Interrupt The Worry Cycle: A Somatic Mindfulness Practice

Worry activates your nervous system — but you can interrupt that cycle right now. In this short practice, you'll bring a worry to mind and use simple somatic tools (softening your forehead, taking a breath, moving your body) to signal safety to your nervous system. Because the body and brain are in constant conversation, what you do physically changes what you feel mentally. This is somatic mindfulness in action: noticing what's happening in your body, and using that awareness to get unstuck.

Transcript

Bring up a worry for a moment and let it come to mind. Visual, Auditory, Other sense perceptions, Touch. Look at the thoughts as they're coming in and then soften your forehead. So let the worry be there and at the same time soften your forehead and your eyebrows. And each time you breathe out soften your forehead a little bit more. It distracts us from the thought. It also helps compensate for the effect in our body of scary thoughts. Many people hold their breath, Feel the relief of taking a deep breath, Moving your body around, Letting yourself get unstuck. We might stand up and shake out the stress, Shake out the anger or the frustration. We're not actually trapped in the experience of a hypervigilant nervous system or in freeze. The first thing we do is we recognize that it's happening. Somatic mindfulness is we're aware of what's going on in our body. We're aware when we start holding our breath. We're aware when our shoulders are up around our ears or when we're clenching our teeth. So we can relax our body, We can move. Our nervous system creates these trains of thoughts that we can interrupt through awareness. Take a breath, Move your body however you'd like. Look around again. Is your body still safe? What sensations are you feeling in your body right now? We just brought forward a worry, Something that we're feeling anxious or scared about. Maybe you can feel that as a heaviness in your chest or a feeling of fear in your gut. Our brain believes what we think.