Worrying about worrying worry?

Let's preface this by saying we all worry. Sometimes they're big worries, sometimes they're little worries. Sometimes they're rational and sensible, sometimes they're as illogical and colourful as can be. Sometimes we can flick them off, and sometimes we cant...

Let's talk about that last one a little bit. Life is mysterious, complicated, and often challenging, and the last few years have added to that challenge in a way many of us could never have expected. Anxiety can creep, turning our thoughts, twisting our bodies, and tugging us away from what we would really rather be doing. It can be hard to escape, and we find ourselves sucked down a vortex with an ever growing list of thoughts inviting themselves in, like gate-crashers at a party we don't even want to be at. To try to escape we might try to avoid things like social occasions, work, friends, family, or we might add things like excessive alcohol, drugs, or food, in an attempt to find our way out of our head and back into our lives. These rarely work in the long run, and some might paradoxically add to the problem.

So what do we do when we find ourselves in this situation? One strategy is to simply stop and ground ourselves back in the moment we are truly in. Why does this help? Because when we are worried or anxious, our brains tend to go bumbling off to the past, the future, things that have happened, things that might happy, and being the creative souls we are, this can mix itself up into a right old soup of worry, often about things that are in the past, or haven't even happened yet. The video below demonstrates a simple grounding technique which can be beneficial to all of us. I love it because it's an exercise we can do anywhere, anytime, and the more we do it, the more in tune we become with out mind and body. Give it and go and let me know what you think in the comments!