What Can Havening Help With?

  • Havening can be quite effective in managing and reducing anxiety. The soothing touch supports calming the amygdala by lowering cortisol levels and promoting nervous system regulation. This is an invaluable tool for clients who often become dysregulated with high emotional reactions.

  • Havening Techniques can be beneficial for managing and alleviating symptoms of depression by boosting Serotonin and Dopamine, reduce emotional distress, enhance Neuroplasticity, and promote relaxation and self-compassion.

  • Emotional resilience refers to an individual's ability to adapt and bounce back from life's challenges, setbacks, and stressful situations. Havening Techniques combination of soothing touch and cognitive activation supports our clients with harnessing the power of neuroplasticity. Havening strengthens the brain’s ability to rewire itself. By using touch and positive affirmations, it helps create new, healthier neural pathways, reducing the emotional impact of traumatic memories.

  • Insecurity and low self-esteem are closely related and refer to feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt, and a lack of self-confidence. Havening Techniques can be quite effective in addressing insecurity and low self-esteem by supporting the rewiring of the brains neural pathways associated with negative self-beliefs. By reducing the emotional charge of past experiences that contribute to low self-esteem, individuals can start to form more positive self-perceptions. Havening also allows for the development of self-compassion and empowering personal growth.

  • Panic refers to an intense and overwhelming feeling of fear or anxiety that arises suddenly and unexpectedly. Havening Techniques soothing touch allows for the calming of the amygdala, lowering cortisol levels and creating a personal "safe space" that is necessary for our clients to re-regulate their nervous system. Havening Techniques provides the tools for distraction and grounding to shift away from panic-inducing thoughts and ground the individual in the present moment. Havening induces a state of deep relaxation by stimulating delta brain waves, which are associated with restorative sleep and healing. This relaxation can help counteract the heightened arousal of a panic attack.

  • Phobia refers to an intense and irrational fear or anxiety towards a specific object, situation, or activity. Havening helps to desensitize the emotional response associated with traumatic memories that often underlie phobias. By reducing the emotional charge of these memories, individuals can experience less fear when confronted with their phobia. Havening Techniques can delink the connection in the brain that associates with the immense aversion of the phobia.

  • Chronic pain can have various causes, such as injury, disease, inflammation, or a malfunction in the nervous system. Chronic pain is often exacerbated by emotional stress and trauma. Havening helps to reduce this stress by calming the nervous system and promoting relaxation, which can lead to a decrease in pain perception. Havening leverages the brain’s neuroplasticity to rewire neural pathways associated with pain. By altering the brain’s response to pain signals, it can help reduce the intensity and frequency of chronic pain.

  • Shame is an intense and painful emotion characterized by a deep sense of inadequacy, guilt, or embarrassment about oneself. Shame often stems from past traumatic experiences. Havening helps to reprocess these memories, reducing their emotional charge and the associated feelings of shame. Havening Techniques can then build up personal agency, empowerment and positive sense of self.

  • Trauma is a term that describes the emotional and psychological impact of a distressing or life-threatening event. Havening helps to “depotentiate” or reduce the emotional charge of traumatic memories. This process involves calming the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for the fear response, which helps to diminish the intensity of traumatic memories. The technique leverages the brain’s ability to rewire itself, known as neuroplasticity. By using gentle touch, distraction, and visualization, Havening can help reconfigure neural pathways associated with traumatic experiences, making them less distressing.

  • Incorporating Havening Techniques into your practice could provide your clients with additional tools to enhance their performance and overall well-being. Havening can help individuals manage their emotional and mental states, which is crucial for activities like public speaking, performing arts, or sports. By reducing anxiety and promoting relaxation, it allows for better focus and presence. It can also enhance the effectiveness of affirmations and positive visualizations. This is particularly useful for athletes or performers who rely on mental imagery to improve their skills and confidence. Havening is also effective for supporting a positive flow state, overcoming mental blocks, and embedding positive beliefs.

Touch

Touch, as we think about it, is based on mechanoreceptors which monitor the perception of pain, heat, temperature, pressure, vibration and position. Prevailing thought from a Western medical perspective, there is no expectation that touch should treat or heal anything. Nonetheless, its effect must exert some evolutionary advantage. 

  Why touch is so important?

As well as cultivating self-esteem, and a sense of value and love, the criticality of nurturing touch for development was demonstrated by early studies showing that infants raised without touch had 30%-100% higher death rates.  Furthermore, touch-deprived infants have impaired development of brain and body chemistry.  Touch as an infant is critical; it means we are not abandoned. The sensation of physical touch not only plays a significant role in social communication; but also the development and maintenance of a healthy body and mind relies on regular nurturing touch.

