Using Morning Pages to Cope With Anxiety, Worry and Stress

Hello and welcome back! Your first step before reading this blog is to read my blog on Morning Pages. Once you’ve done that, please continue on!

We all cope with stress and anxiety in our lives. We may see it in our jobs, our business, our personal, home and family lives too - It’s everywhere. What changes the outcome of these is how you react to them, adapt and change.

I want to discuss how morning pages can help you cope with anxiety and stress. It can actually help to minimize the physical strain on your body, and make you start to feel better about facing outcomes you may not have the answers to.

Morning pages are essentially a type of journaling exercise where you write out your stream of consciousness for 30 minutes daily. If you read my previous blog on morning pages, they are not simply any old journal entry. It is putting things down on paper that you shouldn’t be keeping in your head. The purpose is to release the clutter to free up space so you can have clarity on a daily basis to allow you to focus on what’s important.

With that being said, I was reading a book called The Big Leap, by Gay Hendricks. In this book, he talks about self-sabotaging habits we have that prevent us from achieving our ultimate best that we can achieve.

One of these self-sabotaging things we do is worry, more specifically, worrying about things that we can’t control. How many times do we do this in a day? If we could somehow get rid of that worry, imagine how much more time and energy you might have to actually concentrate on things that matter in your life. As Hendricks says,

“ …almost none of your worry-thoughts have anything to do with reality.”

When you really think about it, most of the things we worry about don’t even come to fruition. So, here’s an idea…

What if we were to write down these unrealistic worries in our morning pages? Write down everything you’re worried about, and the takeaway is we stop worrying about things we can’t control and we do something about the things we can control.

Here’s an example…let’s say you’re worried about getting cancer. LET’S MAKE OUR ANNUAL CHECK-UP AND SCREENING APPOINTMENTS! That’s a solid thing you can do right now. Even if you’re nervous about it or scared, just do it. Prevention and early detection is the best way to stop cancer in it’s tracks.

Another personal example for me just happened the other day (at the time of writing). I was taking my son to school, and I had a mind fog and couldn’t remember if I had shut the garage door. I worried about it for all of a second, and then decided to scoot backward to check. Sure enough, it was shut and I had nothing to worry about.

So here’s the thing - let’s start writing down these worries we can’t change. Let’s write them down and burn them up! We can use our imagination and pretend they’re vanishing into thin air. Keep trying every day, and make it a habit.

I’m going to start now and I will do a follow up blog on morning pages and how it relates to coping with worry, stress and anxiety.

Thanks for reading and I will see you next time!

Sandra 🧡