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On this episode Ms. Jill Garvin, Wing Director of Psychological Health, speaks to Ms. Christi Garner about the importance of recognizing that nervous system wellness is just as important as physical wellness, as they discuss different ways to take your body from a stress response into a rest response. Ms. Christi Garner, is a licensed therapist and one of the 102nd ISR Group key spouses, and has worked extensively with active duty service members and families. www.traumaeducator.com
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Garvin:hello everybody this is Jill Garvin the director of psychological health for the 102nd intelligence wing it's nice to be with you today i have a special guest her name is miss Christi Garner and she is one of the 102nd isr group key spouses and a licensed therapist who has worked extensively with active duty service members and families most recently she was an embedded therapist with the squadron flying and maintaining Marine One and then a security forces squadron at a po1 installation which is one of the highest protection level for air force assets and she is also the spouse of one of our wonderful commanders here Col. Dovalo so i appreciate you being here and you are going to talk about how to go from stress to rest and so i'm going to let you explain what that means exactly and why it's important and we'll have a discussion around it
Garner: awesome thanks Jill i'm excited to be here so going from stress to rest we are going to look at today some tactics techniques and procedures of how to take your body from a stress response into more of a rest response and it seems like these days right now especially with the stress of what's happening in the world around us as well as some of the isolation and being stuck at home and having our kids with us a lot of the time and a lot of our activities that we go to for rest and relaxation we don't have access to right now
Garvin:absolutely
Garner:so learning some different ways to put your body into a rest state has been one of the top topics that i've been talking to clients and even my friends about this list
Garvin:good well i could use it too and i definitely have noticed just with a lot of the folks that come into my office it is a really stressful time for everybody it has been so i love that you're going to give us some ideas on on how to rest our nervous system
Garner:yeah awesome so the number one thing that i always tell people and has really been an issue in our house is sleep routines so falling asleep first of all right like making that nighttime routine of course staying off electronics if you can for an hour before you go to bed but i know that sometimes a lot of my service members including my husband have a hard time falling asleep so progressive muscle relaxation or you can also youtube something called yoga nidra but it's a way to relax your body kind of from head to toe so that you can fall asleep with more ease
Garvin:i love yoga nidra i listen to that too we mentioned this on another podcast insight timer and uh for folks that don't know what that is you're not actually doing yoga but as you're resting and your eyes are closed you're just uh focusing kind of like a muscle a progressive muscle relaxation but you're focusing on different parts of your body and it is so calming i love it
Garner:so calming and it helps i swear everyone that i tell it to it has dramatically increased their ability to fall asleep faster and rest deeper and the other thing that we've really been doing at my house is looking at our devices like our apple watches or fitbits and analyzing our sleep patterns and what we noticed is you know you can really track things such as staying up later drinking alcohol exercising or shift change times you can really see how those affect your sleep and your rest abilities
Garvin:because it tells you if you're getting really restful replenished sleep
Garner:that's right sleep yep and it tells you when how much of the time you're deep sleeping like i am a super light sleeper so i get about sometimes only 30 minutes to an hour of deep sleep a night where my husband gets about eight hours of deep sleep so when i wake up tired every day i was like wow what is what is going on with me like am i not eating right am i not exercising right but when i started really tracking my sleep patterns it really helped me to understand where i needed to put more time and effort and for me that was a routine
Garvin:coming up with strategies to help you get a deeper sleep
Garner:yeah totally so that was my number one tip for everybody is getting a fitbit or apple watch or using something to track your sleep and then doing some kind of routine right before bed like yoga nidra or progressive muscle relaxation and the second one and i'm pretty sure we've talked about this before Jill but breathing we all know how to breathe but we have to sometimes reteach ourselves how to breathe so that the breath is working for us and not against us
Garvin:i like that and that's one thing that i tell just about everybody that comes into my office too it's something that i practice i remember when that was first suggested to me i didn't really understand how breathing was gonna help but now it's a habit so i notice when i'm not deep breathing or i'm shallow if i'm having some anxiety i know that i'm not really breathing very well so there's a lot of science behind that and i really encourage people to to check that out for themselves
Garner:yeah absolutely
Garvin:what kind of breathing techniques do you use
Garner:so i my two go-to are the foursquare breathing which i think comes from a special forces training anyway where they teach you to breathe in for four hold for four breathe out for four and hold for four so that kind of four square breathing i notice all of my frontline responders and people that are interacting in stressful situations that's a super easy one to remember that will help you to kind of get back into that more rest and parasympathetic system instead of that fight flight anxious sympathetic place so four square breathing and the other one that i use is four seven eight so like you said getting that deeper breath sometimes we want to focus more on the out breath and the in-breath if we're feeling we're having a lot of anxiety or tension or stress so that's breathing in for four holding for seven and then breathing out for eight so that one will work any time even for kids especially when you notice yourself getting a little bit more anxious or tense
Garvin:that's a great idea to remind people that they can do with this with their children as well i remember seeing my niece i think they did something in school but she would hold up her hands and then count like you know one two three four with her digits her fingers to keep track so that would be something that parents could do with their children for calming breathing exercises
Garner:absolutely it's a great one and the kids one of the best things i always tell people is you can get your kids to teach you how to do it then they feel like they have some control and they're showing you something new but that's always a good one like mom's feeling upset can you show me how to do that calming breath again that we practiced right so kind of making it a game
