Ep 38. A Neuroplasticity Exercise: Bilateral Stimulation
Not Another Anxiety Show
Kelli Walker
4.8 • 655 Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2017
⏱️ 3 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Join Kelli as she leads you through a short, simple, and dare we say fun neuroplasticity exercise to re-wire an anxious brain.
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Disclaimer: Hopefully you find the information in this podcast helpful but it is not intended to replace medical advice and should not be used as such.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, guys. Welcome to Not Another Anxiety Show. I'm your host, Kelly Walker, and today I'm going to share a fun little neuroplasticity exercise with you. |
| 0:21.4 | If you're hearing that word for the first time and thinking, |
| 0:24.5 | what? |
| 0:26.1 | Then listen to episode 27, where we talk neuroplasticity and its significance to anxiety. |
| 0:33.2 | As you may have heard us say quite a few times, |
| 0:35.4 | there are about a million ways to be mindful, |
| 0:44.1 | present, aware, whatever you want to call it. But whenever we step out of our mind world, |
| 0:49.7 | even for a few seconds, this interrupts the anxiety cycle. And interrupting the cycle is what eventually breaks it altogether. Keep in mind, though, you may not find immediate relief with this exercise. |
| 0:56.8 | That's not the goal. The goal is to do something a little different when we find ourselves |
| 1:00.5 | starting to feel or already feeling anxious. The results of this exercise are cumulative, |
| 1:06.9 | rather than instantaneous. So the more you do it, the easier and more natural it becomes to see anxiety for what it really is |
| 1:14.3 | and step out of its cycle. |
| 1:17.9 | This particular exercise is straight from Melissa Teer's book, The Anti-Anxiety Toolkit. |
| 1:24.2 | And it starts by grabbing a ball or really anything you can around, and think of something that is causing you some anxiety. |
| 1:33.1 | When you can feel that anxiety somewhere in your body, rate the level of it on a scale of 1 to 10. |
| 1:39.0 | Now pass the ball back and forth from one hand to the other, crossing the midline, so you are stimulating both |
| 1:45.6 | hemispheres of the brain. Do this for a minute, then stop, take a deep breath, and check in. |
| 1:55.0 | You might note, keyword you might note, that the anxiety has dissipated. If so, this is because by activating |
| 2:03.4 | both hemispheres of your brain, you are spreading blood and electrical impulses throughout |
| 2:07.8 | the brain, and this floods that area of association and diffuses it. That bully of an anxiety |
| 2:13.6 | cluster just can't keep itself together. Now, think of the same situation again and see how |
| 2:19.9 | much anxiety you can manage to conjure up, and rate it once again on the one to ten scale. |
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