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- #13
Kintsugi
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Just practiced some anxiety-stopping jutsu with grounding techniques. The battle will be won.
Something I find interesting about Hashi's meditation/breathing exercise is that--because I've been consuming a silly amount of documentaries surrounding issues of food and its industry--I recently learned most (non-hunger-related) food cravings last twenty minutes. I wonder if this length of time isn't a good general goal for lots of automatic coping mechanisms. It reminds me of my trouble sleeping as a kid; I would lay awake and eventually get up and tell my mother I was going to stay up a bit, because I couldn't sleep. She would always tell me to go back to bed for twenty more minutes before staying up later. This is also used in the food example, where comfort eaters and others with various habitual eating rituals superfluous to a consistent diet are advised to wait at least twenty minutes before deciding they're hungry after a craving starts, since theoretically cravings will pass but hunger will remain.
I wonder if this would work with anxiety outside of a prolonged, more regimented exercise. Like, maybe you could make a playlist that is approximately twenty minutes long, and when you feel anxious, you could play it wherever you are, even low in the background, and decide that you will not think about the issue that first prompted your anxiety until the music stops. And if you did start thinking about it and felt a pang of anxiety or fear, you could remind yourself to listen to the music instead. After the music stops, you return to the original issue for, say, five minutes minimum, and if you begin escalation again, you could just do it again and return again to the thought.
I'm rambling for sure at this point, so forgive me.
Then at least even if the task itself wasn't addressed, you would be able to attempt to address it, say, five times that day (not in a row), spending two hours trying and practicing to address it calmly, which is more productive than I usually am, since I'll shut down all day often.
It sort of reminds me of my cardio class, learning to improve your resting heart rate. Your body would adapt to being asked to do something intense and then would learn how to come back to stasis from that intensity quickly, making you feel calm and at rest after exercise instead of panting and having a pounding heart. Maybe this is like a similar thing, where you can exercise your calming skills so that they become reflexive, to where feelings of intense anxiety can trigger a practiced sense of calm and confidence.
It sounds really nice.
Hang in there guys and gals.
Something I find interesting about Hashi's meditation/breathing exercise is that--because I've been consuming a silly amount of documentaries surrounding issues of food and its industry--I recently learned most (non-hunger-related) food cravings last twenty minutes. I wonder if this length of time isn't a good general goal for lots of automatic coping mechanisms. It reminds me of my trouble sleeping as a kid; I would lay awake and eventually get up and tell my mother I was going to stay up a bit, because I couldn't sleep. She would always tell me to go back to bed for twenty more minutes before staying up later. This is also used in the food example, where comfort eaters and others with various habitual eating rituals superfluous to a consistent diet are advised to wait at least twenty minutes before deciding they're hungry after a craving starts, since theoretically cravings will pass but hunger will remain.
I wonder if this would work with anxiety outside of a prolonged, more regimented exercise. Like, maybe you could make a playlist that is approximately twenty minutes long, and when you feel anxious, you could play it wherever you are, even low in the background, and decide that you will not think about the issue that first prompted your anxiety until the music stops. And if you did start thinking about it and felt a pang of anxiety or fear, you could remind yourself to listen to the music instead. After the music stops, you return to the original issue for, say, five minutes minimum, and if you begin escalation again, you could just do it again and return again to the thought.
I'm rambling for sure at this point, so forgive me.
Then at least even if the task itself wasn't addressed, you would be able to attempt to address it, say, five times that day (not in a row), spending two hours trying and practicing to address it calmly, which is more productive than I usually am, since I'll shut down all day often.
It sort of reminds me of my cardio class, learning to improve your resting heart rate. Your body would adapt to being asked to do something intense and then would learn how to come back to stasis from that intensity quickly, making you feel calm and at rest after exercise instead of panting and having a pounding heart. Maybe this is like a similar thing, where you can exercise your calming skills so that they become reflexive, to where feelings of intense anxiety can trigger a practiced sense of calm and confidence.
It sounds really nice.
Hang in there guys and gals.
