Do you want to relax? Do this very fast exercise

• The breathing and mindfulness exercise proposed by Kaytee Gillis focuses outside the body, focusing on an imagined pleasant situation.

• To begin with, you need to be offline, relax in a comfortable position and regularize your breathing, devoting about 10 minutes to yourself.

• During the exercise, you explore the mental environment with all your senses and listen to environmental sounds before returning to reality, promoting relaxation and reducing anxiety.

Of theeffectiveness of breathing and mindfulness in containing anxiety and worry, we have talked a lot about it. The interesting aspect of this exercise proposed by psychotherapist Kaytee Gillis is that, unlike those we have discussed so far, they focus outside our bodies. If you are familiar with breathing techniques and visualizations, you know that very often they start with your body and also focus on it: on breathing, precisely, but also on all the signals it sends us. The fact is that not everyone has a peaceful relationship with it or perhaps not everyone can make such a smooth contact with the stimuli the body sends.

A journey outside of you

To begin with, you need to be as offline as possible. To succeed:

1. Put the phone in airplane mode
2. Put up a “Do Not Disturb” sign if you are in a hotel room or have your own office. What you will take for a short amount of time, usually 10 minutes (including the beginning and ending stages, while the exercise itself lasts about 5 minutes), is time dedicated to you alone or lonely, you should not feel guilty about it. Aim for an alarm of this duration and let’s get started.
3. Find a position that is relaxing and does not load your back. Some people also like to do it lying down, some sitting down. The important thing is to feel comfortable and not have to think during the exercise about how you look.
4. Now enter the actual state of relaxation. You can take a handful of seconds or a few minutes. Even those who have been doing it for a long time may not have the same result every time, so don’t despair and don’t think that taking more than a few minutes to relax means failure. To accomplish this, close your eyes and regularize your breathing, perhaps choosing from one of these six different techniques.
5. As we said, this technique is special because it does not “use” the body to function. All that is required of you is to think of a situation that is particularly pleasant for you. It could be an afternoon at your grandparents’ when you were in kindergarten or a walk along the riverfront and trekking in the Dolomites.
6. After recalling the environment to memory, try exploring it, using your whole body: how do the furniture, walls, upholstery feel to the touch, what scents and smells do you smell, what noises do you perceive? In short, don’t feel the sensations that your body sends you but those that pass through it and are perceived by your senses.
7. During the visualization-which, unlike other visualizations, you chose by recalling it to memory, you can linger on other details and perhaps explore minutiae of the scene that you missed at the time.
8. By now the timer is about to sound: time is running out. When you hear it ringing, don’t open your eyes right away but stay a few more tens of seconds in that state of mind and then begin to listen to the ambient noises and sounds of the place you are in, to have them call you back, little by little.
9. After you open your eyes again, don’t immediately pick up your cell phone to check if anyone has been looking for you or to check that while you were inattentive, World War III didn’t break out. Obviously nothing has happened except that you are more relaxed and that those 15-20 minutes have not disrupted your schedule.

When you have ten free minutes, from now on you know what you can do. And especially what is good for you to do ;)