Mindful Tools for Stress Management (self -study)

Now you have learned how to be mindful and you might have noticed that sometimes it makes you more aware of some difficult emotions. This week we deepen our skills and learn to be more mindful of our emotions and find some ways to handle the difficult emotions.

Being aware of our emotions helps us to be more aware about our needs. For example grief tells that we have lost something or someone and need to find a new perspective on future. Guilt tells that we have done something wrong and have a need to fix the situation. We often try to ignore our difficult emotions but that might make the emotions even stronger. Being aware of the emotions helps us to handle the difficult feelings.

Sometimes it is difficult to find words for emotions. Labeling emotions is often the first step to take when trying to cope with difficult emotions.

Self-compassion is a skill that helps us to cope with difficult emotions. Self-compassion consists of three elements:

• kindness and a warm regard towards oneself when experiencing difficult emotions and suffering
• an experience that difficulties and suffering are a part of humanity and that others experience the same emotions
• conscious presence, acceptance and making observations on one's personal experiences as they are

If you like to you can test your level of self-compassion  and learn more about self-compassion on Professor Kristin Neff's web site self-compassion.org.

Practices for difficult situations

When encountering difficult situations you can try this practice:

• Self-compassion break (audio by Kristin Neff)

This practice is for handling feelings of anger afterwards when you've encountered a situation that made you angry:

• Handling anger (audio)

handling_anger

Practices of the week

This week continue with the practices and routines we've learned:

• Body Scan
  

• Listening me or Anchoring to Breathing or Three Minute Breathing
  

• a mindful daily routine
  

Back to weekly practices