A "Quickie" to help release anxiety

Pausing when you feel anxious takes takes incredible courage.

Returning to Ease

Anxiety, depression, and heightened stress levels are widespread in our society. Globally, anxiety and depression have reached their highest recorded levels in history.

Here is a speedy step-by-step method to help you come out of discursive thoughts and return home to yourself: (this is a small excerpt from Returning to Ease series that starts Jan 20, 2026)

Here at the main faculties of a mind in peace:

We can roll with what is happening —adaptable.

That is: can we sit on a sideline position (awareness) and see that the mind is being corrupted by elevating emotions and be in a compassionate stance that is interested about what to do.

To do this, we follow four steps:

1.    Pause: Be Mindful:

When we pause, full stop, we can be mindful.  To be mindful is often defined as a way of intentionally paying attention to the present moment without being swept up by judgments. (Daniel Segal, Mindsight) Developing mindful awareness occurs by training the mind to focus on moment-to-moment experience. Focusing our attention in this way is a biological process that promotes health—a form of brain hygiene—mental flossing.  By cleaning our thoughts and seeing where the deposits are, deposits being the junk thoughts—we identify the thoughts that we are believing.

For example, if I feel like I am not doing enough or “am not enough”, when I put pressure on myself to get more done, then I won’t be able to access the clear mind that is in the moment.

The first step is to be mindful, and this will allow you to identify the thought: “I’m not doing enough.”

2.     Breathe: Deep breaths will interrupt the thought. Three deep breaths can take about 16 sec and this can be a good amount of time to interrupt an uncomfortable feeling.

Deliberately copying a relaxed breathing pattern seems to calm the nervous system that controls the body's involuntary functions. Controlled breathing can cause physiological changes that include: lowered blood pressure and heart rate and reduced levels of stress hormones in the blood.

3.    Practice Self-compassion. 

We would not think to chastise a small child for crying. Instead we hold them, we comfort them and listen to them.  Let us learn how to “hold” our self in those stressful thoughts and know that we are not less than, and don’t need to “snap out of it!”  That’s just forceful, performance-pressure-type thoughts that have no value.

Pause, ...value the feeling and what it is showing you about yourself, feel no need to change the thought. You are not wrong to have hard thoughts. Instead you don't know how to be who you are or love yourself. This decision to develop loving thoughts about yourself will tenderize the harder thoughts you were judging yourself with a moment ago.

4.    Come into Stillness.

It will take practice to feel what a sense of stillness or calm feels like.  You will need to review it again and again, like a fire drill.  We don’t want to try to find the exits when we smell smoke.

Stillness defined:

·      the natural feeling of a fresh moment, where you don’t feel like you need to focus, instead you are engaged in what you are doing.

·      Stillness may feel like an unending relaxed state where the sense of peace is all pervading.

·      You feel like yourself.

·      You feel home, complete, whole.

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