You can’t rewire your brain to stop feeling anxiety at once, but you can use a simple tool to help tame your anxiety once you feel it coming. That simple tool has a fitting name: the taming tool. But before we dive into what the taming tool is, let’s understand anxiety better.
Anxiety is a cortisol pathway built from life experience. Fortunately, you can build a new pathway to trigger happy chemicals instead of cortisol. But you have to feed your brain new experiences to do that. This may seem like an impossible paradox. How can you feed your brain new experiences while you’re running on old pathways? Well, the short answer is to focus on what you want rather than what you don’t want. That’s where the taming tool comes in to bring you on a different pathway that leads to natural good feelings. The taming tool has three steps.
First: spend one minute asking your inner mammal what it wants.
Second: spend 20 minutes doing an activity you like that completely absorbs you.
Third: Once you’ve done that, spend one minute planning your next step, and take that step by the end of the day. By practicing this taming tool every day, your electricity will flow in a new direction and you will literally forget to be anxious.