TM4T Stress Armoury 50 - Distract Yourself

Sometimes, our minds just race away with us.  This tends not to happen in the classroom: there's too much going on, too many things to keep us busy. Away from the students, however, sometimes dark thoughts and worries can take over, and stop us from concentrating on what needs to be done.

What often helps here is distraction, and you need to be clear on the direction of the distraction: you are not trying to distract yourself from the reality of your situation; exactly the opposite. What you are doing is distracting yourself from negative, unhelpful - and mostly irrelevant - thoughts, by focussing completely on the here and now: the physical reality that you are experiencing.

Just walk away from any noise and distraction (if possible) and then say to yourself - ideally out loud - the following things.

• Five things that you can see

• Four things that you can hear

• Three things that you can touch

• Two things that you can smell

• One thing that you can taste

Don't agonise over choice, just choose.  This is a brief exercise - not quick-in-the-sense-of-rushed, but quick-in-the-sense-of-doesn't-take-long. It should take no more than two minutes... however, you should be specific, and describe the things in some detail: 'a rusty old classroom chair with paint stains', not just 'chair'... and, at the third stage, actually reach out and touch three things you name.

You may struggle with the last stage - describing a taste - but that's OK. Just focus on your taste, and carry on slow steady  breathing steadily for a short while.