Oprah Winfrey's life coach has revealed why it can be counterproductive trying to 'fight' your anxiety and what to try instead.
Anxiety can be all-consuming and affect your body as well as your mental health.
Granted, there are certain things you learn and pick up along the way when it comes to dealing with feeling anxious and getting into a fight-or-flight state, but there's one method which you may not have heard of, and it's to do with oranges.
During an appearance on Steven Bartlett's The Diary of a CEO podcast, Harvard-educated sociologist Dr Martha Beck set the scene.
Advert
She told Bartlett: "You've gone to a fight or flight arousal state, 'Something's wrong,' I' m very focused and anxious but also snappish, I'm fleeing on one side and need to get out of this situation but fighting on one side, like, 'Tell me what's wrong'.
"So you've got a full fight or flight thing happening so you can get into that by imagining the situation.
"Now I want you to imagine something else very vividly and it would probably help if you close your eyes.
"[...] So imagine that you are holding an orange."
Advert
Hey, don't hate until you try.
Dr Beck continues: "Imagine that you are holding an orange, it's a nice, ripe, heavy, delicious orange at the peak of its ripeness [..] You can smell the citrus, you just take a bite of it to break the seal of the peeling and just feel that little spray of citric acid that pops up when you bite the peel and then the bitterness of the rind.
"And then as you bite in the juice gets in your mouth, it's sweet, it's a little bit tangy, you can feel the filaments of the skin and the stringiness of the insides and you can pull back the peel, you can feel it on your fingernails, you can smell it.
Advert
"Just put the broken part to your mouth and squeeze the orange and let some juice get into your mouth and taste it completely and then swallow it. And enjoy the sensation."
Now try for yourself and see - and there's method behind the apparent madness.
Dr Beck explains that when you distract your brain with this sensory imaginative exercise, really letting yourself 'enjoy the sensation of tasting, feeling, hearing this experience,' the right hemisphere of your brain is engaged.
Advert
The left hemisphere - verbal imagination - can end up telling you 'horror stories' and worst-case scenarios, but by engaging the right hemisphere, you engage in a sensory experience.
When you're in an anxious state, you imagine on the basis of the horror stories you're being told by your verbal imagination.
However, when you engage your right hemisphere and sensory experience, and 'imagine forward with your senses', this 'brings relaxation'.
Dr Beck reveals: "What happens to your physical body when you're completely connected to the experience of this imaginary orange [...] you start breathing more deeply, you stop producing all the cortisol, the glucocorticoids, the adrenaline that you had in the fight or flight state, and now you're starting to produce serotonin and dopamine."
So, if you can 'hold that energy' from that exercise, you can become more 'curious' about what's going on and question the horror stories your verbal imagination are telling you or the stimulus in front of you which you're uncertain about i.e. someone looking tense.
Advert
Rather than 'fighting' your anxiety, Dr Beck notes how you wouldn't 'run at a frightened animal' and say 'tell me what you want'.
Instead, the orange method helps 'move your nervous system into a state where you can be a field of peace for someone else who's anxious'.
If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available through Mental Health America. Call or text 988 to reach a 24-hour crisis center or you can webchat at 988lifeline.org. You can also reach the Crisis Text Line by texting MHA to 741741.
Topics: Health, Mental Health, Oprah Winfrey, Podcast
Poppy Bilderbeck