Feeling Worried

🪞 What You're Feeling

• Tightness in the chest or stomach
• Restless thoughts that won’t stop looping
• Difficulty focusing or sleeping
• Imagining worst-case scenarios
• Feeling unsafe, even without clear reason

🔍 Why You Might Feel This

Worry is your brain’s way of trying to protect you. When uncertainty or potential loss appears, your system goes on alert. It’s trying to keep you safe — just a bit too hard.

Chronic worry can come from stress, past unpredictability, or feeling responsible for things beyond your control. But calm isn’t gone — it’s just buried under vigilance.

🧘‍♀️ Try This Right Now

When worry takes over, the goal isn’t to “stop thinking.” It’s to help your body remember that the moment you’re in is still safe.

1. Take a slow, deliberate breath — in through your nose, out longer through your mouth.
   → Extending your exhale tells your nervous system you’re safe right now.
2. Look around and name five things you can see.
   → Orientation pulls your mind back from imagined danger to real safety.
3. Say: “I don’t need all the answers tonight.”
   → This creates permission to rest even while uncertainty remains.
4. Soften your jaw and shoulders.
   → Physical tension often mirrors mental tension — releasing one calms both.
5. Place a warm hand on your heart and feel your heartbeat.
   → A quiet reminder: you’re alive, present, and still capable of calm.

📚 Support Tools

• The Worry Trick by David Carbonell — practical methods for defusing chronic worry and breaking anxious cycles.
• Unwinding Anxiety by Judson Brewer — science-based tools to interrupt worry habits and calm your brain.
• A Simple Way to Break a Bad Habit — TED talk on the brain’s habit loops and how awareness changes them.
• 5-Minute Grounding Meditation for Anxiety — quick calm for worried minds.

Some links are Amazon affiliate links and help support this project — with no extra cost to you. 💛