Taming Anxiety
If you broke your leg in the bush 100 years ago you were destined for a very tough time. This is one reason why most of our brains are always scanning for threats. Today, subliminally, and sometimes overtly, the average person will sense six threats (or negatives) for every positive. At times, anxiety can be triggered as the prehistoric, or “lizard”, part of the brain called the Amygdala goes into overdrive. This creates a sense of unnecessary tension within some people, like a fire alarm going off every time you cook toast.
One way to overcome this angst is to adopt the breathing exercises mentioned in my first blog and introducing a Gratitude Diary to your daily habits. This is where you write down three things you are happy or grateful for each, and every, day and why. These could be in the now, the past or the future. You can’t repeat them. You will need to scan your book / diary to ensure you write three different things down each day. At first, this may be easy as you tick off big ticket items like your family, dog, house, health etc but it will get harder. Stick with it and remember things like: shoes on a hot day, clean water, the warmth of a sweater, the beauty of a bird’s song etc.
Exercise changes the brain. It’s like building muscles. You have to put in the work to change your body. And you have to do the work to change your brain. The effort to think about what you are happy and grateful for is building your brain to think differently and scan for the positives in life. If you do this every day, science shows your brain will start to scan more positively after a month and will change permanently after two months.
If you combine the Gratitude Diary with the breathing exercises I talked about here, I liken the potential affect to this analogy:
Have you ever been to a party filled with great people but you can’t enjoy their company because there’s one, loud, obnoxious person who is building an angst within you. That person can often be likened to a problem you have in your life that you constantly think about. By calming your body with the breathing and training your brain to see all the good in your life, you are quietening that person down and allowing all the other great people in the room, who represent the great things in your life, to come to the fore.
Clients of mine have reported to have had great, even amazing improvements in their mental wellbeing by adopting these two techniques. I hope they work for you.
