Your Third Appointment
Support Guide

We have now started to work with your mind directly. Managing your mind, rather than allowing your mind to manage you, will offer you better mind and body control.

Please internalise this session by imagining yourself through the process. Your practice will still take thirty minutes - and this needs to become yours. Do not rely on a recording alone. The recording supports your practice, but it will not be there for you when you need these skills in real life.

Think of an athlete: the training is for the event, but the training is not the event. Your event is your life.

During this session you were introduced to the Stress Coping Strategy - a technique that works in two ways. Used during your daily practice, it helps deepen relaxation. Used in everyday life, once you have built your conditioned response, it will act as a thought-stopping tool to interrupt irrational or unhelpful thoughts before they take hold.

You also began to explore how breathing directly affects your stress hormones. Through diaphragm breathing and loop breathing, you experienced how quickly and effectively this can be reversed - and how relaxed you became as a result.

Once you become comfortable with the SCS, you can use it to interrupt irrational thoughts as they arise. It will move your mind away from the thought and onto something more useful - not permanently, but enough to break the pattern in that moment.

Each time an irrational thought arises, use the SCS. If you have ten irrational thoughts, use it ten times. Over time, this trains your mind not to generate those thoughts in the first place.

You may have developed a habit of thinking a certain way. The SCS will help you build a new, healthier habit of mind.

It is not the environment itself that is causing distress - it is what these triggers mean to you, and the way you are allowing them to affect the quality of your life.

By changing your perception, you will not experience the same response. Some people live in identical environments and remain entirely unaffected. The difference is not the situation - it is the meaning being attached to it.

Sometimes we hold on to beliefs that actually maintain the very issues we are trying to resolve. Consider whether any of these feel familiar:

If you want to continue feeling this way, you have certainly found a way to maintain those feelings - through the thoughts you allow yourself to hold. Consider instead: why not let those beliefs go and become happier? Being happy is being successful.

From today, in the spirit of constructive thinking, we will focus only on what we want. We have no intention of achieving what we do not want, so we are choosing to stop giving it our attention - and instead allow more space for the thinking that moves us forward.

Your full practice sequence is now as follows:

You are building a conditioned response - a reliable, internal route to calm that will eventually be available to you anywhere, at any time. For now, keep it within your daily practice. One successful step at a time.

You have recently completed your third session. We are assuming at this point that you have been practising phases one and two and achieving a consistent sense of relaxation in your body.

Your personal experience of relaxation will be different from other people's. If you are experiencing relaxation when using this method, you are being successful. The depth of your experience and what you expect it to feel like are personal perceptions - they may not always match, and that is completely normal.

Trying harder will increase frustration and stress. Please accept that what you are achieving right now is as good as it gets for now - and that will continue to improve with practice and acceptance. If you are still trying to reach an expectation, please stop. Trying is not relaxing.

Now that you are doing something about these issues, you will gain more control over how your mind and body respond. If you have any concerns at any point, please reach out rather than waiting for your next appointment.

We look forward to continuing to work with you. Please take into account that these support pages are written for a range of clients - not every section will apply directly to your situation, but some of it will. Take what is useful and leave the rest.

We look forward to seeing you at your next appointment.