Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I want to share something I like to call the barbecue method. It's one of my favorite tools for reducing stress and anxiety. BBQ method is an acronym. It stands for breath, body, question.

B B Q. And this is something you can use when you find yourself caught up in tension and overwhelm. So the first thing is you just take a deep breath. And I like to breathe deeply in through the nose and then slowly out through the mouth. So at a one to two ratio tends to work well.

Breathing in for one second and exhaling for two or breathing in for two seconds and exhaling for four. Let's try it for the two, four ratio. Breathing in for two seconds. Exhale for four. That's the first thing.

Take a deep breath. Next, notice where you're holding any tension in your body. For me, it tends to be the jaw, the shoulders and the belly. So right now, just invite your jaw to soften, the teeth don't need to be clenched. Let your shoulders relax.

And let your belly relax as well. We tend to hold a lot of tension here. Jaw, shoulders, belly, and anywhere else that you might be holding tension. So we've taken our breath, we've relaxed, our body. And the next is to ask your mind a question.

And the question is, what can I control and what can I let go of? What can I control and what can I let go of? A lot of times when we're caught in our anxiety, it's because our mind feels a bit out of control. It's trying to organize everything, make sure everything's okay. Make sure that we're safe. So by asking this, we look at, all right, what is in my direct influence in this moment? I can have this conversation. I can take a breath.

I can work on this email. And what's out of my control that I can let go of? I don't know what the outcome of this is going to be so I release that. I stay committed to my process and detached from the outcome. Your response might be different, but the key is to ask those questions, what can I control and what can I let go of? So this is the barbecue method. When you find yourself caught up in anxiety, take a breath, relax your body, and then ask, what can I what can I let go of? So over the last three days, we've gone over three simple techniques that you can use for anxiety.

One, take five. Two, shift your what if to what is. Three, the BBQ method. And you've gotten to explore some meditation practices. We'll do another one in a moment, but I want to say if this has been useful for you, we have this plus hundreds of other videos just like this with simple tools to reduce anxiety, stress, find more inner calm and grounding here at the Mindfulness.com app.

So I hope this isn't your last day. I hope we can continue our journey. If you like this video format, you can do this every day for the rest of your life. We have this here and it would be great to have you along. Thank you so much for your practice, for putting in the work to take care of your own mental health.

Yes, it's for you, but it's also for your family, your relationships, the people you care about and our world at large. So that's why we like to say at Mindfulness.com, thank you for your practice. And today let's settle in for our meditation.