Overactive thinking can fuel a lot of stress in your lifewhic, so it’s important to find effective ways to calm the overactive mind.
Today, I have an interview with Adam Michael Brewer on Calming The Overactive Mind.
Check out the video below to know more.
CLICK HERE to watch the YouTube video interview.
In the interview above, you will discover:
- Who is Adam Michael Brewer?
- His struggles of having an overactive mind
- His journey toward calming the mind
- Health benefits of controlled breathing
- Tips for calming your mind
I hope you enjoyed the interview.
That was part 1. I will be back with part 2 tomorrow.
Watch out for it!
Take care, and have a great day!
Rick Kaselj, MS
If you cannot watch or listen to the video interview, check out the transcript below.
Rick:
Hey! This is Rick Kaselj from exercisesforinjuries.com. Today I have another interview for you. We’re going to do we’re going to talk about calming the overactive mind. And I will get Adam to introduce himself, and then we’ll move into the topic.
Adam:
Well, thanks so much, Rick. I appreciate being here with you today. As Rick said, my name is Adam Michael Brewer. I am a mind-body specialist, wellness coach and meditation guide. And I work daily with clients. As you said, help them calm the overactive mind, and bring some tranquility, serenity into their worlds. Hopefully working hand in hand with that, add more vitality, peace and well-being.
I do it through a variety of different modalities but it’s something that I’m pretty excited about. And something we can all use right now because we’re in this hyper stimulated environment. We call life right now and things are happening so fast for people. And often we find ourselves with that space of being completely agitated in our mind and body. I can’t wait to talk with you about these ideas.
Rick:
Awesome. And so maybe you can kind of share your story a little bit. It came to your journey on kind of calming the overactive mind.
Adam:
Absolutely. My life for many years was just a driven, hyper-energetic world and part of that led me to come out to California about 18 years ago. And at that time I was pursuing dreams of fame. I wouldn’t even say I wanted to be an entertainer or an actor. And I didn’t even know. I just wanted to be famous, I would describe it as that. So I came out to this environment which is non-stop in terms of just self-promotion, what’s happening. I kind of fell into that trap. While it was happening I found myself. I’m going to say spiritually, hitting a crossroads. I realized that much of what I was doing was certainly feeding my ego. My soul felt like it was completely devoid of anything meaningful in any way shape or form.
Energizer Bunny
And as this was happening my body started to break down. I said I had been the Energizer Bunny. I was working out all the time. My main focus was on being cool and looking good, which involved doing sports and modeling, things like that. And it hit a point in which there was really no return and my body started to break down. And what happened for me was a major injury took place in my back and something you know all about. You’re the man for exercises, right? (laughing)
Rick:
It’s like everyone will encounter death and taxes but everyone will also encounter injuries and pain. (laughing)
Adam:
Yes, they really are unavoidable and that’s what it was. I mean, I believe it became a physical manifestation of a psychological issue as much as anything and my back gave out. And for about six months I was on my back. I couldn’t train myself. I couldn’t train clients that I was working with. So I just found myself kind of hitting rock bottom. I lost about, I think it was about 15 lbs., and really felt like I was disappearing. During that period when I was confused and uncertain about what was occurring and experiencing pain. I was open to trying new words to express ‘listen’.
What’s happening is there’s just so much going on in my mind I can’t seem to calm the noise. I need to find a way to center myself. I don’t know what that means yet but I just kind of opened myself up to that possibility that there was help out there. And from that it was interesting how life kind of aligned to bring in healers into my life and I had been up to that point 100% Western in my philosophies of how you heal yourself and what you do. And some people who were working in the world of Eastern modalities came in and introduced yoga and something that’s called Ayurveda, which is kind of a sister science to yoga.
Yoga
It involves kind of almost the nutritional aspects of yoga and through that it led me to something that is pretty hot in the world right now which is called meditation. So we strip away any kind of the questions about what a meditation is, in its simplest level it’s simply just focusing the mind on one thing in particular. It is to contemplate, it is to ruminate over something consistently. And so through all of these introductions, I began to practice what I’m going to call just quieting my mind through calming my breath and then through calming my breath I was able to slow my heart rate down and slowing my heart rate down I was able to slow the brainwaves down.
And slowly but surely through consistent practice of just literally learning how to control my breathing I was able to start to calm my mind and it kind of blew me away. So while I’ve been introduced to things like the yoga and Ayurveda and acupuncture and they’re amazing healing modalities, the one thing that really struck a chord with my body, my mind, my being in general was the focus on the breathing.
