Alive: Stress Management for Transformation (SMT)
Welcome to the world of Alive, where your initiative to better manage your stress can bring you the health and happiness you deserve. Imagine a life where stress just fades away. With a little patience and persistence, this life is yours!
What is Stress?
Stress is a normal emotional, mental, and physical reaction to what’s happening around us. Some degree of stress is good. It keeps us on our toes, challenges us to grow and adapt to new situations, and protects us in times of crisis. Too much stress can be quite harmful.
Why Focus on Stress Management?
Unmanaged stress harms us emotionally, physically and socially. Over time, we get irritable or tense; we feel dissatisfied or overwhelmed; our relationships get strained and suffer; we become fatigued and prone to illness. This is why learning how to manage stress is so important.
Stress management is a set of tools for managing life. Though we can't stop stressful situations from occurring, we can learn how to deal with them calmly and more effectively. When we are able to consciously respond, instead of continuously react, to our stressors our experience of life is easier and more pleasurable. This new way of being increases vitality and productivity as well as promoting restful sleep, sharper concentration, improved relationships, and a heightened sense of wellbeing. As we develop an awareness of how stress enters and sharply affects our lives, we are better able to counteract any negative effects and less likely to become triggered.
Alive uses heart rate feedback, similar to biofeedback, but intended for individuals to increase their awareness in a non-clinical setting.
What is Heart Rate Feedback?
Heart rate feedback allows you to visually observe moment-by-moment physical changes brought about by both stress and relaxation.
As you train with this exciting technology, you will observe firsthand how the way you think and feel is expressed by various parts of your body.
Change happens both consciously and unconsciously — simply by training with heart rate feedback on a regular basis, you will encourage positive changes in your mind and body that will reduce stress and ease tension. Heart rate feedback is a powerful tool to help you manage your stress naturally and effectively.
Training Enhancement Exercise:
Becoming More Aware of My Life Stressors
Successfully using Alive’s heart rate feedback for stress management includes being willing to bring the stressful areas of everyday life to the forefront of your mind & identify your stressors.
Reflect on...
What triggers stress in my life?
In your Notebook
Make a list of these stressful situations, places, people, and activities.
Visualize and experience each stress trigger (stressor).
Assign a level of intensity for each (from 1 – 10; minimal to severe, lowest to highest).
Use Your Breath as a Stress Smoother
Stressful moments often cause unnatural breathing patterns which intensify your stress.
The way you breathe can either decrease or increase your stress level. Natural breathing is known to be helpful in lessening stress and anxiety and smoothes your heart rate.
Practice breathing less stressfully and more naturally:
Alive in Your Life
Over the next few days notice when you are affected by any of those stressors.
Practice using effective breathing techniques to smooth your stress.
Use heart rate feedback to see which stress management techniques really work!
The above off-screen SMT exercises are quite valuable on their own. However, they were created to be used with heart rate feedback to get maximum stress management benefits. For instance, by using the on-screen display that shows your heart rate and relaxation levels, you can find out which breathing methods most effectively help you relax!
Breathing is a key to reducing stress, but it is only one of six main stress smoothers that SMT trains you to develop and use in your everyday life. Stress smoothers lessen the negative effects of your stress on your mind and body, allowing you to be calmer, think more clearly, make skillful choices, and handle challenges without becoming overwhelmed.
The full Alive SMT package includes training with Alive on-screen Workshops, Games and Environments. Here are examples of the many ways that the breathing stress smoother is used in Alive SMT:
Example of an Alive Heart Rate Feedback Training
Alive Environment Breath Spirals
This training shows your stress levels on-screen and requires Alive and the Alive heart rate sensor.
In this environment you use your breath to smooth your heart rate, making the music louder and expanding the particle wave.
Give yourself the gift of relaxation!
Click here to purchase your own full Alive SMT package.