The chillout zone: Easy rituals to soothe anxiety

Author of Everyday Calming Rituals, Tania Ahsan, shares two of the rituals she practises to destress and relax!

Sitting in front of my laptop, I rubbed my blurry eyes. ‘This is hell,’ I thought. I was working late again. I had a great job as a magazine editor but between the pressure of corporate meetings and targets, and long hours, I was running on empty.

, ZDV DORQH LQ WKH R FH )OLWWLQJ from one task to the next, I could feel a tightness building up in my chest.

I realised I was having a panic attack. I put my face down on my desk, to one side. I could smell the recently cleaned aroma of the desk. )HHO WKH WKUXP RI P\ FRPSXWHU through it. Hear the ticking of the clock on the wall, reminding me that it

A magic moment

way past the time that I should have gone home.

Suddenly, something magical happened. By concentrating on all that I could see, hear, smell, touch and taste, I came around to myself and got a real jolt of perspective.

I wasn’t my job. I wasn’t even my relationships to others. I was me, a human being with senses and a reality beyond just my circumstances. I would continue to be me after this job was long over, after relationships broke up or friendships ended.

I wasn’t being forced into anything. I didn’t have to work late or so darn hard or anything. I was choosing to do it. I had the power to change the things around me for myself.

,W ZDV D ÀDVK RI OLJKWQLQJ D much-needed realisation that I didn’t need a knight in shining armour – I was my own knight!

After that, whenever things got too much for me, I would put my head on my desk and do a little ‘sense ritual’ and see what I could see, hear, smell, feel and taste.

Slow changes

Eventually I quit that job – and the lifelong lesson I learned was that we DOO FDUU\ DURXQG ZLWK XV DQ LQEXLOW ¿UVW aid kit for dealing with everyday stress. If you’re feeling a level of daily overwhelm, then tapping into your senses can help.

That’s why I wrote my book, Everyday Calming Rituals. Try some of the rituals and see if you can make a daily practice of them. Over time, you’ll be surprised at how you still come across new sensations in your everyday life.

Everyday Calming Rituals (Trigger, £9.99) is out now.

like the sound of

– say, church bells or the sound of a stream

– take out your phone or recorder, if you’re using one, and record a clip of it to listen back to later. You don’t have to do this if you’d rather not interrupt your enjoyment of your walk. 5. Walk for as long as you are still enjoying finding new sounds. When you’re home, you may find that you hear the sound of the kettle boiling more keenly than you did before you went on your sound walk. Your senses have been awakened.