Our bodies are electrical-chemical entities. ANY sensory input — anything you see, hear, smell, taste or feel — is transduced into an electrical/ chemical signal that is sent to the brain in order to be perceived. The electrical part of that signal can be measured in frequencies. Different frequencies cause the body to release different chemicals. Frequencies range from very fast (30-100Hz) called Gamma waves, to very slow frequencies (0.5–4 Hz) called Delta waves. The release of Delta waves during Havening Touch release relaxation response chemicals like oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine. Dopamine affects the immune system, protecting the brain and body from excessive inflammation.  Oxytocin is released into our bodies during social bonding and nurturing touch, promoting well-being, especially following trauma.  Oxytocin is also highly concentrated in the limbic regions, such as the amygdala, where it promotes more accurate discrimination of threats and facilitates adaptive behavioral responses.   Additionally, activating Delta waves during wakefulness inhibit amygdala activity during recollection of a traumatic or stressful event.  Furthermore, cortisol secretion, the stress hormone, is diminished with a soothing touch.

Self-Havening

Self-Havening is an incredible and highly versatile technique that offers unlimited potential to tap into our own innate ability to soothe, regulate, calm and strengthen our nervous systems.  Self-Havening sends signals to our brain which allows it to calm down and change how we think and feel in the moment; and when used in regular practice, builds our resilience to consistently promote nervous system regulation and positive sense of self.

Self-Havening is used to enhance your capacity for presence, focus, and attention, allowing for deeper engagement and mindfulness. By incorporating Self-Havening techniques, you will strengthen resilience, enabling you to bounce back from challenging situations with greater ease. Utilizing Self-Havening allows for focus on accessing and magnifying positive states of being, fostering a sense of well-being, happiness, and contentment. Self-Havening specifically targets the reduction of distress experienced in the present moment, providing relief from overwhelming emotions and promoting a sense of calm. 

Self-Havening for Self Love!

Havening = Resilience

Resilience is a term that has different meanings in different contexts, but generally refers to the ability to cope with or overcome challenges, difficulties, or adversities. Resilience is not a fixed trait that some people have and others don’t, but rather a skill that can be learned and practiced. Resilience can help people cope with stress, trauma, loss, change, and uncertainty. Resilience can also help people grow and thrive from their experiences, rather than being overwhelmed or defeated by them.

A number of factors contribute to how well people adapt to adversities, predominant among them:

  • the ways in which individuals view and engage with the world

  • the availability and quality of social resources

  • specific coping strategies

Havening Techniques allows our brains to develop, grow and maintain protective resilience to guard against future traumas and/or stressors. Havening Touch helps the brain make more Delta Waves, which can make the client feel more positive and happy over time. We can help the client remember or imagine good things that make them feel good, and use different Havening methods to make those feelings stronger and last longer. This way, the client can have a stronger and healthier brain, which can protect them from future stress, help them recover from difficulties, and make them enjoy life more.

The Hijacked Amygdala

“Why do I react this way?!”

We essentially have two primary ways our brain functions; with our rational side, and our emotional side.  Our rational side is mostly guided by our newest formed area of our brain; our Cortex regions.  Our emotional side uses, primarily, our “older” region; our Limbic Region.  This area of the brain is what starts to “flare up” when we experience emotions such as fear, anger, frustration, or anxiety.  Basically, emotions that would be opposite of calm, content, and joy.

It has been described that when it comes to the two functions; rational and emotional,  the space they hold has to equal 100%.  What this means is if we are calm and content, our rational brain can function at 100%.  If we are frightened, or start to get into a heated argument, our emotional brain if “firing up”, and starts to increase its’ percentage.  And for each percentage our emotional brain takes, our rational brain loses. 

Have you ever experienced or witnessed someone getting so upset they don’t even seem to be able to make sense anymore?  Or, a person is in a crisis situation and they seem to not be able to “think clearly” or just work off of reflex?  When we experience an increase in unpleasant emotions, we give up a portion of our rational thinking. 

Why do I always blow up?  Why do I react with such fear/avoidance?  What makes me worry things are not going to go well?

This all starts in the Limbic System!  Specifically, our little Amygdala.

What is our Amygdala? 

When we start to feel fear, or anger, our Amygdala has already been hard at work in less than a blink of an eye!  Our Amygdala is working to determine…

  • Is this a threat?

  • Do I need to put my defenses up?

  • Do I need to fight harder or run? 

    And when our Amygdala gets really worked up (remember the percentages), we lose our ability to think clearly, and we start acting fully on how we are feeling in the moment.  This can result in a “Hijacked Amygdala”.  This can look like explosive rage, panic attack, or complete state of feeling frozen.