Today is one of those days. I woke up with AN anxious pressing of thoughts, yet my mind was scattered to the four winds and I initially could not pin down what it was that caused the pressing niggles.

It was such that I felt like not doing anything but just crawling between the sheets and allowing the thoughts marinate and vacillate.

This was not the ‘I am feeling lazy today thoughts,’ rather, it was more like the ‘let me stew in some unknown worry and annoyance thought.’

However, I knew the fore-warnings and the possible resultant effects of such marinating. I would gradually spiral into a ball of anxious worry wart and by the end of the day, the snappy, stressed dragon will start showing it’s ugly face and it just goes downhill.

So I had to actively decide to turn my ANxiety moment into an active moment and I did just three things before the emotional waves came into balance.

These are the three simple things that I did:

• I prayed briefly with my children.

• I dragged on my exercising clothes and lazily sweated out for an hour and twenty minutes.

• After the sweating, I sat in my thinking corner and turned to piece my thoughts apart to try and put my fingers on the niggles. Some thoughts were dealt with and resolved as quickly as a phone call. Other thoughts were written down and turned into action points to be resolved at assigned specific times.

Doing these three things decompressed my mind. I found myself back to a balanced tandem and my day continued on a good note.

Those moments of ANxiety can possibly be turned into moments of ANswers, but it takes a lot of conscious effort to deal with it.

I have learnt over time, that putting pressing thoughts or issues off or pushing them under the rug does not make them go away, rather the rug only gets higher.

This is my first post in relation Stream of Consciousness challenge and we Linda has asked us to use ‘an’ for today’s prompt.

© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha