Managing your anxious thoughts

Apr 05, 2022

Here are a few suggestions of how you can manage anxious thoughts this Stress Awareness Month.

Keep a ‘head diary’

Worries running through your head all the time?

Keep a ‘head diary’ of your thoughts on paper.

Every time you have a worry, thought note it down and leave it there.

Look at your diary at the end of the week and get rid of what’s not worth keeping.

Work on having a lighter head with less thoughts than at the start of the week.

Anxious thinkers tend to project into the future by thinking ‘what if..’ worse case

future scenarios.

Every time you think of something as a ‘what if?’ replace it with, ‘at the moment’

instead.

Practise saying ‘as yet’ at the end of negative sentences.

I can’t do it (as yet).

Focus on what you can control and let go of what you can’t.

For example: You can’t control whether you will do well in your exam. You can

control how much time you spend revising.

Make a list of activities you can do every time you have an anxious thought come to your head.

Observe your worries and let them drift away, like clouds in the sky.

Observe them if they come back and keep them drifting away from you.