Exercises To Calm Your Anxious Thoughts
Honor Your Feelings
We all experience anxious thoughts from time to time. For some people, these thoughts can interfere with relationships and experiences. If you tend to shut down or experience anxiety attacks due to uncontrollable anxious thoughts, you can benefit from therapeutic support to help develop coping skills to work through the anxiety.
Today, I will highlight a few exercises that can help calm your anxious thoughts and feel more in control of your feelings and reactions to those feelings.
Fact or Fiction
Most times when a person is experiencing anxiety, it’s regarding a potential upcoming threat or experience. These worries for the future are typically rooted in something that has not happened or may not happen. One exercise to help is determining if the anxious thought is rooted in a factual experience or a fictional possibility. Ask yourself if there is a chance you are overly worried or do you have enough reason to believe the thought to be true? These kinds of questions can bring you back to reality.
Talk it Out
We all need trusting support to listen to us when we are experiencing stress. Seek out a friend or loved one to provide a listening ear and help you verbalize those anxious thoughts. I know firsthand, with the opportunity to talk things out, I can usually see that I am over thinking or speaking about future outcomes I can’t be certain of. It doesn’t serve me or you to worry about potential outcomes that are out of our control.
Seek Safety & Redirection
The overwhelming feeling of anxiety can sometimes alert the body to feeling unsafe. To control the feeling of being unsafe, use mindfulness cues to slow down your thoughts. One of my go-to strategies is focusing on my senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling). I will stop and focus on identifying 5 things I see, 4 things I can touch, 3 things I can hear, 2 things I can smell, and 1 thing I can taste. Our brains are unable to focus on anxiety while seeking out these mindfulness tasks. It always helps you to redirect your energy. You can also use things like exercise, music, and breathing to help redirect anxious energy.
Schedule It
As a busy mother, wife, and business owner, I don’t always have the time to stop and honor an intense feeling like anxiety. One thing that can be helpful is scheduling time to just work through those tough feelings. For me, I use the early morning time to walk through the feelings through journaling, mindfulness breathing, or singing to various music to give space to honor my intense feelings. I don’t recommend allotting a great deal of time to this task, it can be small increments like 5 to 15 mins. This allows you to give it space and time without taking away from other tasks throughout the day.
Anxiety can be a challenging thing to overcome, if you have tried all these strategies and still feel consumed with anxious thoughts, seek professional help. Our staff at LITTherapy can help you develop an individualized treatment plan to attack your anxious thoughts.
