Visit number four at the psychology clinic last week, where I’m being shown various techniques to re-train my thought processes from the punishing cycle of self-defeating, emotional reactions.
One of these involves guided meditation and mindfulness exercises like those demonstrated by Jon Kabat-Zinn in the Google workshops. I was guided through another of these last week, in which I closed my eyes and visualised myself sitting on the bank of a stream, watching leaves float downstream away from me. Each leaf represented a distracting thought which I had to let go of as I focused on the stream.
I was also given an exercise called “worry time”. The idea is to distance myself from worrying thoughts during the day by writing them down as they occur, then reviewing the list later on, at a fixed time each day for no longer than 20 or 30 minutes. I don’t always have the time or means to write things down, so it hasn’t been going so well. I tried writing things down for the first time yesterday, on a scrap bit of paper. It didn’t really have the desired effect. But I’ll stick with it for a while and see how it goes.