Tame Your Anxiety: Rewiring Your Brain for Happiness

Exercises

• Keep an anxiety journal to capture the moments when anxious thoughts sprout in your mind, noting which events or images trigger them, as if you were observing rare birds in the forest of your own mind.
• Create a personal map of neural pathways: mark which habitual reactions and scenarios repeat day after day, and try gently changing their direction, as if forging a new path through dense thickets.
• Practice mindful attention shifting: when anxiety washes over you, choose one specific object or sensation—sound, color, scent—and fully immerse yourself in perceiving it, allowing anxiety to dissolve in this focus.
• Develop a gratitude ritual: each day, find three moments you are truly grateful for and write them down, gradually weaving your inner speech with threads of positivity.
• Train yourself to notice your small victories over anxiety, marking each time you resisted a habitual impulse, and celebrate these steps like the first shoots on spring soil.