Can’t get out of your head? When you are overwhelmed with thoughts try this SUPER helpful technique 💁🏼♀️:
Imagine that you have been abducted by aliens (stay with me, I’m going somewhere sane, I promise), and your life depends on your ability to express all the depth of your feelings and thoughts to your captors. The only caveat - aliens don’t speak human. So you are not allowed to use words. You can dance it, you can draw it, paint it, play it, play-dough it,… anything non-verbal is game (you can make gibberish and animal sounds though).
This works on many levels. From psychology angle the effect is through activating your emotional brain. Here’s a bit of science behind it:
we process everything in our minds in 2 distinct parallel processes - rational and emotional. Thinking about some shitty thing that happened to you (or CAN happen to you) puts your rational system in overdrive. You get totally stuck there. The THING seems so terrifying or burdensome or troubling that your smart smart rational brain wants to protect your emotional self and takes all the burden onto itself. And so the poor sucker keeps thinking of strategies to save you. Like searching for reasons why you were right and your partner was wrong or prepare you for a possible failure in the new project by playing all the worse case scenarios.
Help the brainy brother out. Engage your emotional processing too. As you express your conundrums (rather than engage in feeding the endless loops of what if and buts), you are still working through them, but in a different way. Your rational brain is now resting (and so are you as it’s no longer firing the crazy hormonal alarm potions into your body). And your timid emotional brain is learning that this world is not all that scary after all.
Remember, what you express doesn’t have to be beautiful, it doesn’t need to be seen and approved by anyone. Just let it move through you. Put on some music that suits your mood and dance it out. Grab some paper and colours that match your feelings and draw, scribble. Go nuts.
If you don’t have a favourite expression method - try them all.
And who knows, maybe this may turn out to be a legit alien communication training.
For more tips on how to stay grounded and actually benefit from rather than come undone in these uncertain times follow Wake up And Roar.