Calming the Overactive Mind
It was the ability to just say, “Listen, the gateway to get to our mind is really what’s going on with our breathing”, because when we get agitated, as you know when we get tensed, get nervous, what tends to happen is we contract and we constrict, our breathing gets shallow and our muscles get tense and that’s going to cause agitation in the mind as well. If we can kind of do the exact opposite of that and slow the breathing down and allow our bodies to relax a little bit, the calming the overactive mind.
And so it was an amazing journey to just begin that process. And that as I mentioned when I when to LA, that was about 18 years ago, and that injury or that pain moment came from me probably about eight years into that experience or something around there. I’ve been working with breath control and what I’m going to call meditation for about the last 12 years and my life has not been the same.
I can say in all of the healing modalities I have tried, and I’ve tried many because I’m in this world of health and wellness, that this working with the breathing and this meditation has been the one thing that has changed my life more than anything and brought peace of mind to my world and just helps to make sense of life. It’s something that I would not have imagined I would have found.
Rick:
Awesome. Now, we were talking before on what we would talk about in this interview and we came up with looking at the three steps to calming the overactive mind and body. Maybe we’ll kind of work through those steps and as you share those steps, we’ll also expand on them a little bit more. If people wanted to calm their mind and their body, what would be the first step?
Adam:
Yes. The first step is one I’ve already kind of touched on which to me is if you want to calm your mind or bring peace to your thoughts would be to learn to manage your breathing. As we said and I’m just going to call it, learn to breathe. You know, the average person in terms of the respiration rate in any given minute is going to have about 12 to 20 breaths and the breath would be an inhale and an exhale. So that’s the normal state of activity.
Brainwave Activity
That’s what they refer to in terms of brainwave activity as the beta brainwave activity and it allows us to function and to do the things we need to do on a daily basis so that all the ducks can be in a row. But in that same state of the 12 to 20 breaths a minute in that beta brainwave it also has a lot of agitation, anxiety and worry that are attending to it as well. So when we slow our breathing down there’s some really basic breathing exercises you can do where you can get your breath, your respiration rate down to sometimes only four to six breaths a minute.
You can then slow the brainwaves down to what’s called the Alpha state and in that alpha state we have the ability to find that peace of mind and that ability to calm ourselves to a state in a place that we can be less reactive and more responsive because that’s really what it’s all about. When we work on our breathing, we slow it down and we calm ourselves. So often when we’re in that agitated state it’s a reaction.
So if somebody barks at me or a dog barks, it’s like what’s the dog’s instinct? It’s to bark back and we do the same thing as human beings when whether it’s a person honking or whether I think people know what they do in response that either yell back or they do something with their fingers. I’m not sure and I’m not going get into that right now, but they barked back, right?
And what slowing the breathing down and slowing our brainwaves and our thoughts down does is it allows us to be a little more responsive so that we can take a moment, we can pause in those moments of confrontation or conflict or agitation and say, “Hey, what’s my course of action that is actually going to perhaps elevate this experience rather than exacerbate the issue, right?
And I can now say, “You know, maybe I don’t need to honk back and I can just go about my day”, and in doing so you’re going to find yourself experiencing a lot more of the things you want to find in life so that I guess all that long-winded would say, the first step would be to just slow the breathing down. Get some breath control into your life.
Rick:
And people can easily test that on themselves like how does the body feel or how do your muscles feel when you breathe quickly. And then how does your body feel and your mind feel when you sit down and you try to slow down the breathing, not to like holding your breath but to decrease the number of breaths that you end up having in a minute and see how your body ends up feeling.
Adam:
Yes, that’s exactly right. I mean, if your normal pattern is like one or two seconds on an
Inhale and one or two seconds on an exhale, simply just as you just said slowing it down to three to four to five seconds on an inhale and then just doing the same try to match the length of the inhale to the exhale. And as you’re doing so just notice what you’re doing with your body. Let the muscles relax like you said and just see where you’re holding on.
And not only where you’re holding on physically because that’s the common thing is like, “Where am I holding on? Where am I gripping”, but also mentally like what’s going on there in terms of are there thoughts that are also constrictive. And so when you’re working on slowing the breath down, slow your thoughts down and also just relax the body and try to notice if there are any thoughts that are holding on as well.
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