Welcome to the Anxiety Slayer series. Our mission is to assist you with creating more peace and tranquility in your life

through anxiety release exercises and supportive tools created to slay your anxiety.

As we enter a new year, it's natural to look back over the past 12 months and look forward to the year ahead and start thinking about what happened before and what would like to happen

next.

But the way in which we do that can have a profound effect on our anxiety levels.

If we look back on the year behind us with gratitude and review

what we've learned and hold those learnings with us as we move forward into a new year.

That can be a very positive, mindful experience.

But if we look back at the things that went wrong, things that challenged us, things that

we didn't feel so comfortable about, and we hold those in our awareness, then that can

set up an anticipator anxiety for the year ahead,

where the mind naturally starts chewing over our past unpleasant experiences,

and the mind seeks to protect us from the things we don't like, the things that make

us feel uncomfortable. And the way it does that is to become hyper-vigilant. It becomes like a watchman on the lookout for problems. So when we bear in mind

troubles that we've experienced in our recent past, then the mind starts to set up negative what if thinking. Your mind

starts to look ahead and think, what if this happens again, and it's the complete opposite of bringing our learning from things that have happened to us in the past

or just having a clear open space for the future free from expectations.

And the two are a very different experience.

So as we're into the new year, if you're suffering from stress and anxiety,

one helpful thing to practice is looking ahead with an open mind rather than dragging past experiences with you

and projecting negative fears and expectations into the future.

None of us know what the year ahead will bring. We don't know the challenges we're going to face and we can be so much more prepared in a healthy way if we just leave the slate clean and look after ourselves in the here and now.

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