Anxiety comes in several different forms.
Sometimes it includes runaway thoughts that lead to some imagined, but terrible outcome that you feel helpless to stop from happening. You’ve played out the scenario to its bitter conclusion and its terrible! Your body then reacts to the imagined threat in the present moment where no threat exists.
Other times, you may feel anxious as a major deadline or task looms on the horizon, and you feel unprepared or certain that failure is imminent. You’re locked in to this project or on this trajectory that you *know* ends poorly, but you have no way to jump ship before it’s too late.
Whatever shape your anxiety takes, its difficult to manage in those moments. The alarm bells are ringing and when that happens, the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for rational thought) turns off and we are left to react in “fight or flight” mode.
There are a lot of ways that we can slow this process down and regain some functioning, however, and for today’s “Self-Help Saturday” I’d like to share one of those tricks that my wife affectionately dubbed “The Boring Game”