Oprah‘s life coach revealed a solution to coping with anxiety.

Dr Martha Beck, who is a Harvard-trained sociologist and founder of the Wayfinder Life Coach Training platform, joined Steven Bartlett on The Diary of a CEO podcast to discuss anxiety.

Martha first appeared on The Oprah Winfrey TV show in 2000 and became a regular on the day time show between 2001 and 2020. She was also a columnist for O magazine, which in its heyday had a print circulation of 2.5 million.

The doctor claimed there was an easy trick to stop yourself from feeling anxious, which also gets you out of the fight or flight response.

She first asked Steven to imagine a situation which makes him anxious and then asked to him visualise himself eating an orange.

She said: ‘Imagine that you are holding an orange, it’s a nice ripe heavy delicious orange at the peak of its ripeness… you can smell the Citrus, you just take a bite of it to break the seal of the peel, and just feel that little spray of citric acid that pops up when you bite.

‘The bitterness of the rind and then as you bite in the juice gets in your mouth, it’s sweet it’s a little bit tangy, you can feel the filaments of the skin and the stringiness of the insides, and you pull back the peel.

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Dr Martha Beck, who is a Harvard-trained sociologist and founder of the Wayfinder Life Coach Training platform, revealed a solution to coping with anxiety and claimed there is a trick to reduce it

She continued: ‘You can feel it on your fingernails, you can smell it, put the broken part to your mouth and squeeze the orange and let some juice get into your mouth and taste it completely and then swallow it.’

Martha claimed this sensory experience of pretending to eat an orange should alleviate anxiety and calm down the nervous system.

She asked Stephen: ‘How’s your anxiety now?’ The host replied: ‘My anxiety went away, it’s gone yeah.’

The expert revealed taking your mind away from the thing that is worrying you and using your sensory imagination is the perfect way to relax your mind and body.

She explained: ‘You start breathing more deeply, you stop producing all the cortisol, the glucocorticoids the adrenaline that you had in the fight or flight state, and now you’re starting to produce serotonin and dopamine.’

However Martha said that there are many tricks to help yourself out of an anxious state, including focusing on writing your name on a piece of paper and then writing the mirror image of it.

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Dr Martha joined Steven Bartlett (pictured) on The Diary of a CEO podcast to discuss anxiety and childhood trauma.

She said: ‘Your brain is creating new neurons synapses that have never existed before, you’ve never done this before, so you are fundamentally changing your brain, teaching in a skill it has never had.’

The doctor revealed there is a three-step process to alleviate anxiety on a daily basis, which she calls CAT, Calm, Art and Transcendence.

She said our brains have been biologically pre-programmed to be anxious so we have to calm it down.

She explained: ‘Most people will say ”I want to fight my anxiety, I want to get it, I want to end it, I want to bring it down, I want it gone”, because they think it’s a broken machine but it’s not, it’s a frightened animal.

‘If you came in and I said to you ”okay I want to end you, I want to bring you down, I’m going to fight you till you’re gone”, would you be less afraid or more afraid?

‘So they’re attacking the part of themselves that’s anxious and it makes it more anxious so and that’s what we’re taught to do end it force it to calm down.’

WHAT IS ANXIETY?

Anxiety is a normal part of life that affects different people in different ways at different times.

Whereas stress can come and go, anxiety often persists and does not always have an obvious cause.

Along with depression, anxiety is among the most common mental-health condition in the UK, affecting 8.2million people in 2013 alone.

Around 40million adults suffer from the condition in the US every year.

Anxiety can make a person imagine things in their life are worse than they are or that they are going mad.

Although it evolved as part of the ‘fight or flight’ mechanism in our caveman days to avoid danger, anxiety can be inappropriately activated in everyday life when stress builds up.

It can have a clear cause, such as moving house or having surgery. However, sometimes little life events build up until a person is unable to cope, with anxiety then taking them by surprise.

Physical symptoms can include:

Increased heart rate and muscle tension
Hyperventilation and dizziness
Nausea
A tight band across the chest
Tension headaches
Hot flushes
Sweating
‘Jelly legs’
Shaking
Feeling like you are choking
Tingling in the hands and feet

Some psychological symptoms are:

Thinking you are going mad or losing control
Thinking you may die or get ill
Feeling people are staring at you
Feeling detached from others or on edge

Treatment often involves counselling or cognitive behavioural therapy.

Activates like yoga, exercise, reading and socialising can help to manage anxiety.

Martha said we have to gentle with ourselves like we would be gentle with a scared puppy.

She added: ‘We are taught to be violent to ourselves, biohack this, make yourself eat this and do that.

Martha said once you get to calm then you must go to art, and start being creative.

She explained: ‘You need art, and I don’t mean drawing, I mean making things, making things in three dimensions, making events happen, making a podcast.

‘If people have been through a trauma and they’re allowed to draw about it, even if they can’t draw professionally, they have an 80 percent lower chance of developing PTSD.

‘There’s something about creating stuff and it could be a company or it could be a spray paint on a cardboard.

‘There does seem to be this toggle effect that anxiety and creativity just can’t work at the same time so the moment you begin to create anxiety switches off.

The doctor said the last stage is ‘transcendence or awakening’ which is called Flo.

She explained: ‘It’s a state of creating and performing at a level so difficult we almost can’t do it, but when you get it, it’s like flying, it’s heaven and there’s a time in the process of creation where the sense of self falls away and the sense of control isn’t necessary.

‘What you feel is creation itself sort of moving with you and through you and it’s blissful and I believe that is the state in which we are meant to spend almost all our time.’