Feeling Stressed? 5 Quick Alexander Techinque Tips to Feel Better 

Thanks Brett!

I think that this is a common with many people who try to observe the breath or use the breath to relax. The best advice I can give is to only control the out breath. Let the in breath be completely uncontrolled. You can work on slowing down the out breath, often by quietly making a sound such as 'ffffff' or 'ahhhhhh' but before you completely run out of air, seal you lips and let the breath recover automatically. Avoid 'Taking' a deep breath and focus on slowing and lengthening the out breath. Hope that helps! I'll try to make a video about using the breath soon.

Thanks for your comment. Really glad you're finding them helpful. Great topic suggestion, I'll add it to the list.

Thanks so much, that's very kind of you! I try to teach in the way that I would like to have been taught. You can make progress by yourself but it is a lot easier if you can work with a skilled teacher who can use their hands to help you get the experience of more balance and freedom. Sorry to hear your previous experience wasn't helpful. May be worth trying a different teacher if there are any others near you. All the best, Pete

@@MovementandPosture thanks Pete I think it's because I'm not at ease with anyone doing hands on things to me, I just feel uncomfortable. I will sign up for your online course.

@@cinders1413 I totally understand. Thankfully with modern technology, it's possible for people to choose the learning style that works best for them. Hope you enjoy the course and please do me a line if you have any questions etc

I think that many people who have learnt AT have found that it can be really transformative in many areas of their lives, often unexpectedly. I guess there are 2 elements to your friends case, the first is the therapeutic benefit of the AT teacher. If the teacher is supportive, calming, compassionate and able to assist your friend to access a state where they are less at the mercy of their habits then the sessions can provide a genuine therapeutic experience. Depending on your friend's mental health issues and also the interactions they have with others in their life, this may be incredibly useful. The 2nd thing is making sure they fully understand what the AT is and have realistic expectations about what it can help them achieve. The AT is a tool for stopping habits. The habits that we choose to work on can be as simple as using too much muscular tension to perform a movement or more complex such as a pattern of tension associated with performance anxiety. In terms of self development, this can be a very useful approach but I'm always keen to advise my students to see it as part of a bigger picture. For example, AT can help you to exercise more effectively by improving your posture and movements and reducing unhelpful tension but you still need to exercise if you want to get fit! The same goes for mental health. AT can help with achieving a calmer, quieter mind but in my experience, it works best when combined with meditation, journalling, yoga etc. I often describe AT as a process of changing direction or attitude. Many of us are heading in a direction that is more out of balance, more stiff, less mobile, more restricted in terms of activities and thoughts and AT can be part of a decision to head towards more balance, flexibility, mobility etc. I hope that your friend is getting some quality support for their mental health issues. AT is fundamentally a 'self help' skill but there are circumstances where medical assistance may also be needed and if relying on AT alone doesn't seem to be the whole picture, I would encourage them to seek further help. Hope that makes sense. Happy to answer any questions that you or your friend may have. All the best, Pete

@@MovementandPosture Hi Pete, thanks so much for your swift and thorough reply. My friend definitely puts a lot of value on the style of the AT teacher they use, so I think there's a lot to be said for the therapeutic benefit of feelng truly heard and understood by another, as you say. My concern is they seem to view this teacher as the only one who can help them, rather than it being the technique/s that can help them and the teacher being a particularly supportive conduit. There also seems to be a very rigid belief that the AT is the "only way" for them to achieve healing, with other support refused, or treated as trialled bolt ons to recovery that often get discarded to make way for the AT "process" which, for them, is described as a kind of waiting for things to become clear. Would you say this is accurate for AT? I like how you've described the AT as a changing of direction or attitude, this is very clear... would you say this can happen subconsciously, as something 'set in motion' by the AT teacher, or does it need to be applied and practiced consciously by a person? My friend will often avoid anything they experience slight resistance to (other therapies/practices) because their AT sessions have led them to feel they're "just not right" and thinking too much about an issue feels "too cognitive" for them and needs to be left to a felt sense approach instead. I'm all for tapping into our gut intuition (this may even be part of an AT practice?), but in my experience we sometimes need to challenge our resistance to things to check out whether it's something that really isn't right for us, or if we're avoiding it due to fear/unhealthy habits. My friend is gradually becoming more open to trying additional types of support in small doses and I have tried to suggest their Dr, a counsellor, other therapies, returning for more AT sessions. But I have to tread carefully as they seem to view the AT as the 'only way' as I say, and will get very protective of their "process" if anything contrary to the AT is suggested. I'm not sure that viewing any type of support as the be all and end all to recovery is healthy, nor necessarily what the AT teaches by the sounds of it? Hence my concern they may have been misled into refusing additional support. Thanks for taking the time to read and reply, it's helping me understand it all better.

