Harness your innate survival responses to reverse anxiety and tension and feel more confident, naturally. Based on the popular CD of the same name, Calm and Confident is for anyone who is struggling with too much stress and not enough confidence. As the name suggests, this app is designed to help you feel both calm and confident. The app comprises innovative 10 guided meditations based on trauma therapy principles. Two of the central sessions are the 19 and 27 minute respectively Calm and Confident sessions. These transformative sessions incorporate focused attention, sensory stimulation, relaxation and re-connection with personal resources to change how you feel about yourself. Another session (‘Healing Anxiety’) addresses the role that childhood emotional neglect plays in maintaining anxiety. Other sessions are designed to stimulate increased self-awareness, emotional regulation and security through various combinations of auditory, visual and mental stimuli.
Feeling calm is essential for health and wellbeing, but without confidence it's just a nice feeling. Confidence is the end-product of feeling calm; it means experiencing yourself as connected, self-aware, energized, whole, and capable. Confidence is feeling okay about your feelings, needs and wants - it’s about feeling able to become the best version of yourself – not necessarily perfect, but the best ‘you’. As Lao Tzu said, ‘Health is the greatest possession. Contentment is the greatest treasure. Confidence is the greatest friend.’ Calm and Confident will help you to find your inner friend.
Based on recent discoveries regarding brain structure and functioning, Calm and Confident uses applied neuroscience to teach you how to communicate more effectively with your nervous system to effect change. The deepest learning comes from experience, activities which stimulate sensory-emotional learning. This is different to the ‘2+2 = 4’ kind of learning you got in school – it’s the learning that comes from doing something which changes how you feel about yourself – leading to new connections, new neural pathways. This kind of learning takes you from ‘I’m worthless’ to ‘I’m okay’; from ‘I can’t’ to ‘I can.’
The secret to achieving such confidence (when stress is getting in the way) is focused attention + bilateral stimulation (BLS), a unique combination which stimulates an in-built activation-deactivation circuit in your nervous system. BLS enables you to ‘hijack’ your own fight-flight response and transform anxiety and tension into relaxation and calm, naturally and effortlessly. It does this by harnessing your brain’s innate information processing capabilities. When your brain detects a stimuli such as BLS it‘s threat systems get activated while it figures out what’s going on. After a few seconds, once your brain recognizes there is no threat (no sabre-toothed tiger), it returns to normal levels of arousal, bringing your body with it. This happens naturally and quickly, without your having to try.
The resulting feelings of relaxation not only reduce stress – they also facilitate increased confidence. When your nervous system is in a relaxed state it is more receptive to the true real-life affirmations embedded in the tracks on this app, resulting a more positive self-state. The amazing part is that this all happens as naturally as you might experience the pleasure that comes from watching a sunset or walking on a beach. This effect has been confirmed by research.
Bilateral stimulation is a treatment element of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) EMDR, the revolutionary treatment for PTSD. The method seems to resolve trauma-related memories and feelings more rapidly and effectively than traditional methods.
The app can be used for emotional ‘first-aid’, as an adjunct to psychotherapy and as part of long-term efforts to feel more confident. You can learn to feel different - you know much more than you think.