Dealing with Anxiety

Start Date: February 13, 2023
Duration: 5 weeks
Tuition: $29
Registration: Now Open!

Anxiety, fear, and worry are normal reactions, but they don’t have to be your constant companions. 

Through this course, Dr Rick Hanson, New York Times’ bestselling author and psychologist will take you through powerful practices for managing stresses and worries.  You will let go of anxiety and grow a greater sense of calm, strength, and being protected and supported by other people and more able to deal with threatening situations around you.

Course Description

• You will get 5 powerful practices from Dr Rick Hanson for managing stresses and worries
• Explore ideas and practical, evidence-based methods for replacing anxiety with a sense of ease and confidence
• As you engage these practices, you will hardwire their benefits into your nervous system so that you’ll have them with you wherever you go – helping you feel less preoccupied and nervous, and stronger and more hopeful

Rick provides a brief description of the course in this video:

Course Method of Delivery

• Video teachings
• An overview and outline of each video
• 5 weekly email emails to guide you through the program
• Audio downloads and printable handouts

Course Outline

In this program, you'll be exploring ideas and especially practical methods for feeling less tense, feeling calmer, and disengaging from anxious preoccupations that go round and round and round, including in the middle of the night. 

When you find something useful in this program, apply it in everyday life, because as you engage these practices, you will hardwire their benefits increasingly in your own nervous system and have them with you wherever you go.  Over time, if you really engage this program, truly, you will feel less anxious. 

• Why We Are Anxious and What We Can Do About It

Anxiety is really common.   People experience it on a range from mild, subtle uneasiness, apprehensiveness, or caution through an ongoing sense of tension, vigilance, and fearfulness, all the way out to panic and even terror.  We can experience anxiety for many different reasons and the focus in the course will be on growing resources inside yourself.

• A Calm Core

One of the most effective and fundamental ways to lower anxiety is to calm the body. When we engage the parasympathetic wing of the autonomic nervous system, it helps us settle down. Scientists call it "the rest and digest" portion of our autonomic nervous system, in part because it's involved with regulation of the viscera and digestion.  In this module we learn what to do to calm the body.

• A Sense of Strength

Anxiety comes up, understandably, when there's a mismatch between threats and resources.  So one way to deal with it is to bring down any actual threats - as well as an overestimation of threats - while bringing up the sense of resources, including the sense of strength. It also helps to increase an accurate perception of your own strength.  In this module we focus on building up the sense of strength inside.

• Recognising Protections

We all need to feel safe. It's the most fundamental need of all. One of the major ways to help oneself feel as safe as you reasonably can is to be more aware of the protections in your life, including the resources that are around you, in your physical body, and inside your own mind.  By doing that we are able to recognize that we are protected in some way, even as we cope with the challenges to our need for safety.

• No More Paper Tiger Paranoia

Why do we overestimate the likelihood of bad events occurring and how bad it would feel if they happened? 

This paper tiger paranoia can be useful because it keeps us on our toes, but for most people, this leads to needless anxiety and swerving away from opportunities with an over focus on threats.  We recognise the deep roots are found in our biological evolution of the nervous system and for this module we are going to borrow a very simple and powerful technique from cognitive therapy that to do as an experiential practice.

• Feeling Alright, Right Now

The brain, as the master regulator of the body, really needs to know what's going on inside there.  The body is routinely telling the brain all is well and we habituate to it and gradually start tuning it out.  Meanwhile, because of the brain's negativity bias, any little time that we don't feel basically alright really lands and becomes memorable.  With practice you can start to observe the fact of basic all-right-ness and feel it just about any time and have a growing sense of a mind that feels covered with an ongoing sense of reassurance and confidence as you move forward in your life.

• Taking Action in Your Life

It's really important to scale resources up to the level of the threat. Action also has the value of binding anxiety so that if you're taking systematic, concrete action that's related to the threat, pain, or danger, then you can feel better inside yourself as you cope with it.  As you do the kind of practices we've explored here, you can build up this core of calm strength, not just to feel safe, but to actually be safe. By integrating the development of your own inner resources and practices with effective sustained action out in your world, you will be more able to be safer and feel safer down that long road of life.

About the Facilitator

Rick Hanson, Ph.D, is a psychologist,Senior Fellow at UC Berkley's Greater Good Science Center,and New York Times best-selling author. His books are available in 31 languages - with over a million copies in Englixh alone. He has lectured at NASA, Google, Oxford and Harvard. He has taught in meditation centers worldwide and been featured on the BBC, CBS, NPR and other major media.

https://www.rickhanson.net/