deepstash
Beta
How To Control Your Attention When You’re Feeling Anxious
Controlling Attention When Anxious
2020 is rocky, with a health crisis, an economic crisis, and a social crisis all at the same time. This, coupled with our already complex lives has made us anxious and unable to deal with the information overload.
Controlling our attention is the key to get over this type of anxiety, where the outside world just isn’t helping.
373 SAVES
This is a professional note extracted from an online article.
Read more efficiently
Save what inspires you
Remember anything
IDEA EXTRACTED FROM:
6
Key Ideas
Controlling Attention When Anxious
2020 is rocky, with a health crisis, an economic crisis, and a social crisis all at the same time. This, coupled with our already complex lives has made us anxious and unable to deal with the information overload.
Controlling our attention is the key to get over this type of anxiety, where the outside world just isn’t helping.
Fear In Fear Out
According to Darren Hardy, author of The Power Of Compounding, our consumption of content the whole day (fear-inducing and fear-based news) hypnotises us negatively and impacts our output. What is put in us is what goes out of us.
Do not rely on only mainstream organizations and try to get your news from individuals and multiple sources.
Action, Not Words
Doing the right thing, no matter how unpopular, shows your commitment towards what really matters.
Moreover, it is a human flaw to pay more attention to what people are saying, rather than what is being done. Action speaks louder than hollow words.
Be Nice
As simple as it seems, being genuinely nice to others helps reduce anxiety.
Our attention gets divided and clouded when we are pissed off, attracting further negative emotions out of nowhere. Avoid that attraction by being nice to others.
Small Missteps
We need to get a grip on ourselves.
The occasional binging on Netflix, or the cheat meal, does not hurt, but it would if it is done regularly. One misstep, if it starts snowballing into several missteps, would make us lose our momentum, and it takes a lot of energy and focus to rebuild the same.
Attention Is Everything
Managing your attention may be the most important thing you do. Through your attention, you control your mind and through that, your entire life. It starts with managing your mind’s input, where you can be a gatekeeper.
You are in control of your mind, the most important tool at your disposal
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
7
Key Ideas
Self-Control Components
Self-control has two components:
- Our ability to resist temptations
- Our ability to exercise control over our behaviour and emotions. ...
Self Control and Eating Healthy
While it’s obvious we need to exhibit a certain amount of self-control while choosing what we put in our bodies, that is not the whole story.
If we educate our bodies and learn about nutrition, longevity and how our individual bodies function, we could be eating a lot healthier.
The Pleasures Of Life
There is a lot of stuff available for us to do that makes us feel better instantly. Watching TV, going to the beach, drinking alcohol, smoking, and almost every other activity that seems pleasurable to us, giving us temporary pleasure in a jiffy. When we keep doing that, the long term effects are bad, and we feel older, weaker, sicker, while not having any achievement in our lives.
This is a natural process of a slow movement towards disorder, is also the second law of thermodynamics, called Entropy.
4 more ideas
3
Key Ideas
Leaving our options open
We have a limited amount of willpower, and if we leave our options open, we have to use our willpower constantly. We are much better off removing choices and creating routines that preserve our ...
More options create anxiety
The extreme adaptability that served us so well in evolution is, today, a source of anxiety: at any given point we could choose one of a million options for our life. But the overwhelming number of options only makes us stressed, depressed and anxious, to the point we choose nothing and simply gaze at possibilities.
Noncommitment and multitasking
Multitasking is basically the act of refusing to prioritize one thing over everything else. It’s non-commitment on a micro-scale.
And when we refuse to commit to a goal, we are ensuring that we do not reach any goal.
4
Key Ideas
About uncertainty
Most of us are quite addicted to a degree of certainty of all kinds, as this is what makes us feel safe. And now we all know nothing compares to feelings such as safety and control.
When f...
Stepping in the unknown
While it can be quite scary, stepping out in the unknown is necessary every now and then.
In order to push your limits, you should consider taking up new challenges that will not only make you experience fear, but most probably also later success into dealing with new and stressful situations. Furthermore, your brain will get trained to form new connections, which can only prove beneficial in the long run.
Train your mind to defeat uncertainty
Recent research has shown that uncertainty scares people even more than knowing that things are going to actually end up badly.
Therefore, in order to be mentally prepared to beat uncertainty, what better way than just imagining the worst case scenario? If it turns out badly, you will at least not be taken by surprise and, if it turns out well, you will be happy.
one more idea