Building a new relationship with anxiety Part 2

When you feel your anxiety rise, there are short term strategies that may reduce it in the moment: distractions (e.g., focussing on a single object while considering how it looks, feels, and is made), and breathing exercises (e.g. belly breathing by placing a hand on your abdomen while breathing slowly and deeply, feeling your abdomen rise on the in-breath and fall on the out).  

While these are helpful ways to distract from anxiety, longer term changes need a different strategy. Changing how you think and feel about your anxiety allows your brain to develop a different, calmer, response.

Next time you experience anxiety, ask yourself the following questions:

How do you know you have it? 

Where in your body do you feel it?

What kind of sensation is it?

What is it trying to tell you?

Consider these questions in detail; writing your findings down can be helpful. What you are doing is taking curiosity to your anxiety, running toward it rather than away. This allows your brain to begin re-wiring its automatic response.  You are always in control of how far, and how long, you explore your anxiety, and there is no success or failure with this activity!