A short instructional excerpt from Dr. Aziz’s YouTube video offering an immediate grounding technique for social anxiety and negative self-critical thoughts: label intrusive thinking, take three full breaths, and while breathing, shift attention to surrounding sounds to move focus from fearful thoughts to the present and calm the body.
Here's a powerful technique to help you calm down instantly, especially if you're feeling social anxiety or a lot of negative self critical thoughts. The issue is not the thoughts. The issue is that you are tuning and hyper focusing all your attention on the thoughts and making them very real. So when you notice that, just label it. Oh, a lot of thinking is happening right now, or a lot of negative thoughts or anxious thoughts. And then on purpose, take a full breath. And as you're breathing in and out three times, bring all of your focus to what you can hear around you. And you can do it right here with me in a beautiful setting where there's birds. And just take a full breath in now and just bring all of your focus to what you're hearing. You ready? Let's do it together now. And as you do that and you tune into the sound, all of a sudden your focus goes away from your mind and the thinking and the scary things to being right here and your body calms down instantly.
