Whenever you have the urge to avoid, you need to realize that’s an opportunity to weaken your worries. It’s a chance to practice more mindfulness. Shift your focus away from your thoughts and back to the concrete world.

Avoiding bad feelings doesn't work

<ul><li>Fear is what you feel in the moment when someone comes at you with a knife. </li><li>Anxiety is about the anticipation of an event. Anxiety is often problem-solving — but without the solving part.</li></ul>

Anxiety vs. Fear

It’s a technique where you deliberately expose yourself to the thing that is making you anxious. It helps your brain to figure out which places or people are not actually dangerous and don’t need to be avoided. Once your brain makes that connection, your fear tends to diminish, you stop wanting to avoid things or people, and your life opens up so that you have more freedom to go where you want to go and do what you want to do.

Opposite Action

Trying to push the worries out of your head is inherently problematic because to be vigilant about not thinking about something, your brain needs to keep it in mind. Mindfulness does the opposite by making you aware of your state of anxiousness.

Mindfulness = anxiety antidote

<ul><li>Acceptance: accept that the worries are here and stop trying to make them go away.</li><li>Attention: get out of your thoughts and focus on the world around you. </li><li>Labeling: When a worry pops up, label it as “a worrying thought.” It’s not you. Do not identify with it and don't let it overtake you.</li></ul>

Build the Mindfulness muscles

The most dangerous emotions are the ones you don’t know are affecting you. When you know what happens when the worries start, you’ll be relieved and you'll also be able to do something constructive about them. So make a list with thoughts you have when you get worried, physical sensations and also actions you feel driven to take.

Recognizing warning signs

<ul><li>Catch yourself worrying. </li><li>Turn your attention to your body and notice sensations you can identify (muscles are tense, heart beating nausea). </li><li>Don’t get involved with your worrisome thoughts. </li><li>Try to label or name your emotion, whether it’s anxiety, dread, fear, trepidation, anger, irritation, shame, or sadness. </li><li>Tell yourself that it’s okay that you feel what you feel, that your emotion won’t kill you, and try your best to simply let it be there for as long as it’s there.</li></ul>

Practices to tend to your emotions

Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my first book become a Wall Street Journal bestseller. To check it out, click here. *** We all worry. At one point or another, almost one-third of people have dealt with a level of anxiety that would qualify as a disorder.

Mindfulness = anxiety antidote

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