There can be a lot of stress during the stages of breaking up. I’ve posted advice on not sleeping, well what about if your mind just goes crazy and won’t stop thinking when you are trying to sleep. In fact sometimes you just can’t stop thinking those thoughts all day. Stress causes this – your mind just won’t shut down. Thoughts of what you could have done differently, worries about anything from never finding the right guy to having enough money. All of these stress factors can swim around and around your mind. Your heart rate goes up, your shoulders stiffen, and you feel stressed. It can be very unhealthy to be very stressed – check your stress levels out with the breakup stress scale test.
One exercise you can try is imagery training. This is when you train your mind to think about something soothing and let those stressful thoughts go. You might have a particular thought that is soothing for you – a fantasy about a holiday abroad, remembering a wonderful beach you have stayed at before, or just a nice place you can escape to in your mind. It shouldn’t be stimulating, it should be relaxing. I went through my breakup with T fantasizing about houses I wanted to buy – it was a dream, I couldn’t actually handle the real stress of buying a house, instead I would imagine how I would decorate my dream house. It was the thing I returned to, especially at night when I wanted to sleep.
The stressful thoughts though, can be addictive, so we need to train ourselves to let them go. So how do we do this?
1. Think of your pleasant thought or scene
2. Concentrate on using all of your senses
- the smell (in my case: fresh paint)
- the touch (newly polished floor boards)
- the sound (the sound of hammering as I did my renovations)
- the taste (dinner as I invite my guests to a dinner party for a house-warming)
If you have stressed out thoughts try to invade your wonderful fantasy, don’t involve yourself, just let them enter and leave. Patience is important at the beginning – you will improve your focus over time.
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