4 Science-Backed Ways to Reduce Anxiety in 60 Seconds

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hey there billionaire. Yep, I'm talking to you. If you expect to live another 31 years, you're already a billionaire. Not in money, but in the real measure of wealth, time. That's because 31 years is roughly a billion seconds, but most of us waste time in ways we'd never waste money. The currency of time billionaires is micro moments, the 90 second to 15 minute gaps hidden between the structured parts of your day. This podcast is about reclaiming them with quick, research backed ideas to help you feel more creative, productive and alive. Welcome to Time Billionaires. Let's make your next micro moment count. [00:00:38] Speaker B: Today's episode is one that I can't believe I didn't think to record sooner, and it's just a quick overview of four of my favorite micro moment activities and how and why you might want to do them. The first one is called bilateral doodling and it just involves drawing with both of your hands. This has been shown in FMRI scans to increase the connectivity and the communication between both hemispheres of your brain and it's also just a lot of fun and easy to do. All you need to do is pick up a pen or a crayon or a marker in both of your hands. I like to use one that's a little easier to track in my non dominant hand and set a timer for two minutes. Then just draw anything you want. My personal favorite is overlapping isosceles triangles, but you can draw squares or spirals or caricatures anything you want. That just gets your brain thinking and moving in a way it doesn't normally. The second one is called make it a metaphor and it just involves looking around at any object in your environment and creating a metaphor before about how it describes your current state or how you're feeling. The other day I did one of this paperclip is me trying to hold too many things together and I found that the objectivity I felt looking at another object and describing how it described my current state helped me take some of the self critique out. I had been feeling like I couldn't do so many things, but then I realized when I described it in the metaphor of the paperclip that the paperclip wasn't designed to hold 90 pages together and I wasn't designed to hold 90 threads together. It helped me feel a little more grounded and connected to where I was and a little less self critical. This next one is a good one to get outside. You can also do it indoors and it's one that when I first heard about I actually thought sounded pretty Silly. And I almost didn't do it, but now I'm glad I tried it because doing this activity is what I credit with connecting the dots of the micro limit research I'd been doing but hadn't quite been able to synthesize until then. It's also the closest thing I found to being able to recreate and shadow or shower thoughts of the one time that we feel really unplugged and not really thinking about things tends to be when we have some of our most creative ideas and bring threads together. And this involves just trying to create different shapes and appreciating your shadow. The easiest way to do this is just to walk outside and look down at the ground and see the different shapes that your shadow creates as it merges with other objects that you're passing. Or you can even try to intentionally create certain shapes that you find interesting. You can make a dog and et cetera out of your shadow and just watch how it moves around. Like I said, I know it sounds kind of silly, but I hope you'll try it and let me know what you think. And this last one is my favorite actually. It's the way that we end most yoga practices, and it's for a reason. So humans are wired to be especially creative and focused in times of transition. But we tend to blur through transition in our modern lives. We rush from meeting to meeting. We scroll while we're waiting in doctor's offices. But those transitions are powerful opportunities to feel more creative and focused. So this is just called savasana. And savasana means corpse pose. Because in yoga we're honoring the death of a practice and the possibility and transition that it creates for something new. So just lay on the ground wherever you are. It can be in your room, your office, even outside on the grass or on the ground for 60 seconds and just look up at the sky or the ceiling. You can decide to place one hand on your heart. You can do a cactus arm where your arms are back, kind of in a cactus goalpost pose, or which is shown to increase posture, improve your posture and increase blood flow and just for 60 seconds, feel more grounded in your environment. You don't have to be anywhere else. You don't have to focus on or do anything else. Just see what you think and see how you feel more connected to where you are in present space and time. I would love to hear what you think if you try any of these. [00:04:21] Speaker A: Thanks for spending this micro moment with me. If you found it valuable, share it with a fellow time billionaire and give us a rating to help others discover the power of micro moments. For more ways to reclaim your time, check out timebillionaires.org and follow me. Rebecca Shattucks on LinkedIn. [00:04:37] Speaker B: See you next time.