- [Narrator] If you or someone you know is in crisis, help is available.

Call or text 988 to be connected to trained counselors from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

Free and confidential support is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week in the United States.

If it is an emergency, please call 911.

For more information, visit suicidepreventionlifeline.org.

- So let's just get started sitting up as tall as possible, really rooted down in your sit bones, crown to the ceiling exhale, everything out.

Inhale two, three, four.

Hold two, three, four.

Exhale, two, three, four.

Hold two, three, four.

So I just did a workshop on meditation and most of the presentation was about breathing because we don't breathe anymore.

We hold our breath and you know what that does, that puts us into that fight or flight position to where we're holding our breath and to learn how to breathe will take you into the body and the mind connecting.

So that there's more of a calmness.

In my yoga classes, I'm probably ridiculous about inhale and exhale.

Really, they're like if you first start taking my class she's like, oh, she, all she says is inhale and exhale.

But that's part of the practice is learning how to breathe.

- [Narrator] More people around the globe Googled how to maintain mental health in 2021 than ever before.

Between the pandemic, politics and personal matters, we're stressed out.

The whole planet is stressed out.

We asked local and national experts for their advice and the research behind it.

Breathing intentionally, being mindful, exercise, connection, creativity.

those aren't just buzzwords.

They're science-based strategies to help us build resilience.

Sometimes, the little things can make a big impact.

Let's start with a little thing.

- Box breathing, it's about inhaling four hold for four, exhale for four, hold for four.

So you envision this box.

Inhale, hold.

Exhale, hold.

Inhale, hold.

Exhale, hold.

But in your mind, or even with your hand, you can draw these boxes.

And I've heard of counselors with young people, that's what they're doing a lot is helping 'cause it's that body-mind connection, too.

Breath and mind and body, it's a team that works together.

- Stress has become such a common part of our lives these days, that we've just kind of, I think accepted the fact that we're going to have stress and there's eustress, there's good stress.

Eustress is the kind of stress that helps you wake up in the morning.

Eustress is what gets you to an appointment on time.

Eustress is what helps you to prepare for something that might be a stressful activity or event.

Distress, once it crosses over to distress, that's when it becomes problematic.

- So when you have an event that feels stressful and in this case, we have an event that has felt stressful for a very long time, we call that complex trauma, right?

So we're experiencing these events that are happening for a really long time.

Our brain looks at an event that feels stressful and perceives it as danger.

And so the way that that works in your brain is that the amygdala recognizes danger right in the middle of your brain.

It doesn't, it's not a logical part of your brain.

It's a feeling part of your brain, and your brain recognizes this danger and goes to the hypothalamus and says, send stress hormones everywhere.

And the reason they do that is because our brains are prepared to fight or flight.

That's really great if you're camping and there's a bear in your campground.

It's not so great if you're trying to take a test or get out of your house for the first time in a long time.

And so our brain just perceives danger as danger.

It doesn't delineate between.

The problem with that is that we've been in long-term stress.

And so what can happen is we can get into a state of hyperarousal where our brain starts perceiving everything as danger.

- So we tend to get all this chaos going on, this chemical chaos going on.

And it actually - so stress and adrenaline literally redirects your blood flow.

It turns off your prefrontal cortex, which is where you, that's how you engage with the world.

That's our problem-solving tools.

And if we can't access those tools, then there's a lot of our modern day stressors that we can't resolve, if we can't access our tools.

It also turns off your guts.

So those are the two biggest energy consumers that we have on board.

Kind of like turning off the air conditioner in your old car when you ran low of gas.

Your body is trying to conserve energy so that it can escape whatever it is that it's deemed as danger.

- We have a dumping of those kind of adrenaline-like neurotransmitters or hormones in our bodies that help get us through a stressful situation.

And in the short term, that's fine.

It's a survival technique.

But when you're in a stressful situation for a longer period of time, and you have that chronic elevation of those stress hormones, that starts to cause all kinds of damage to your body.

It has implications for how your heart works.

It can increase your blood pressure.

It can cause trouble with your vasculature, increased levels of hypertension and hypercholesterolemia over periods of time, increase in morbidity and mortality all across the board because of living in this chronic elevated stressful state.

