Videos

Ep375. How To Use Visualization to Regulate Your Nervous System + Reduce Anxiety

Positive emotions like happiness, ease, connection, joy, love and more have a profound positive impact on our nervous system. When we experience these emotions, our body responds with a cascade of calming hormones and neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins.

As a result, we slow down our heart rate, lower blood pressure, and reduce stress hormone levels, creating a sense of relaxation and calmness. This means, we are taking our nervous system out of the chronic fight and fight and move it into the rest and digest mode, which is exactly what we need in order to reduce or eliminate chronic anxiety and pain. Because remember, these are simply results of chronic dysregulation!

Visualization is a powerful technique that calms the nervous system by rewiring our brain's response to stress. When we vividly imagine ourselves in a peaceful, safe environment, our body relaxes and releases tension. We can do that by going back to positive memories and not just THINKING about them but recreating the FEELING that was present when the situation that brought us joy, ease or another positive emotion happened.

The brain processes this visual information, reducing cortisol levels and heart rate, while increasing feelings of calmness and relaxation. Regular visualization practice can retrain the nervous system to respond to stress with more ease (although you are NOT supposed to NEVER get upset — you’re a human not a robot), but you will have less anxiety and the intensity of it reduces too. Visualization a wonderful tool that can really change our health and it can help reduce chronic sensations.

When should you do it?
How should you do it?
How to find the positive feelings to focus on?
What if you don’t have positive memories?

Find the answers in today’s podcast!

Check out my FREE 14-day course Strong + Sensitive, meant for Highly Sensitive People and people with TMS: https://kerstenkimura.lpages.co/ss-14-day-course/
This course combines mindset tools + FREE strength training workouts!

Emotionally Fit is my new emotional healing program for chronic pain or other chronic symptom recovery. You can find it here: https://kersten-kimura.teachable.com/p/emotionally-fit

If you are looking for a safe and effective, BEGINNER level strength training program, check out my brand new Train to Build STARTER: https://kersten-kimura.teachable.com/p/train-to-build-starter

For an INTERMEDIATE level strength training program, check out Train to Build: https://kersten-kimura.teachable.com/p/train-to-build

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Check out my website: https://kerstenkimura.com/

Kersten Kimura

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