SA preventing me from relaxing and doing things I enjoy at home

[Marie8]

I find my SA and anxiety/general worries get in the way of doing the things I enjoy. And I mean the things I enjoy doing at home in my own time. I can never relax as my mind is always so full of thoughts going round and round. I love reading and drawing but I hardly have time to do them as I'm always too busy in my own head. I can sit down but then find it's an hour later and I've just been sat there thinking crap thoughts. Does anyone else get this and how do you deal with it??

[Bluebear]

Originally Posted by Marie8

I find my SA and anxiety/general worries get in the way of doing the things I enjoy. And I mean the things I enjoy doing at home in my own time. I can never relax as my mind is always so full of thoughts going round and round. I love reading and drawing but I hardly have time to do them as I'm always too busy in my own head. I can sit down but then find it's an hour later and I've just been sat there thinking crap thoughts. Does anyone else get this and how do you deal with it??

Hi Marie,
I have this also. How to deal with it? I could write a book about that maybe (several have I think). Hopefully someone more helpful than me will reply.

PS myself and a couple of others I know find playing the piano sometimes interrupts these negative thoughts. If you’ve never played piano or keyboard maybe it might be worth buying a keyboard and maybe trying a few piano books
etc. It wouldn’t help everyone but I just wanted to toss that out there. Or guitar. Also you might find some other people who also love music.

[Mr. Nobody]

I think it's because the mind has been greatly overemphasized in modern society,
It's seen as the cornerstone of our existence, which is nonsense really, but it's maybe led to a strange kind of resultant indolence or lack of actual physical action ?

The mind should really only have the same place and significance of say,.a typewriter, it doesn't actually "do" anything or get things done, it's just a typewriter in effect,
We forget that fact, and overlook the real player, the main player, ...our bodies, our physical moving self, that's what "lives" and does everything in reality,
And this mind, which is really only ever meant to have the position of a basic typewriter has been overburdened with thinking it has to run the entire operation, when in fact, it has never had the way or the means to do so.

If the body is simply left to "do" and the mind is given only the weight and significance of a basic typewriter, then things should fall into place.

People have lost the art of doing things as the mind got too involved,
There is a great art in movement, in doing things.

Let the body speak for itself, it is real at least,
The mind is really just make-believe half the time, and it's machinations have all the significance of soap bubbles, in the end.

The body has an innate intelligence and sensitivity of it's own to see things clearly and know what is good for it and what not,
The mind overriding the body isn't healthy, but I think this is what often happens,
Our jobs and way of living in society can often mean the mind is given dominance and significance way beyond it's value,
So when you get time alone, away from that to be creative, the mind cannot move aside to allow that to happen as it's erroneously been given the role of master of everything, when it's really just nothing of real significance when it comes to being creative or artful or sensitive in some way.

[Sisyphus]

Hi Marie8,

I do this quite a lot too.

It calmed down quite a bit after I took up mindfulness meditation. It gave me much more control over my mind and I could shut down uncomfortable thoughts at will.

This is not quite what it is for but in the early stages it did give me room to think.

It is a double edged sword as it can be very useful to help maintain procrastination and avoidance by shutting thoughts down rather than sitting with them and just not engaging with them.

The down sides are that it can be quite tedious to do and once you have better control of your mind you can think about what the next intervention is going to be.

[Marie8]

It's true I have never tried mindfulness.. this probably sound stupid but how do I do it?

[Sisyphus]

Hi Marie8,

There are many kinds of mindfulness and a quick search will throw up lots of leads if you wish to follow it up.

My first real introduction to mindfulness was during CBT as it is one of the many tools to learn and practice. It is a bit tedious, as are a lot of the things CBT asks you to do. I didn’t really get to grips with it until I found a local mindfulness group which was focused just on mindfulness.

There are quite a few meditations but the two that I find most helpful are breathing and emotion. Having a guide CD really helps at the beginning and is useful when the motivation isn’t quite there.

The breathing is simply sitting relaxed and concentrating on watching your breath. It sounds simply but almost immediately the mind tends to find something else to worry about. The idea is to spot that your mind has wandered and bring it back to watching your breathing. Sounds simple but I find it very challenging. One of the key points here is to be able to spot your mind wandering and bring it back to watching your breathing.

I use the emotion meditation when I have something challenging going on in my head. This time you simply sit with the emotion. Not trying to drive it away or engaging with it; just sitting with it and observing it with an objective frame of mind.

Both techniques make it easier for me to maintain more control over my mind than I used to have.

I did find I did much better after going on a course.

[Tom1985]

I relate to this Marie. At the back of my mind is always depressing thoughts that doing activities alone that I enjoy sometimes like reading or watching films, tv shows is just not going to help me in any way in terms of improving myself to become a "normal" person and I'm just wasting my time. Have a hard time just losing myself in activities and a lot of the time I spend watching pointless youtube videos or just napping etc.
Feel very self conscious being upstairs in my room if there is other people in the house downstairs.

[Franz of Franzylvania]

Yes this is one of my big problems. I feel like I could cope better with the anxiety around people if it would just let me rest a bit when I was on my own, but it doesn't.