Guided Meditation for Anxiety: Dropping Anchor
When you’re a person with anxiety, and you’re looking for guided meditation activities, you probably need some help lowering your stress levels.
Emotions can swirl around you. Thoughts can become catastrophic. It feels like you’re in the middle of a storm.
But rather than fighting the storm, or trying to outrun the storm (which never works), we want you to instead drop anchor. And ride out the storm, feeling it and noticing it, and connecting with it.
Image credit: Torsten Dederichs @tdederichs
At Compassionate Counseling St. Louis, we provide anxiety therapy for college students and teens, in addition to young kids and their parents.
(Read More: CBT for Parents and Using the Three Step Approach)
We’re passionate about helping anxious kids, teens, college students - and, yes, their parents, too - find ways to manage their anxiety and anxiety-driven anger, rather than letting it take over.
With that it mind, it may seem counterintuitive as anxiety therapists to encourage you to feel your anxiety.
Or even to let it seem like it’s taking over. But actually, this is a critical part of ACT, aka Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (one of Kelsey’s favorite types of therapy!)
Rather than trying to stop your thoughts, or stop your feelings - which is impossible - we ant to allow them to happen, sit with them, and accept them.
When Anxiety Makes You Angry is a self-help book for teens
It’s chock full of concrete strategies rooted in ACT, so that your teen can manage their anger, and their anxiety, instead of letting it take over their life.
Dropping Anchor: Therapy for Anxiety
Dropping Anchor, created by Russ Harris the founder of ACT, involves three components.
Part 1: Acknowledge the thoughts and feelings coming up
Part 2: Connect with your physical body
Part 3: Engage in your environment
It’s like sitting with your anxious brain, and then expanding your awareness to the world around you. You are a brain, in a body, in an environment. You can sit with difficult things, and defuse from them by expanding your viewpoint.
It’s a simple technique, and it’s powerful. Give it a listen, right here:
Therapy for College Students and Teenager Therapy in St. Louis, MO
If you’re looking for more help with managing the storm, reach out to one of our specialized anxiety therapists today. We work with kids, teens, and parents from age 4 on up, specializing in anxiety and anxiety-driven anger.
Other therapists might want you to practice thought stopping, or they might even label thoughts or feelings as bad.
But we want you to accept the thoughts, accept the feelings, and gently find ways to defuse and take the power out of them - so that you, and your child, feel less like anxiety is in charge of you, and more like you are in charge of your anxiety.
Let’s get started - right here.
Compassionate Counseling St. Louis specializes in anxiety therapy for teens, kids, and college students, along with partnering with parents through parent coaching - basically therapy for parents here in St. Louis. We’re located in Clayton and work with clients throughout the St. Louis region. To schedule a free phone consultation, please use our contact page.
