**3.3. Attention shifting technique**

Most of the children with anxiety disorder focus totally on the negative thoughts when a thought causing anxiety comes to their mind, and selective attention works up the anxiety further. Similarly, depressive children focus on the negative situations/incidents rather than experiences or memories that makes their valuable in life or feel good, and fill their mind with such thoughts continuously. Therefore, a technique is used to distract attention from the thought causing negative emotions to a neutral or relaxing mental activity, and help the child to feel himself/herself much better.

These mental activities might include neutral reasoning such as counting or finding names starting with the last letter, or thinking activities such as imagining to be somewhere that the child feels very happy and comfortable or thinking of the lyrics of a song that he/she likes. It is assumed that the more detailed the scene pictured in the mind is, the quicker and easier the child will relax. Accordingly, it will be quite useful to work on this imagination during session, and help the child to elaborate it [73, 76].
