Do you have a habit of thinking the worst and then feeling stressed and anxious?
To stop catastrophizing use these steps:
How To Stop Thinking The Worst
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Anxiety Stress and Panic Attacks
Reduce Your Worry
Here’s a quick technique you’ll love because it shifts your focus from worry and stress to feeling positive and happy:
1) Ask yourself: ‘Who or what makes me feel happiest?’
2) Write down your answer and spend 30 seconds thinking of that person or thing.
3) Ask yourself the same question and again write down your answer and spend 30 seconds on each until you have 8-10 happy triggers.
3 Useful Ways to Disintegrate Stress & Worry
Do you struggle with stress and worry?
It’s easy to become overwhelmed and so get even less achieved – adding to the worry. Or maybe you try and distract yourself and not think about it, but then sooner of later those thoughts and worries come flooding back and you feel just as bad.
There’s no point pretending that things don’t exist or wishing they will disappear; you’ve got to start to take control over how you feel about them and how you react to them.
Having worked with hundreds of people to ease their stress levels, I thought I’d share three of their favourite ways to take back control:
An Anxiety Free Life
An Anxiety Free Life - Hypnotherapy in Ely and Newmarket Start reigning in your anxiety and giving your stressed brain some moments of peace every day: 5 Foundations of an Anxiety Free Life...
7 Ways To Improve Your Sleep
Do you have trouble sleeping?
If you are anxious, worried, stressed or feeling low, sleep can be one of the main things affected. And the less well you sleep the more tired you become and the harder it is to cope. You may also start to worry about not getting enough sleep and the impact this will have for you – and so you create a cycle of feeling anious about sleeping, which leads to not sleeping and more anxiety.
So here are seven simple things you can do to improve your chance of a good night’s sleep:
Are you a ball of anxiety?
One of my clients told me recently that she felt like a tightly wound up ball of anxiety. She constantly felt on edge, restless and tense and couldn’t find any peace from feeling that way.
No matter how much she tried to distract herself for a while, all those unwelcome thoughts and feelings kept coming back.
However, that soon changed when she used the process below to find more and more inner calmness.
The Anxiety Ball
Here’s what worked for her and if you struggle with anxiety then you can benefit too:
Be In The Now
How much time do you spend dwelling on the past and worrying about the future? Sometimes it can seem like all our time is spent looking back or looking ahead and never taking the time to be in the moment – where you are right now.
If you spend too much time looking back it may make you feel sad, depressed, low or even hopeless. And too much time lost in future worries can lead to anxiety, stress and worry. You may also find that you put happiness and health on the ‘never-never’ – it becomes something you hope to have in the future without doing anything about it right now.
A Time And A Place
It can be useful to look back over the past to see how we have grown and moved on, to remember challenges we’ve overcome and successes we’ve achieved and to learn for the future.
It can be useful to think to the future to help us plan to successfully achieve what we want to in life.
However, it is alos important to make sure you spend some time in the current moment – in the now. We can forget to enjoy the moment and miss opportunities to experience gratitide. love and happiness. When you are more in the now, fears about what might happen in the future start to diminish and feelings from the past are put to one side or behind you.
How To Stop Anxious Thoughts
If you struggle with anxiety then you will be very aware of the two main symptoms that come with anxiety – those anxious feelings that you notice in your body, and the anxious thoughts that race through your mind.
Everyone is very different in how and when they experience their own anxiety – for some the feelings and thoughts are a constant burden through every moment of the day whilst for others they may come and go or be more acute in specific situations.
So when someone with anxiety comes to see me they are desperately seeking relief from the physical feelings and the worrying thoughts.
Your Stressed Brain
The simplest way to explain anxiety is the state in which your mind is on high alert looking out for any sign of danger so it can take action to keep you safe and protected. Of course you probably aren’t in any actual, real danger but your mind can’t tell the difference between worrying about a hungry wolf coming towards you and all the worry and stress that you are experiencing from work, family and all the other areas of your life.
Your mind registers all that stress, worry and anxiety and gets ready to take action – and so your body responds by getting you ready to move, and your breathing increases, you get hot and sweaty, the adrenaline pumps around your body. You notice all these things and start to interpret them as anxiety, which causes more worry and stress and leads to more physical symptoms and a cycle develops where the feelings and thoughts feed each other and fuel each other.
Anxious people often talk about thier brains feeling full or lilke cotton wool, how they have trouble concentrating and how tired they feel. It’s like having a stressed out brain working as hard as it can and therefore has no room for anything but anxiety.
Anxiety Buster: Ditch The News
How much news do you follow? I’ve worked with people who watch the news over breakfast, read the paper on the way to work, check their news app throughout the day, look at news online at lunchtime then back home for the evening news and the ten o’clock news before bed.
And as much of the news is full of disasters, pain, suffering and sadness, that’s a lot of worry and stress being force fed into your mind.
Limit Your News Intake
Let’s be honest, most news stories don’t change so quickly that you need to check in on them dozens of times a day. What tends to happen is you get the same story wrapped up in several different ways.
And all the pain, suffering and disaster you are absorbing is like waving a red flag in front of an anxious mind and screaming ‘it’s dangerous out there!’ No wonder many people with anxiety would rather stay indoors where it feels safer from all that worrying stuff ‘out there’.
Anxiety Buster: Cut the Caffeine
Could caffeine be contributing to your anxiety and stress levels?
Many of us like a few cups of tea or coffee each day. Or you may prefer energy drinks or other drinks that contain caffeine. You may like the taste, enjoy the ritual of taking a break at the same time or maybe you use them to help you overcome your tiredness and lethargy.
How Caffeine Fuels Anxiety
Caffeine is a stimulant that can help perk us up and keep us going. Yet the effects of too much caffeine can be symptoms such as feeling on edge or jittery, agitation, over-alertness and palpitations. In essence, it produces effects similar to stress on our bodies.
And if you suffer with anxiety, several of these symptoms may seem all too familiar already – such as those shaky, jittery, on edge feelings and those palpitations.
If you are already anxious or stressed then the impact of caffeine can be enough to amplify all those feelings. And the more you feel them, the more you focus on your anxiety, creating a cycle of worry and even more anxiety. It’s like pouring fuel on your anxiety and then trying to cope with the fire you’ve created.
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