Philippa Perry

And then afterwards, you can have a look at those thoughts and you have to do it for half an hour.

And for the first quarter of an hour, I'm always angry that I'm doing the exercise.

And then the last quarter of an hour, I really start to enjoy it and it goes really fast.

It's how to do it is in my book, How to Stay Sane, which has got many exercises that are good for self-therapy in it, including that one.

And then you notice what your thoughts are and you can go, my goodness, I've had 25 self-critical thoughts, two practical thoughts, three thoughts about what I can sense.

And then you can go, well, I could steer my mind a bit.

So then you could do another exercise where you only notice what you can see, what you can hear, what you can taste, what you can smell and what you can touch.

Like you can be aware of what the fluffy carpet feels like under my feet.

I can be aware of what my hands feel like on my jeans.

Now, this is not interesting, but it can get interesting because you just get into your senses.

It's sort of the Gestaltist used to call it, leave your mind and come to your senses.

Oh, I like that.

Because it's about letting the chattering mind go.

The other thing you can think about are things like you can have thousands of thoughts a day, but if you class one down and bring it down, you can make it into thinking.

And you can choose whether you let go of that thought or bring it in to make it into thinking.

We have choices about this.

And if you sort of have some sort of regular practice where you notice your thoughts and notice what you want to do with them, it can be as good as therapy.

I mean, it's a lot easier when you've got someone to work with about, you know, what's going on in your mind and unpacking your mind and seeing what you want to do with it.

Unpack your mind, lay everything out, only put back what you need.

Yeah.