When I'm teaching or talking about AT, I do my best to de-emphasise the role of the teacher and ensure that students know that they are learning a tool that they can use themselves. I often describe myself as trying to put myself out of work by making the student self-sufficient asap contrary to some approaches in other disciplines which seem to aim to create a culture of dependancy. The role of the teacher is in explaining the technique and bringing the student to a place where they can apply it and achieve measurable results. The reason that we need a teacher at all is that we are all so stuck in our habits that our sense of what constitutes a healthy, natural movement or amount of tension has been distorted and a teacher can give you a direct experience of, for example, holding the head with less tension in the neck. It is so much easier to break these kind of habits after having these kind of teacher-led experiences. The sensations of reducing tension and restoring coordination can feel quite amazing and profound as you realise how difficult you'd been making your life (by for example holding your neck muscles too tightly) and this can give you confidence that you are on a pathway to a 'better' (or at least more comfortable!) life. The danger of course is that the teacher-student interaction could be misconstrued as some kind of 'healing' and that the teacher has the power to create permanent change. All the teacher is doing is providing a window into how we would be if we were able to stop some of our unhelpful habits of tension and reaction so that we can then apply the same process (what Alexander called inhibiting and directing) to achieve the same results. Being a student of AT is incredibly hard work. Our habits have usually decade of inertia and it takes persistence and good technique to be able to affect meaningful change. Luckily, it's really good fun and very empowering for an individual to learn how to stop their old reactions and discover how they would feel if they allowed their mind/body to work as it's designed. When I teach, one of my prime concerns is to make sure that the student fully understands the process and I always say that while learning AT, you will discover all kinds of crazy things you are doing (such as holding muscles incredibly tightly) and that you will need the ability to laugh at yourself, not get stressed by what you discover. In other words, I give a student enough of an experience to decide whether this approach is going to work for them and a clear understanding that they shouldn't continue if they are unlikely to enjoy the process. I sincerely hope that your friend's teacher has not mis-represented the Technique or encouraged your friend to develop these ideas about the process. It's much more likely that your friend has misunderstood and gone down a bit of a rabbit hole. I think that this type of reaction can be seen across all 'self help' disciplines such as Yoga, Nutrition, Exercise, Meditation etc. It's natural for someone who is suffering in some way to latch onto a discipline as 'the one true way' but this isn't healthy. Unfortunately, life is so much more complex than that and needs a flexible, holistic approach for success. Hopefully your friend has a good support network around them to help them navigate the complexities and challenges of life. Sometimes it's just too difficult to do by yourself.

@@MovementandPosture Thank you so much for clarifying further what the AT really teaches. I think it's becoming clear that my friend has misunderstood the practice in some way. Whilst yes, any self-growth is hard work, they seem never to mention joy other than fleeting glimses of this felt sense of a 'new self', that emerges sporadically with no seeming pattern or conscious work towards this as a new habit. This 'new self' is also described in an unrealistically perfect light, as a version of self who has everything sorted and will never experience issues. It seems implausible to me that any singular technique/approach could provide such a thing. They also never mention the physical, practical aspects of the technique that seem to be pivotal to the teachings - there is certainly never mention of concrete, measurable changes beyond a felt sense of things and there is never mention of tension, physical realignment, or releasing old habits, and they say the AT is "very complicated and difficult to explain", often giving vague descriptions (hence my doing my own research to try and understand it). Again, this concerns me - an approach may be complicated, but one should surely be able to explain at least a good 70-80% of its core teachings if one is living their life by it. It seems they have developed their own, more spiritual (mis)understanding of the AT, relying on it as a much more elusive, ethereal support, that is deeply reliant on the presence of their AT teacher, as much as the practice itself (they have referenced not knowing how they'd cope if their teacher retired/died before their "process is finished"). Thank you for helping me understand this better. Sadly, I feel there's no way through as they are very protective of their process as I say, but perhaps I can start to gently challenge them to explore other options alongside the AT, now I have a better understanding of what the teachings aim to provide. I'd also like to thank you for piqueing my own interest in AT - it has not seemed appealing to me historically, from how my friend loosely describes it, but your information has brought a new and interesting self-care tool into my awareness 🙂

In those situations, it's really useful to use a bit of humour and also interactive role-play. For example if a child is prone to getting stressed about school work, get them to demonstrate what being really stressed feels like. Get them to really enjoy pretending to be scared and anxious about something and then get them to list all of the things they have done in their body (stiffening neck, clamping jaw, tight arms etc etc.) By exaggerating in this way, they can become more aware of patterns of tension and habits and can notice when they do the same thing in their daily life. Once a habit is made conscious, they then have a chance to choose a different response. This is obviously a huge topic and my answer barely scratches the surface but hope it gives you an idea of a possible approach! All the best, Pete

I've got a playlist for working at a desk. There are quite a few videos in it, not all of them neck focussed: ru-vid.com/group/PLhG2OhXbQc01kwLmPwqXP2_JEO2jXQym4 This video is specifically talking about neck problems (Text or Tech neck) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ZI2g3J9mIEU.html Hope that helps and hope that your colleague's neck improves. Nursing is a tough job!