In our last post we discussed about Anxiety Pins. Hope you tried to explore your pins causing anxiety or stress. If not, let’s reflect now and explore ways to regulate our anxious mind.
To begin with let us try to understand what is anxiety briefly. Is it not normal to be anxious in such life changing pandemic which has no defined end or way out? Is the uncertainty not stressful, isolation not frustrating for every normal people to feel anxious. Well, yes! Absolutely. In fact the only ones who are not feeling ‘normal’ are those who feel anxious on every regular day. They probably already know how to cope with such anxiety triggers as they may be seeking some form of help already. But for many, this turmoil is quite new. Letting this anxiety for long within our brain may change the way we think, way we are wired and create fear, phobias and low self esteem which we never experienced in past. Hence, caring for our ‘mind’ is more important than ever before. In this article, I will introduce two very simple tools widely used to calm our mind and regulate our emotions in positive direction.
Find your Pin: Let us understand this more in details. An early 20th century French philosopher known as Alain (born Emile-Auguste Chartier) developed the concept ‘Find The Pin’ in his work Propos sur le bonheur. When faced with an angry person, don’t get angry—instead look for his or her “pin.” A man’s impatience and bad temper are sometimes due to the fact that he’s been standing up too long; don’t reason with him about his temper, but offer him a seat. Finding the pin can change how you perceive a situation for the better. By placing the pin at the epicentre of a stressful event, you can remove your ‘self’ as its victim.
Now let’s pause here and reflect on our thoughts right here – You may think ‘ not again another 101 ways to cope article’ If your thoughts run along these lines, you are feeling skeptical or even discouraged. What causes you to feel that way? Your thoughts. You create those feelings by the dialogue you are having with yourself about this article!
Conversely, you may have felt a sudden uplift in mood because you thought, “Hey, this sounds like something which might finally help me.” Your emotional reaction is generated not by the sentences you are reading but by the way you are thinking. The moment you have a certain thought and believe it, you will experience an immediate emotional response.
