Today I would like to talk about how you can quickly neutralize negative emotions, and not only neutralize, but to create a powerful positive state that will help you in all aspects of your life.
You probably heard about “emotional eating”. It’s when people eat to cope with some negative emotions.
The food quickly allows them to switch their state and replace the negative feelings with positive ones.
Unfortunately, this strategy is a bad solution in the long run, since most people use unhealthy food in such situations.
By the way, the same thing applies to people who smoke. The cigarette allows them to quickly switch their state, for example take a break and get relaxed.
So this quick fix may be effective right now, but just like with emotional eating, ultimately it’s a bad strategy.
One of the possible solutions is to find another way to quickly switch our state without the use of food or cigarette. The question is how.
Before answering this question, I want to speak about the results of one study.
The scientists observed people who have anxiety. And they noticed that when someone has anxiety, only one part of their brain is activated, and the other one is not. So the scientists came up with this idea that if we restore the balance in the activity of both hemispheres we will be able to reduce negative feelings.
And one way to restore the balance between left and right hemispheres is to do a physical activity that engages both sides of the body.
So I wanna give you three different ways to help you rebalance your brain and switch your state very quickly.
One such way is juggling. You can start with one ball. Then add another ball. As soon as you reach three balls, your life will never be the same.
Eventually you can add another ball. And another one. Or add another person.
Another way to change your state is based on polyrhythm. The basic pattern is two-over-three and it goes like this.
One easy way to learn it is to start by clapping your hands like this.
You can pause the video now and try it yourself.
Once your clapping is good enough, you can do the rhythm.
Again you can pause the video now and do it yourself.
If that’s too easy, you can learn 3-over-4.
Another way to quickly change your state is the alphabet game. You will find the instruction on this website.
What is common between all these exercises?
First, they all have a certain rhythm.
Next, like I mentioned, we engage both sides of the body and this way we stimulate both hemispheres.
Another thing is that we use all our senses – we see, we hear sounds and we feel something with our hands.
Juggling and polyrhythm exercises also have a feedback mechanism – if we make a mistake we know it right away, so we can improve our performance.
By the way our performance is an indicator that we successfully switched our state.
If you perform these exercises correctly, you will notice that they will help you to be more relaxed, centered, balanced, tension-free. Enjoy the process! Be playful!
So next time when you have a bout of anxiety, do these simple exercises, activate your brain and I guarantee you will be pleasantly surprised by the results.