We know it has implications for our immune status for our reproductive status.

And some of the things that I think are easier for people to recognize are kind of your day-to-day functioning, picking up on starting to feel fatigued and run down.

And maybe you're getting sick more often.

You're catching every little cold that comes through, a lot of GI trouble, feeling like you're not digesting things maybe you're gaining weight or losing weight.

And so, even though we talk about stress and pull yourself up by your bootstraps, there are real effects on our bodies.

And long term, it really changes kind of our overall health picture.

- Men and women actually experience that a little bit differently.

Sometimes men get more irritable.

Sometimes women get more weepy or cry or tearful.

It's a feeling of overwhelming.

Some people progress into like panic attacks where they kind of shut down or feel like they can't breathe or that they're suffocating.

So stress can be very physically overwhelming as well as mentally overwhelming.

- We are running on fumes on a constant basis, which is not healthy for anybody.

And that includes healthcare workers, that includes mental healthcare workers.

- So we have a saying in yoga that wherever the breath goes, the mind goes.

And so the breath is one of those anchors that we may not be able to control anything else going around us, but we can change how we breathe.

And so, what happens when we bring our attention to the breath and specifically start to focus on exhales, that activates what we call the relaxation response in the body.

So it brings kind of the rest and digest side of the nervous system online, which automatically starts to soothe physiology.

So heart rate decreases, respiration decreases.

And as those physiological things slow down, the mind follows that.

- I think stress is a major part of our lives on a daily basis on some level.

And we keep our shoulders up to our ears.

Our shoulders, our necks, our stomachs, our jaws, our fists are clenched.

And I think if we can focus, we have to think about thinking, right?

So if we can slow down our thinking by slowing down our breathing because our emotions are tied directly to our thinking.

And so if we're thinking unhealthy stuff we're going to feel unhealthy, and we're gonna, as human beings we tend to solely act on how we feel.

When you're in crisis your brain is going a million miles an hour.

And for me, if I can get someone to slow their breathing down then everything else can slow down and they can start being able to think rationally and make healthier choices.

- [Narrator] Breath practices are one prescription for stress and chronic stress.

They also have been shown to reduce symptoms of depression, anxiety, insomnia, post-traumatic stress disorder and attention deficit disorder.

- Often the source of stress is the mind like thinking in the future or ruminating in the past.

The mind is somewhere other than here.

And that's, those are things that either haven't happened or things that have happened and we can't go, we can't hit rewind to go back and redo them.

(upbeat music) So bringing the focus back to the now is what helps to reduce that stress response.

- I think that it's really hard to stay in the present especially when sometimes the present feels unknowable, right?

When we feel like we don't have a lot of ability to understand what's happening we don't have a lot of control.

So it's easy to get stuck in the past or the future.

And it's true that those things generally tend to keep us from being able to exist in the present in helpful ways.

I think there are kind of three sets of strategies you could use for rumination.

One of them is to lean in.

Lean into the rumination - for a bit.

One of them is to evaluate what's happening when you're ruminating.

And one of them is to move on.

So lean in, evaluate, move on.

Leaning-in skills that you could use could be like, for example thinking about what is your big fear right now and giving yourself some time to really think about what are you afraid of?

And then, what's the worst that could happen?

So I'm afraid that I'm never going to get to go back to school.

Okay, what's the worst that could happen?

I would do homeschool.

What's the worst that could happen?

What's the worst?

And you follow that all the way to conclusion.

And a lot of times, the conclusion is not as bad as the feeling you have.

And so, these things are counterintuitive to lean into the rumination because what we try to do generally as people is ignore those feelings.

The problem is that doesn't work.

It doesn't work to ignore feelings.

They just keep circling around and sometimes they get louder because they're demanding to be heard.

Evaluation strategies: You can call a friend you trust and someone that you know has the space to be able to hear.

It's a good thing to say, do you have space to talk to me?

Do you have the emotional space to talk to me right now?

But if they do, let someone that you trust help you think through the thing you can't stop thinking about.

So moving on can look like deep breathing - to take five, slow, deep breaths.

One of the things I teach a lot is a strategy called rate breathe rate.

