a different form of training in the beginning.
So here’s kind of what we know. Autogenic training, because it is focused on kind of this imagery of warmth and heaviness, particularly getting into the extremities. It tends to work really well for people who are what we would call sympathetically dominant. So if you have high blood pressure, or you are prone to hypertension, maybe you have things like asthma or other issues where you are kind of constantly in a state close to anxiety.
When you have presentations like that, people that are constantly sweating in the, you know, in the midline of the body, but their hands and feet are always cold. These are people that will often respond super well to autogenic training. It tends to impact the limbic system of the body and will help down regulate that sympathetic drive and help you become more relaxed. And as a result of that, we often will see changes in pain and changes in a wide variety of physical, cognitive and emotional symptoms.
This has been studied again since 1932. It’s very, very powerful. And like I said, most of my clients, particularly high performers, CEOs, professional athletes, whatever, Most of them have very high sympathetic tone. They’re tight a lot. They’re stressed a lot. And if I try to get them to sit and think nothing about what they’re thinking, mindfulness approach very often, it’s actually less beneficial and sometimes will often make them feel worse in the beginning. So I want you to really consider. what you’re doing for yourself and who you’re doing it for.
Mindfulness tends to work better for people who maybe need more focus on emotional regulation. People that are struggling with anxiety and depression. Now both techniques can work for people in both arenas, but for people again, that are looking to improve their capacity to concentrate to really stay what I would call or describe as being present in their own body.
Mindfulness can work really, really well because one of the things that we know from brain scans of people doing mindfulness meditation is it increases activity in what’s called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which allows us to focus, and also the sensory cortex, because you’re becoming more aware of the sensations in your body without judging them which makes them less threatening.
So both can be effective, as I said, for pain, for different issues. But I really want you to think about, can I target this more specifically? So again, as a reminder, if you have that person, or you are that person like me, who is very, has a high tendency to be sympathetically driven, that fight, flight, freeze kind of personality.
And as I said, physically, they midline, they’re cold in the periphery, they have a tendency toward hypertension, they sorta have dry skin, dry eyes, all this stuff. Autogenic training may absolutely be the way to go in terms of how to learn it. There are great books. There are easy apps. I think apps cost somewhere between nothing and 4 and 99 cents.
It’s auto as a car, AU T O genic G E N I C autogenic training, find an app. Turn it on and just do the work. What’s really important in the beginnings to tell yourself, tell your clients It doesn’t matter if you can make your foot actually feel warm and heavy or your arms feel warm and heavy in the beginning This is a training process like anything else.
It’ll take you some time It can take somewhere between four weeks and four months for people to get to the entire program. But once it is mastered it is a remarkable tool for improving health for improving pain And performance, both physical and cognitive. So think about that. This was a great time to start because Christmas is about four weeks away.
So if you think about it from that perspective, this is a great tool for the holidays, especially if it fits the person, uh, precisely. So again, brain based practitioners, please do not randomly prescribe or randomly suggest mental training to people. Think about who it is and make sure you’re giving them the right one.
All right, good luck.
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