1) Am I calm and peaceful? Yes or No

• If Yes. Enjoy! Stay peaceful by finding 10 things to be grateful for every day.
• If No. Go to #2

2) What exactly are you feeling?
Consult a feelings chart or answer the questions below:

• Is there sadness? 
• Is there anger? 
• Is there fear? 
• Do you feel bad in a general way? 
• Do you feel disgust? 
• Do you feel happy?
• Be as specific about your feeling as you can. 
• I feel ______________________________

3) Now that you know what you are feeling, ask yourself if you have felt this way before. You are likely very familiar with this feeling. 

4) Focus on this feeling:

• Does it have a shape?
• What colour is it? 
• Does it have a texture (smooth, jagged, soupy, sticky, soft, light, heavy)? 
• Where is it located in your body?

5) Now note how big this feeling is right now, on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 meaning you can barely feel it and 10 meaning the feeling is HUGE. My # _________

6) Notice that you can make any feeling bigger by thinking about the incident that triggered the feeling in the first place. 

So. If you reacted with anger when your brother did something annoying, then when you think of him doing that you will feel that anger again and you can turn up the volume on that feeling. Humans can produce feelings just by thinking of events and circumstances – as if we were actually there! The only reason to produce a feeling is to use that feeling to find out where the thought that produced that feeling is actually coming from. This requires you to be a thought detective – coming in the next lesson.

Action Step: 
Notice your feelings for a day. What are the feelings you feel most often? It may sound strange but your body actually wants to feel these feelings, even if they are unpleasant!

You can list your frequent feelings here:

​Here’s a list of some typical unpleasant feelings for you to refer to (you probably already know the good feelings):

You are never upset at a fact – you are actually upset by your thoughts about that fact.
​
So, if you think you’re upset that you have to do your homework, it is not the homework that is inherently upsetting – that’s just a fact: You have homework to do. 

What is upsetting to you is that it triggers thoughts about it such as:
Life’s hard
I’m not in control of my life
My parents are mean
My parents don’t love me unless I do my homework
I am not capable
I’m not good enough
Success is all about achievement

You chose to think those thoughts and you are in control of your thoughts and so you can choose to change them.
You can choose to change all thoughts that hurt.

Instead of saying to yourself “I have to do my homework”, I can choose to say “I get to do my homework”.  Change those words to change the way you think about your homework. Homework now becomes a privilege rather than a chore. With this slight adjustment, it is likely that your thoughts will change to:
 
My parents love me so much they want to educate me
So many kids in the world have no schools to go to – I’m one of the lucky ones
I wonder what I’ll learn next
This homework will help me to get to where I want to go
The sooner I finish my homework the sooner I can go outside

​Action Steps:
You can practice changing your thoughts by substituting the words “I have to…” to “I get to…”
Throughout the day notice how many times you think “I have to” and each time switch the thought to “I get to”. Notice how it feels!

​Tom Sawyer, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, put this into practice when he had to paint the garden fence as a punishment.  He convinced his friends to do it for him by having them think “I get to paint the fence” rather than “I have to paint the fence”. They even paid for the privilege. Smart kid that one!

These are just facts:

• School’s out.
• I broke the window with my soccer ball.
• Mum or Dad yelled (parents do that sometimes!)

There’s nothing inherently upsetting about these facts, but we may feel good or bad about them because of our thoughts about them. The good news is that we can change our thoughts – we are in control of our thoughts. That’s pretty good to know!

Facts have no emotion attached to them in and of themselves. However, we react to facts based on our beliefs (ideas) about ourselves. It is your thoughts that cause you to feel bad. So, if mom or dad yells at you, you are likely to be upset – not by the yelling itself, but by what you think it means about you. 

It is just a fact that the person in front of you is going red in the face, looking angry and speaking at a higher volume than usual, but you are upset about this if you have a made-up idea about yourself that is being triggered. 

The following made-up ideas would likely be triggered by this scenario:
I’m not safe
​I’m bad
I’m guilty
I’m not loveable
I’m powerless

It is almost certain that you have all these beliefs and more. The reason is that you were a tiny being when you came into the world and you are looked after by big people who share these made-up ideas. It can be terrifying at times! It is important to know that these ideas are not true.

Action Steps:
List your ‘triggers’ as statements of fact. So, for example, if you were upset by something your friend said to you or the reaction of your sister, or something you did that was clumsy, just 
write: 

My sister laughed when I broke my favorite model airplane.
My friend called me stupid (or whatever it was). 
I spilled juice on the carpet.

Now look at the list and see that when these are stated as facts they no longer have the same emotional charge. 

Wanting things to be different than they are is painful. By stating facts, you now know that this thing happened. Wishing that it didn’t doesn’t help at all. 

Actually, the fact that the trigger event happened can be a really good thing because if you have an emotional reaction to any event (or fact) you’ll know that you have an idea about yourself that isn’t true. You can learn how to find and fix those mistaken ideas. Eventually you may even be able to welcome triggers! We’ll work on that another time.

​At a time when anxiety and depression are rampant in our youngsters, helping them to understand their feelings can go a long way to relieving these debilitating problems. 
 
Children do need to be allowed to feel their feelings and we can help our children to labeltheir feelings. However, we help them to understand where their feelings are coming from when we don’t validate them. In other words, it is OK for my child to feel angry when his best friend breaks his toy, but it’s best not to agree that the anger was because his friend broke his toy. We are never upset for the reason we think.

​Are your children anxious about Covid-19?
Are your own stress levels increasing with each newscast?
Are you wondering how to help your children to calm their worries?
 
We are living in unprecedented times. The world has changed seemingly overnight and we don’t know where this is all leading. Uncertainty about the future tends to provoke anxiety in adults, which is then picked up by our children. One of the best ways to beat anxiety is to have something that you can do right away to calm down. Studies have shown that smiling, being grateful, taking deep breaths and helping others are all powerful ways of relieving stress and reducing anxiety. 
 
Here are six tips that you can teach your children and then give them a ‘tool kit’ as a tangible reminder of how to relax whatever the circumstances. You’ll likely have most of these items around.