Struggling with overwhelming emotions like fear or anxiety? This guide offers practical steps to help you acknowledge and navigate these feelings, building resilience and fostering a healthier mindset.
This guide will help you practice sitting with difficult emotions like fear or anxiety. The goal is to observe and acknowledge your experience without being consumed by it or suppressing it. With practice, this process builds resilience, rewires your brain, and teaches you that discomfort, while unpleasant, is not dangerous—it’s something you can handle.
It will also help you guide your attention to thoughts that are meaningful, rather than thoughts hijacked by an anxious brain. It’s important to move away from the idea that every thought we have is meaningful or important—because many of them are not. We have thousands of thoughts each day, many of which are unhelpful or completely meaningless, even if they feel engaging and alarming in the moment. Only you have the power to decide which thoughts are important and which are just “noise.”
It’s essential to avoid offering reassurance to yourself during this process. This approach teaches your brain to lean into uncertainty and tolerate discomfort without needing to “solve” it. Refrain from using physical compulsions, “neutralizing” thoughts or mantras to reduce discomfort. While it might feel counterintuitive, we want to avoid reassuring yourself that everything will be okay during this exercise.
The more you practice this—whether with small or big emotions—the better you’ll become at sitting with discomfort. This process is inherently uncomfortable, and it’s not uncommon to struggle with this exercise at first. Don’t get frustrated if it feels very challenging in the beginning.
Over time, your brain will learn that uncertainty and discomfort are safe and manageable. You don’t need to avoid or resolve them—they resolve on their own.
