44 Don’t Let A nxiety Run Your Life
moment without judgment or reaction. In this chapter, we
will teach you how to reduce your judgments and how to be
less reactive to your emotions by engaging in mindfulness-
based practices.
Attention and Observation
Imagine the following scenario. R ight after you arrive at
work one morning, your supervisor requests that you give
everyone a thirty- minute presentation about your team’s
recent progress on several projects. You politely agree, but
inside you feel frantic and panicky. Worries about feeling
underprepared and concerns about how your coworkers
might evaluate you consume your mind. Indeed, you notice
that your heart begins to race, your palms feel sweaty, and
your chest feels tight. Rather than focus on the task at hand
by organizing necessary materials for the presentation, you
anticipate the ways in which you might seem like a failure in
the eyes of your coworkers and your supervisor. During the
presentation itself, maintaining your focus on the content of
your talk becomes nearly impossible, as most of your atten-
tion is on your emotions and your physical symptoms of
anxiety. Furthermore, you are doing more than merely
attending to your emotions throughout this ordeal. You are
doing it in a certain way. Focusing on your fear of how others
perceive you is inevitably accompanied by judgments and
evaluations of what these emotions mean. Judging the pres-
ence of fear as bad or as a sign that you are not in control of
your feelings leads you to believe that you are inadequate or
that you lack the ability to accomplish the task at hand. In
other words, these judgments make you equate how you feel