It may or may not surprise you, but I don't always know what to write about on a Friday morning. Ideas are odd like that, aren't they? They strike quite unpredictably and creativity seems to ebb and flow. There are times in life when I feel full of creative thought and grand plans and ideas and philosophical musings. And in the in between, when the creative landscape feels like a vast dustbowl, I often wonder if they will ever come back (but, have faith, they always do).
So, in the absence of grand philosophical musings, I'll write to you about what I do know to be real and authentic: I'm dealing with quite a bit of anxiety at the moment and, since I imagine we have all had periods at one time or another where anxiety feels more present, I thought I would share some things I've learnt through recent CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy):
Don't suppress an anxious thought. If I tell you not to think about a pink elephant, what do you think about? A pink elephant! It's the same with anxiety: if we push thoughts away, they simply bounce back.
Don't chase the thought. So, we're letting the thoughts in rather than suppressing them, but that doesn't then mean we need to get wrapped up in them. Don't chase the story; the imagined narrative; the endless stream of ‘what ifs’ (seemingly my favourite pastime).
Allocate the worry to a worry period. Tell yourself “I'll worry about this for 20 minutes at 6 o'clock tonight”. By doing this, you're acknowledging the worry and setting aside a dedicated period of time to deal with it.
Focus instead on mindfulness. Now you've postponed the worry, come back to your breathing and your five senses: what can you feel, hear, smell, see and taste?
The idea of a ‘worry period’ is something quite new to me. I didn't, at first, understand how postponing worry to a later time was a good thing, but I see now that it's a way of acknowledging and appeasing the anxious mind. Quite often when it gets to the worry time that particular thought no longer bothers you. If it does, you can write it down and write two columns: ‘evidence for’ and ‘evidence against’ and begin to address it.
Mindful moment: Quite aptly for this newsletter, the best antidote to anxiety in the moment is mindfulness. Often, just reminding ourselves to take a few deep breaths (yes, deceptively simple and cliched) is the most effective thing to do.
curated just for you
I think yoga works to help the anxious mind because it's so closely linked to the breath. By pairing movements with inhale and exhale breaths, we're getting all the benefits of deep, nasal breathing as we move.
Mindful movement: Inhale to lift the arms above the head, exhale to come into a forward fold (knees as bent as you need). Cradle the arms and just hang out here for a bit, taking deep breaths and imagining any stress, worry and tension dripping off your upper body down onto the ground, much like melted butter. Inhale, slowly roll to standing and exhale release the shoulders and sigh it out.
Please consider donating to my London Marathon page to help raise £1300 for the Sussex Beacon which provides life-saving HIV care:
One of my yoga students recently told me (by the laws of coincidence in the same week as I learnt about the worry period) about a grief period. Much like a worry period, this is an allocated period of time where he allows himself to feel whatever difficult emotion needs to be processed:
“So I allowed myself to grieve over someone or something only at a certain time of the day. Every day even, but not earlier or later than that set time to use for this certain aim. I mean for me that was the morning, from 6am to 7am, I allowed myself to grieve someone, to be angry over something, to feel lost and deal with it...but not out of this time. Of course, every day was different in terms of success - sometimes more and more thoughts came throughout the day, but I tried to remain focused and do my best... I tried to postpone them till next morning, until their allowed time to visit me again.”
Mindful moment: Is this something you feel you could try? I'm certainly keen to give it a go. Remember, you are in control of how you respond to your thoughts, not the other way around. Like a naughty child that needs reprimanding at the end of class, we can appease our worried or anxious minds by simply giving them a set time to throw their toys out of the pram. And often, by that point, they've moved onto something else anyway and just by creating space between the worry and our response, we've already diminished the problem.
