Hey guys, welcome to not another anxiety show. I'm your host, Kelly Walker, and today it's going to be yours truly sharing an exercise for when you catch yourself ruminating.

So this exercise involves asking yourself three questions when you notice yourself ruminating.

But keep in mind, if the rumination is so intense that you're feeling that fight or flight response in your body,

then you may want to take a step back and try this when things aren't so intense because this is a cognitive exercise,

and we know that the prefrontal cortex, or executive control, lives, goes offline when we're in

fight or flight mode. This can be a great exercise as an alternative to a formal meditation practice

to cultivate more awareness in our lives.

If you can simply remember to check in with yourself once or twice a day, you may notice some

lower intensity rumination happening under the radar. We don't often register rumination

unless we start to feel it in our body. So this exercise can be particularly

beneficial with the lower intensity rumination. Maybe you catch yourself replaying a past or

a projected conversation over and over, or maybe you catch yourself worrying about the logistics

of the week, or maybe you notice yourself rehashing a work presentation,

or spinning your wheels while you wait for medical test results. Whatever it might be,

you can ask yourself three simple questions, starting with one, is this a good time to be

thinking about this? If it's the middle of the night, probably not the best time.

You can always throw a reminder on your phone to revisit the issue in the morning when the issue

isn't too intense or consuming. This wasn't always possible for me when I was remaining

about potential health issues. It felt too risky and dangerous to

set aside at first. I had to start small here and build my capacity to step away from

overthinking and ruminating when it wasn't serving me. But if things aren't too intense,

if they're not too overwhelming, sometimes just simply asking ourselves, hey, is this when I

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