ask tHe exPert
JoHN P . forsytH , Phd . And georg H . eifert , Phd . CoNtiNued
anxiety with defense and struggle , we can learn to let go of trying to deal with anxiety — we can learn to be gentler with ourselves and our thoughts and emotional life . Many of the exercises are aimed at building that skill . Then we will find the space to respond to it differently , and the space to do something new in our lives .
P : Which of your 52 ways to find peace of mind do you use most often ? F & E : Honestly , we do our best to use most of them , but we do have some personal favorites . One of them is the “ I am ” meditation . We have both been meditating twice a day for years . This exercise teaches us , in a disarmingly simple way , that we are not what our mind constantly tells us . Our minds are word-generating , story-telling machines . What we fail to see is that the mind ’ s job is to produce thoughts — that ’ s it . If you can learn to watch thinking as thinking and all the commentary the mind creates , what we ultimately come back to is a simple “ I am .” Not “ I am anxious .” Those are words — the mind describing the person and their emotional experience . But the words are not the person . Heck , when you were six years old and someone asked you “ who are you ,” you might have responded “ I am a first grader .” But do you still call yourself a first grader ? Are those words really who you are ?
Also , we like the exercises that teach us more flexible perspective-taking . We cannot change what we don ’ t know or are unwilling to look at . We have an exercise where we have people describe their anxiety as if it were another person — give it a personality , age , tone of voice , right down to their shoes . Then , we ask , is this someone who you want to hang out with ? Is this character someone that gives you good advice ? This exercise is helpful in getting perspective .
P : How is Anxiety Happens different than other self-help books on the same subject ?
64 PULSE ■ August 2018