And so when you're doing deep breathing, a lot of times we want to do a few breaths and then I feel perfectly better.

That's not the way it works.

And so what we can do instead is first you rate your anxiety on a scale of one to 10 then you're gonna take five deep breaths all the way down to the bottom of your diaphragm.

And when you're breathing and your lungs increase, this is the way that you address anxiety in your brain because you are breathing, you're taking deep breaths.

Your lungs actually open all the way up forward and all the way back.

They touch your vagus nerve.

They send messages up your vagus nerve to your brain to say the danger has passed, you can calm down.

So you take five deep breaths, and then you rate again.

So you rate, breathe, rate.

And on the second rating, anxiety one to 10, you're looking for your anxiety to come down by half.

So if you're at an eight, you're looking for a four.

If you're at a six, you're looking for a three.

You're not trying to get your anxiety to go away completely.

You're just trying to make it go down enough that you can move on.

- Mindfulness to me means complete awareness in whatever I'm focusing on at that moment.

And just try not to worry about any of the stressors from the day that you've had.

It helps me not think about anything else except the task at hand.

I joke about it.

I say, oh, I always, I'm constantly making love to my food.

And I really do like I talk to it.

Maybe that's just crazy, but it helps me just connect.

It helps me connect to the ingredient a lot easier than just chopping and throwing it in the pan.

Like, I pay special attention to the way it looks.

And I think about all the different ways I can transform it to something spectacular.

Just connecting with the the ingredient all the way from the very beginning to getting it to your table, it's a beautiful thing.

- We talk about like being in the present moment and being mindful.

That's maybe best illustrated as to what that is by describing what it's not.

And I've had plenty of experience of having moments of mindlessness.

And one moment that sticks out in particular, many years ago - I think even before I even started my meditation practice - was well, I grew up and still am sensitive to chocolate.

I can still have chocolate but I just have to be kind of careful.

I have to wait a few days for my body to give me the cues to let me know that it's ready and that it's time.

And my favorite chocolate treat for all these years has been Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

And I remember one time I bought a packet, you know those two-packs of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

And the day finally came and I opened up the package and peeled the little ruffled paper container from the first one, took a bite, mm, wonderful, right?

And the TV was on and something on the TV caught my attention and distracted me.

I started watching the TV and before I knew it I started thinking about all the stuff I had to do for work the next day.

And how am I going to get all this stuff done?

And, oh my gosh.

And then the next thing I know, I looked down in my hands and there was nothing but empty wrappers.

I'd eaten the peanut butter cups, but I'd completely missed out on the experience.

So Zen is a practice that helps you become more in tune with being with the experience, rather than kind of what we usually do is we're lost in our thoughts and our fantasies and our daydreams and whatnot, and miss out on so much of what life really has to present right now.

Zen has really nothing to do with religion.

One pretty common way of thinking of what Zen is like is to think of it being like a kind of an interconnectedness kind of experience, kind of like if you have a dance partner with whom you're really comfortable and you just know you and can anticipate the other person's move.

So you're so in tune that you don't know who's leading, who's following, there's just the dance, right?

That's Zen.

Another common way that I think is a bit more accessible to think of Zen as one Zen master put it as the ability to experience experience.

Being able to be more in the moment and be really focused on what's going on right now helps with whatever you want to do, really.

And it can help with other things too, physiological things.

It can help reduce blood pressure.

I've had traditional health issues with respect to blood pressure.

And I can sit in the waiting room like I did with a doctor's office yesterday and just focus on my meditative practice for a little while and watch my blood pressure drop like 20 points just within a few minutes.

So it can really help with lots of things.

There's not much that it can't help with, frankly.

A lot of people kind of think, well what good is it to just kind of sit there and do nothing, in meditation?

And I think of it as kind of like putting money in a bank where you, for all intents and purposes it's just sitting there, but it's growing interest and it comes out better than what was put in.

That's kind of the same thing with meditation and exercise, and so many other things where people always are like I don't have time to exercise, but if you make the time it actually gives you more energy than you put into it.

We call it a meditation practice.

'Cause it's like playing the piano or shooting basketball or anything else, it just takes practice.

