#🧰 # mind tools to overcome anxiety ![[calendar-plus.svg]] <small>Mar 10, 2023</small> | ![[calendar-clock.svg]] <small>Mar 18, 2023</small> 🏷️[[anxiety]], [[self-care]] Ten mind-oriented tools to overcome anxiety. These are useful when your [[take your emotional temperature|emotional temperature]] is at a 5 or lower. ### 1. Catch the Chatter Pause to ask yourself "What am I thinking about?" or "What was I just thinking about?" Set a reminder and write down your thoughts to quiet the chatter. Look for trends in your thoughts. ### 2. Talk Back to Your Thoughts To reframe your thoughts, separate yourself from the part of you that is thinking. If you catch yourself saying something like "I am overwhelmed," reframe it as "A part of me is overwhelmed" of "I am feeling overwhelmed." It's easier to change our thoughts and feelings if we can separate them from our identity. ### 3. Thank Your Protective Brain Recognize that your brain can't tell the difference between an actual immediate threat and one that is imagining. Instead of fighting the emotion, thank your brain and acknowledge that you're ok. ### 4. Manage Your "What Ifs" When you're in threat mode, the emotional brain treats "what ifs" as if they are happening now. When you catch yourself "what iffing" in a moment of stress, bring yourself back to what is actually happening in the moment. Peel the worry away so we can focus on the "what ifs" with a calm and rational problem-solving mode. ### 5. Designate worry time Create a container for your worry by setting aside a set amount of time to write down your worries. If you start worrying outside of that time, tell your brain "Thank you, but this is not worry time." ### 6. "I've handled it before. I'll handle it now." Think back to all the ways you've been resilient in the past. Tell yourself, "I'll handle it. I've handled it before, and I'll handle it again." ### 7. [[Worst Case, Best Case, Most Likely]] If you are prone to high-level worrying or catastrophizing, this exercise can help the brain stop that tendency. You are training the brain to recognize that unrealistic best-case scenarios have the same low likelihood of occurring as the worst-case scenarios you're imagining. ### 8. Mindfulness > "The difference between mindfulness and meditation is, meditation are practices that support a more mindful way of being in the world. So, the reason we practice is so that we have a habit in place that we're able to take off the cushion into the day-to-day things that we're experiencing. Mindfulness itself is a state of being present in the moment in a very specific way - in a way that is non-judgmental, openhearted, and connected to what is happening in the moment." Simplest mental tool is to recognize when you're out of the moment, because your mind is going to the future or thinking of the past, which will bring you back to the moment. ### 9. Five Senses & Nouns One way to drop into mindfulness is to ask yourself five questions: 1. What do I see? 2. What do I hear? 3. What do I feel? 4. What do I smell? 5. What do I taste? ### 10. Certainty Anchors Use rituals to create moments of certainty. --- ## Sources [[20 Tools to Tame Anxiety - Good Life Project]]