For not important and not urgent tasks: Delete!

When you analyze your stress diary like this, you are working with real data that can help you make insightful changes. You may even be surprised at some findings—only in writing things down in the moment do you see clear patterns emerge.

The antecedent is a trigger that cues a behavior.

Once you’ve decided that something is not worth worrying about, be ruthless. Imagine your mind is a dog on a leash and keep pulling it back to the present. This is easiest to do if you engage all five of your senses to anchor you in the real, present moment. Examine your environment to see if you can list three sights, three sounds, three smells,

Progressive muscle relaxation is taking control of your muscles to deliberately loosen and relax them, as well as heighten your awareness of these sensations and your degree of control over them.

Your brain can go at a thousand miles an hour and imagine anxiety-provoking scenes that have absolutely nothing to do with reality, but your physical body is slower and your senses are almost always going to give you an accurate reading on the environment, provided you tune into them with enough sensitivity. Using visualization helps us to change

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.

If you are familiar with your triggers, you can remind yourself to “switch on” your script when you know you’re most vulnerable to delving into negative self-talk or overthinking.

when we write these down systematically, we can analyze them and evaluate whether these thoughts are merited at all. To build the habit, you can carry a pocket journal with you and write whenever you feel it’s necessary.