When I come across a few adversities and even a tiny amount of stress – my thoughts are always ruled by my anxiety. Anxiety has constantly ruled my life. It’s like having this constant tug of war battle against my thoughts. I go through everyday feeling exhausted – my mind overrun with negativity.
Most days, I just feel like this giant cloud is constantly engulfing me, my mind clouded with worries and thousands of thoughts. I wanted all of them to stop. I wanted to scream at them to make them all go away.
But still nothing.
Anxiety is a thief. It constantly robs our chance of happiness. Our chance to enjoy life and to live in the present moment. And I hated myself for allowing it to happen.
So, I made a decision to stop letting it control me. I started looking for ways, I tried different practices to change my mindset. And Practicing mindfulness is one of them – this has become my life-saver.
Practicing Mindfulness allowed me to be more aware of my thoughts, it allows me to easily let them go without letting it affect me. It helps me to be in the present moment instead of fixating on all my negative thoughts.
And most of all, it has been a tremendous help in learning to control my anxiety.
And I wanted to share this with you too. That’s why today, I have decided to share with you 5 Effective Ways to Use Mindfulness in Fighting Anxiety
I tell you, these tips have become a complete life-saver for me. It helped me take control over my thoughts and It allowed me to take my power back.
So, check them out!
Go for A Walk(with intention)
You may have read or heard of this tip a thousand times before but I really wanted to emphasize this since it has done amazing things to me. Normally, when I’m bombarded with stressful situations, I freeze. I feel this sudden feeling like I’m losing control and my breathing starts to become shallow.
My mind is then clouded with thousands of thoughts preventing me to move forward.
So, instead of finding a solution to fix it, I end up fixating on the problem over and over again.
Then I tried this tip — I went for a short walk. I didn’t check my phone and instead of thinking about the problem, I started focusing on the things around me.
I focused on the sky. The cars passing by. The flowers. Everything.
Doing this gave my mind a chance to breathe. It pulled me back to the present moment.
It allowed me to act and think more rationally and to not let those events affect me and how I think. It gave a sense of control over my anxiety.
So, try making it a habit to set at least 15-30 minutes of your time every day to go for a short walk. Use this time to recharge your mind and reconnect with life.
Focus on One Task
In this fast-paced world that we live in, we always love to multi-task. While others succeed in multi-tasking some of us, like me, are left less productive, less effective, stressed, more anxious.
Doing this every day and constantly having to experience that amount of stress and anxiety is draining – physically and mentally.
One thing I noticed is every time I create an unrealistic to-do list – a list that’s too much for me to really handle, I end up not finishing anything at all, leaving me more stressed and anxious.
So, don’t be too hard on yourself. Allow yourself to focus on one task. Give yourself permission to tackle one task at a time – the benefits will definitely surprise you!
Breathe
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Breathe
I have considered breathing as the foundation of mindfulness. Focusing actively on my breathing or even doing breathing exercises from time to time helps me detach myself from all negative thoughts.
It gives me a chance to clear my mind and focus on what is happening now instead of focusing on my worries – leaving me less stressed and less anxious.
So, if your mind is constantly overrun by your negative thoughts, pause. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Journal
You don’t have to be a writer to do this. There is no wrong or right way. The key here is to write what you feel. Scribble your thoughts, your worries, and fears.
Acknowledge them and detach them from yourself by writing them down. Writing down my worries before I go to sleep, helps lessen my tendency of fixating on them the whole night – making me less anxious and making it easier for me to go to sleep.
It gives me a sense of clarity and it gives me more control over my thoughts.
Be Grateful
The thing about my anxiety is, I tend to focus more on everything that’s negative, on all the bad things that may happen that I end up forgetting all the good things that happened to me and all the amazing people that I have with me.
Most days, we are always so focused on that one bad thing that happened to us that we immediately forget those 10 great things that took place.
This easily robs us of our chance to be thankful and to experience the happiness that we should have felt in that present moment.
How many times have you woke up and immediately thought of problems, worries, and fears?
Many of us, tend to start our day wrestling with our worries instead of being thankful for having another day to live – having another chance to correct our mistakes, to fix the problem, to start over.
Once you start to notice that you are blocking yourself from appreciating the good things in life, you start to take control of your thoughts and welcome them without any judgment and without letting it affect your mood.
Now, practicing mindfulness and incorporating it into your daily life is not something that happens overnight or even after a few days. Some days, I still even struggle with it. Especially, when a very stressful situation arises and all I could think about are the worst-case scenarios.
It takes practice and it may take you a hundred tries but as long as you are willing to do it, as long as you want to achieve it then you will certainly make it.
And there are a lot of you can practice mindfulness every day, these tips are not even the half of it. So, look for the ones that will work best for you and don’t give up!
Your Turn…
What about you? How do you practice mindfulness? Let me know in the comment section below or send me an email, I would love to hear from you!
DISCLAIMER
I am not a licensed therapist. If you are suffering from a major disorder and need treatment please seek the help of a professional to get the help you deserve.