A lot of people get discouraged because they think oh, I can't do this very well right away but it's a practice, it takes time.

Like playing the piano takes time.

But it can be there and accessible to you whenever you need it.

Or, when do you not need it?

When do you not benefit from being able to focus and concentrate on what's happening right now?

A good beginning practice for meditation is, first off, talk about posture.

Some practices kind of focus on becoming aware of the body first, really.

So maybe focus on your feet in contact with the ground.

And maybe putting one hand on top of another in your lap just to give your hands something to do.

We want to keep your spine straight.

I typically pull my back away from the chair a little bit.

One thing that really helps me a lot is to think of maybe somebody with a string on the crown of my head pulling up so that it straightens out the back of my neck and really helps straighten out the rest of my spine and pulls my chin down just a little bit so that you're staring at a spot a few feet ahead of you.

Many people meditate with their eyes closed, but again, if you're sitting still and your eyes are closed what does your body think is going on?

So if you find yourself nodding off a lot try to keep your eyes at least half open.

If you keep them all the way open then maybe there's too many things that are distracting that can catch your eye.

But maybe just kind of sort of half open.

So that's what to do with the body.

The hard part is what to do with the mind 'cause the mind is like this monkey going back and forth and grabbing onto this and then grabbing onto that, oh, I want this, ooh, I want that.

So that's the difficulty, the challenge.

So a common practice it's a lifetime practice is to simply count your breaths.

So when you breathe in, then breathe out, in your mind, you think one.

You breathe in, two, and so on until you get to 10.

Then you start over again and when your mind drifts off or wanders off - and I say, when not if, but when - once you notice that your mind has drifted off into this, that or the other, then just kind of bring your mind back to one.

The breath count, it just gives your mind something to do.

For beginners, especially, I think it's very helpful to count both your in breaths and your out breaths.

So one, two, three, four and your mind is gonna wander off time after time after time.

That's where people tend to really get discouraged and think I'm terrible at this.

My mind drifted off - in a 10-minute meditation, my mind drifted off probably 50 times.

But you know what?

That's 50 times where you noticed that your mind had wandered off and you started back over with the count.

So that's 50 moments of awareness, which is kind of what we're looking to cultivate, right?

So don't whip yourself about that.

That's a good thing.

One Zen teacher talks about this practice as being sort of like training a puppy, house training a puppy, where you put the puppy on the paper, newspaper right?

To potty train him.

Then what does the puppy do?

Puppy wanders off.

It's like the mind wanders off, right?

So you grab the puppy, put it back on the paper.

It doesn't help to scold the puppy and to hit the puppy.

You don't want to do stuff like that.

It doesn't help.

Likewise with your mind, whenever your mind wanders off, just notice it, pick the puppy up, pick the mind up, put it back on.

One, two - not every time you've had a thought but every time you've had enough thoughts to where you've drifted away and have lost track of the count.

- [Narrator] Next time on "The Little Things."

- I've often equated, especially depression to existing in like a pitch black room.

I think you can't, you don't know where the doors are.

You don't know where the windows are.

I think you're just constantly searching for like an edge and you're in this velvet blackness.

And I think, I've often found, like, trying to seek help can be really hard.

It's hard for people to understand that you are seeking help because they can't see the movements you're trying to make.

And I think it makes it a really lonely space 'cause you know you're in there searching desperately for any corner, just an edge, just something to understand where you are relative to anything.

- There are ancient spiritual practices called examen where at the end of the day you think through the things that happened in your day and you intentionally store the positive and that can make your brain grow more towards health, towards connections with positivity, connections with changes in your anxiety structures in your brain where they're not so reactive.

And that's really exciting.

- The first thing I would tell you to do before you begin cooking mindfully is to just stop and breathe.

Take a deep breath, breath in hold your breath for five seconds if you can, and then exhale.

And then I would connect with something that brings you joy.

It could be putting on your house shoes or your pajamas.

It could be putting on your favorite music.

And then, get in the kitchen and figure out what you're hungry for.

- When you take the breath and use the breath to get you into a certain state, what, how do you describe that state?

- Calmness, awareness.

It develops your intuition, suppresses the anxieties of the world.

(upbeat music)