4 Steps to a Quieter Mind

Your anxiety, plastic brain and mindfulness. The treatment for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as outlined in Brain Lock by Dr Jeffrey Schwartz has relevance to the practice of meditation and the quieting of your mind noise. Here is a link to a site to manage and help treat OCD http://www.ocduk.org/2/foursteps.htm

The steps, as broken down to manage this disease, can be applied very successfully to quieting your anxious thoughts. Thoughts are thoughts they arise from habits, experiences, mistakes and errors in perception they are not in or of themselves real, they are chemical messages we can hopefully choose to believe and act on or not.

Step 1: Relabel
Recognise that your intrusive, anxious thoughts and urges are stuck brain patterns that become more defined and stronger the longer you allow them and act on them. It’s not what you think that is important, in changing your habits, it’s what you choose to do or not do as a result of them.
Step 2: Reattribute
Realise that the intensity and intrusiveness of your thoughts or urges are caused by your habits; it is probably related to a biochemical imbalance in your brain that may be attributable to sticky brain processing, dehydration, deficiencies in your diet, lack of exercise, experiences and embedded memories that cause leakage behavior and perpetrate your anxiety still further. Your anxiety will have a biochemical instigation.
Step 3: Refocus
Work around the thoughts by focusing your attention on something else, at least for a few minutes: do something else, go for a walk, drink a glass of water, focus on your body parts relaxing, sing, listen to music, sit or walk and focus on your breath.
Step 4: Revalue
Your anxious thoughts are not important or real in and of themselves, which means realising that the feelings are not worth paying attention to and not to be taken at face value. Revalue it.
When the anxiety occurs, you will be prepared. You will know, “That’s just my anxiety. It has no meaning. That’s just my brain. There’s no need to pay attention to it.” Remember: You can’t make the thoughts go away, but neither do you need to pay attention to them. You can learn to go on to the next behavior. There is no need to dwell on the thoughts. Move ahead. Simply ignore them and get on with things.

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