Treating Anxiety With Distraction – following on from my previous post on treating anxiety.
Physical Exercise
This simply means keeping active when you are stressed. If you are physically occupied, you are less likely to be able to dwell on worrying thoughts. You could try taking exercise such as walking, jogging playing squash and so on. These sorts of activities are particularly beneficial as they help use up the adrenaline which can otherwise make you feel tense. If at a party, you began to feel self-conscious, you might offer to take drinks around to people to keep yourself and your mind busy. If your physical task requires mental effort, so much the better, because the distraction effect will be more powerful.
In different situations you will need different activities. You might play squash in the evening in order to work off the day’s stress; take a brief walk up and down the corridor when you are very tense at the office; reorganize your desk when you are not able to leave the office but are alone; unwind and rewind paper clips to take the edge off your anxiety in meetings.
Other distractions that you might try are taking the dog for a walk, reorganizing your garage or a room in the house if you are unable to go out, tidying your handbag, updating your diary if you are physically restricted in what you can do – in a doctor’s waiting room, for example.
Refocusing
This means distracting yourself by .paying great attention to things around you. If you were in a crowded street you could try counting the number of men and women you could see with blonde hair, or look for certain objects in a shop window; in a cafe, you could listen to others’ conversations or study the details of someone’s dress or of a picture.
You don’t have to be sophisticated you just need to find a range of objects which absorb your attention. For example, if a woman were anxious about using the supermarket, she could read car number plates as her friend drove her to the store, attend closely to her shopping list while moving round the supermarket and, at the checkout, read the details on food packages, count the number of items in her own or another person’s basket or browse through a magazine.
Mental Exercise
This requires you to be more creative and to use more mental effort by generating a distracting phrase, picture or mental exercise for yourself. You might try reciting some poetry, recalling a favorite holiday trip, practicing mental arithmetic or studying someone nearby and trying to guess what they do, what interests they might have, where they are going and so on.
You could try dwelling on an imaginary scene to take your mind away from worrying thoughts; by making your scene come alive with color and sounds and texture, you can distract yourself even better.
Examples of this would be imagining your dream home and then walking through every room, studying detail; ‘listening’ to a well-loved tune; cycling over a familiar and much-loved track, paying attention to the scenery; recalling all the stages involved in making a complex flower display; or redesigning your home. The more detailed the mental tasks, the more distracting they are.
