Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present (The Path to Calm Book 1)

For example: 4 February, 9:15 Received a worrying message about Dad needing surgery on his shoulder. Feeling around 4/10, kind of apprehensive and a little tired. Weird knot feeling in my stomach. Trouble staying focused on work: only working at about 1/10 effectiveness. I think I feel this way because I’m worried about something bad happening to h

The general technique goes as follows: Find a comfortable position and relax your breathing; center yourself and close your eyes. In as much detail as you can, take your time to imagine a location of your choosing, so long as it makes you feel happy, calm, or energized. You might choose a cool, mystical forest, a beach, a snug blanket beside a fire

Researcher Gaétan Chevalier found that “earthing” or grounding the human body on the actual earth had fascinating effects on mood.

The language that we use when we talk to ourselves makes as much of a difference as the factual accuracy of the statements.

Next, try to find four things in your environment that you can feel or touch. Feel the weight of your body against the chair, or the texture of the jacket you’re wearing, or reach out to feel how cool and smooth the glass of the car window feels against your fingers.

Stress management is about removing those unnecessary stressors, but it’s also about proactively making room for those things in life that we enjoy and which refresh and regenerate us. You could begin the day with something enjoyable, rather than dive into chores and stressful tasks.

There are no “anxiety genes” that destine you to a fixed fate you can never escape. There is even now evidence to suggest that as we get older and our environments change, the effects of our genes have even less influence over us.

A “dysfunctional thought record” is a structured way to gather all those automatic, even unconscious thoughts in one place so we can analyze them and decide if an alternative would serve us better. In the same way as we constructed an ABC spreadsheet above, construct a thought record: Date and time Situation Automatic thoughts Emotions Alternative

changing. Attempt to restructure only after you’ve spent enough time gathering data neutrally—we are often not in the position to start making changes until we have a clear picture of what we’re actually altering!