Garvin:great idea thanks thank you
Garner:so breathing it always is always a good one um you know and the other thing that i think we're all dealing with is some zoom fatigue right
Garvin:yes
Garner:so a lot of the way that our nervous system responds to the way we're all interacting these days we have our cameras really close up to our face which is not something we are normally seeing people so close up and so intensely focused on people the way that we have been this last year over the zoom so a little tip that will help you move from this more like extreme focused sometimes tense place of being on a zoom call all day is to focus like on your screen where you're watching the zoom and then let yourself focus six feet away for just like 10 seconds and then bring your focus back to the screen for a few seconds and then focus back out to the wall behind you or maybe out a window so that kind of movement of the eyes really helps the system to engage
Garvin:yeah that's a great idea that's kind of like some of the bilateral you know there's tapping and left and right side of the brain and it sounds like that's kind of what you're talking about just how it can soothe our nervous system and calm things down too
Garner:yeah so some simple stuff that you can do at any moment on any zoom call you you you can do this and no one's going to
Garvin:really good for your eyes too right just to give them a little rest as well away from the screen
Garner:totally and i don't know if you wear the blue light blockers but we've been wearing those glasses at our house and i think you can find them on the internet amazon for like 15 bucks or something
Garvin:yeah i just got some reading ones in addition to these so i'm just trying them out now can you tell the difference
Garner:yeah definitely you know i spend sometimes 10 to 12 hours a day on zoom meetings and on the computer and for a while i was getting really bad headaches by the end of thursday or friday so i noticed if i use my blue light blockers as much as possible and the other thing that Col. Dovalo does is he turns his night vision on his computer 24 7. so instead of having it bright during the day it's on that night vision which takes away some of the blue light so those are the two tips that we've been working with to help with the technology fatigue that's been happening so focusing on your finger and then focusing away so i have some more technology tips you can download on my website and we can link that up for any of you folks that want to get some more of those
Garvin:okay what is that
Garner:www.traumaeducator.com and there's some downloads for yoga nidra meditations and technology fatigue as well
Garvin:great well and again you know just the importance of recognizing that our nervous system really needs attention and and maintenance to perform our best so just like we train our train our bodies to be fit we can also train train our brains for mental health fitness and and i think just being aware of our nervous system and how that's impacted and you know there's stress hormones like cortisol and and things like that that can really be pretty shocking to our nervous system and i remember i had a job working in crisis services and it was a very probably the most stressful job i've ever had but i had a co-worker that was hired and after about two weeks she said yeah this is too it's not good for my nervous system it's too jarring and she quit and i was like wow what a way to take care of yourself you know just recognizing that something is a little too much you know but just again having that awareness on on on how things impact your nervous system is great
Garner:yeah and i think like you said if we we exercise to keep our bodies healthy and this is one way to do that as well practicing some of these exercises looking at your sleep making space to rest and take care of yourself is like exercising your mind body right that connection that we need because people that have a higher level of stress and tension tend to develop long-term health problems right higher levels of heart attacks
Garvin:Ulcers
Garner:yep tons and tons of research around this yeah so the more you can bring your system back into that rest state actually the more you're taking care of yourself in the long term to make sure your body is functioning at a more efficient and more restful way which is really important because right now even though times might be stressful is we can rest in our bodies and kind of provide that level of comfort for ourselves then we can do that more easily in our families right and with our partners and then that seeps out to our teams and our communities and our larger family systems which we could all use a little bit more compassion care and rest
Garvin:oh definitely well it's like the the saying it's important to put on you know the oxygen mass on yourself first you know if you're taking care of yourself first your your mental health your physical health then we're able to take care of others better and we're in a better better position to do that so yeah any other any other tips that you want to give us
Garner:i think just as we move towards spring which we're all feeling it i hope remembering to get outside in nature and even gardening or spending some time walking amongst the trees or on the canal path or wherever you're at is super helpful so that's one i'm looking forward to
Garvin:me too everybody is daylight savings time is coming up not too not too far away and for those people i know some people that struggle with depression or seasonal affective disorder because we don't always get a lot of sunlight here really have a hard time motivating themselves to get out or to get some sunlight so sometimes i'll suggest you can just go around the block once you know and then maybe the next week you can go around twice if it feels too overwhelming to get back into some kind of fitness routine just to start really small and set yourself up for success
Garner:absolutely i love that tip yeah
Garvin:first things first you know you don't have to and progress not perfection i love that saying too you don't have to be perfect at anything just try
Garner:keep it simple yep
Garvin:yeah anything else yep that's it thank you and then i want to remind everybody of Christi's website www.traumaeducator.com and i think you said there's some free things you can download to help with that stress to rest practice and yeah and i encourage folks to to think about what sounds right for you or to try some of these things and see what a good fit is so thank you so much for being here and hope to have you back it's just nice to have short simple tangible topics each time for people to use especially right now during this pandemic so thank you
Garner:thanks for having me Jill
| Date Taken: | 03.02.2021 |
| Date Posted: | 03.02.2021 08:38 |
| Category: | Newscasts |
| Audio ID: | 65437 |
| Filename: | 2103/DOD_108209287.mp3 |
| Length: | 00:15:38 |
| Location: | OTIS AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, MA, US |
| Web Views: | 15 |
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This work, 102nd Intelligence Wing Wellness Podcast for Feb. 26, 2021 - Going from stress to rest, by SrA Francesca Skridulis, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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