Is Claire Weekes saying to loosen your body throughout the entire day?

[Ryukil]

I get the panic attacks thing. I don't have panic attacks, but she is is saying if a panic attack comes up you should loosen your body and just let it kind of fly over you.

But for someone with GAD...when she talks about acceptance and loosening, does she mean to go through your day being as relaxed as possible? Wouldn't this cause me to be constantly looking at myself to make sure I am doing it? What about when I'm in bed? Like does it have to be 24/7?

If someone who had GAD and came through using Claire Weekes could explain this I would be very appreciative.

I also read At Last A Life which honestly made more sense to me than Claire Weekes but yeah...

Claire Weekes says we are "tensing against" symptoms whereas I see it as...we are tense because we are anxious. The two are basically inseparable.

[Davit]

Of course if you didn't have symptoms you wouldn't be tense! Wouldn't that be a better solution?

[Ryukil]

Well I'm trying to go about the acceptance approach and Weekes says that loosening your body is an essential part of acceptance. I could see that for panic attacks but maybe not for GAD?

[Davit]

But if you are thinking negative thoughts as happens with worry in GAD do you want to accept them. NO. What you accept is you have GAD or anxiety or panic attacks so you don't fight it and use coping and relaxation skills to stop the symptoms or prevent them. That is acceptance. Assertiveness is a coping skill where you tell anxiety in combination with acceptance to get lost. "I know you are here, (acceptance) now go away because I don't need you (assertive)". Combine this with coping skills and you get some relief.

[MyNameIsTerry]

This is where Claire Weekes seems to be a little sketchy and this probably reflects the age of her material as these types of questions seem to pop up on forums and its left to peoples interpretation.

If you have OCD and you tried to apply active relaxation in this manner constantly throughout your day you could end up creating a whole new ritual. So, you become anxious, you reach for your ritual to relax. Well thats partly how OCD works, so why encourage it.

If you don't have OCD, this shouldn't be a problem but I would say that you could just end up making a safety behaviour out of it and doing it for the sake of it. In the long run, you don't want to have to do it - you want it to be intuitive.

Relaxing your body doesn't have to be part of acceptance, acceptance is a state of mind. What I have found is that acceptance is a hard skill to master and sometimes you learn some skills quicker than others and come back to some later. This is why I prefer Mindfulness because acceptance is one of its 8 core principles and some of the others make more immediate sense so you can see improvement in mastering them when other areas remain slow.

I think things must have changed on NMP because when I joined a thread titles "Claire Weekes" would have had some discussions triggered because people liked her methods. Nowadays its a bit of a tumbleweed and more people who don't agree come along and try to help instead.

Can you do some searches to find what you need from "Weekes" maybe? I know JonJones is a big advocate of hers and he has put up some threads in the past and he is always talking about how to loosen up when he posts.

[ricardo]

I believe "Self help for your nerves" was the first Claire Weekes book to be published and as Terry correctly points out this was written about 50 years ago and medication and various techniques have moved on.

I have had GAD for over thirty years, so her book was a real comfort to me.I read and reread various paragraphs . I understood practically everything but just have never been able to put into practice the principles to try and make me more relaxed.

Even simple breathing exercises are difficult as my mind just wanders and I lose concentration as it is with Headspace.

I have been told that my subconscious wont let me get better but I think when first put onto medication I became more relaxed and just accepted that I could do a few things,but didn't push myself to get a better quality of life, as I was and still am in a comfort zone.

I am not trying to depress others by writing this, just for them not to make the same mistakes that I have done.

Basically I have had two lives,a normal half doing absolutely anything and 30 + years of torture and now having had a heart attack the anxiety and depression has escalated.

I know people want to read success stories but unfortunately it isn't always the case.

[Ryukil]

Why wouldn't you ever try to implement it?