Learn a powerful exercise to better manage specific situations that cause you stress or anxiety. This exercise is more in depth than previous ones outlined and so does take about half an hour to complete.
When you get anxious or stressed about something it can be pretty intense when you are “in” the anxiety and it can feel like it takes a hold over you. This is part of our fight/flight response, where the mind and body wants to devote all it’s focus on the problem to ensure you deal with it as quickly as possible. Unfortunately this is not always the best response as we repeat and reinforce the same unwanted feelings, thoughts and behaviours, experiencing it first hand each time. This makes it much harder to move away from the problem and towards a solution even if we know what we ought to be doing!
So what we need to do is retrain our mind and actually live through and experience what we want to be doing instead. If we repeatedly imagine and fully engage in feeling the feelings, thinking the thoughts and acting out the behaviours that we want to be doing, our mind and body starts to get the message. Using all your senses and lots of repetition are key to success here.
The following exercise is a brilliant way to start making those changes:
- Have a pen and paper handy. Sit down with you eyes closed and imagine seeing yourself just before the scenario that can make you feel anxious. If you can’t visualise this very easily just try getting a sense of what you would look like. Make sure you do this without any emotional attachment, like a helicopter hovering above or out to the side.
- Now you are going to create a brand new template of what happens next, in that scenario. Imagine a magic wand has been waved and you wake up tomorrow morning with the best possible outcome for how you want this old scenario to be different. It can be helpful to start by writing a few words describing what you would want to change. Then start by creating a vivid picture or sense of how you will be acting, feeling and thinking differently. Take your time and really immerse yourself in the experience. Notice how your posture and body language changes in this new scenario and your pitch, tone and speed of voice and any other sounds around you. How might other people be acting differently due to your changed behaviour? Most importantly really focus on your feelings and become aware if there is a specific place in your body that the good feelings starts from. Perhaps there is a particular colour that you associate with this feeling. If you find that you start to feel anxious you can simply remove yourself from the picture like you did before until it subsides, or simply distract yourself with another task quickly.
- Once you are happy that you have created a new and much better template version stand up and then visualise or get a sense that the new you is standing about a foot in front of you. Imagine taking a step forward into the new you and by doing so starting to feel in your body what you did in the last step of the exercise. Repeat this imaginary step 3 times, each time increasing the feeling with more power and intensity. Take your time to really enjoy this part.
- Then actually take a step into the new you and allow yourself to become immersed in those feelings. You can even experience the changes to what you will be doing and thinking, as in the previous exercise. Then step back and out, shake off your body and the step back in, repeating this at least twice more.
Sit or stand somewhere different and think about a future scenario where the old behaviour would have appeared, noticing the wider knock on affect to other areas of your life as well as other people.
My previous post on self observation also has a helpful exercise on how to deal better with internal dialogue.
For your free telephone consultation contact me
By Lawrence Michaels
