• Catch yourself worrying. 
• Turn your attention to your body and notice sensations you can identify (muscles are tense, heart beating nausea).
• Don’t get involved with your worrisome thoughts. 
• Try to label or name your emotion, whether it’s ...

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.

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

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.

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, y...