In laymens terms, your thoughts affect your feelings and also create a physiological affect in your body (anxiety can create a variety of illnesses, that’s a whole nother topic in itself!). So the more negative and worrisome thoughts you think, the more it affects how you feel and how your body internalises these negative thoughts.
So to begin to understand our anxiety a little deeper, we need to become aware of the thoughts that we think.
More often than not, these thoughts are repetitive and habitual, so you may not even realise how often you think it and what you’re telling yourself multiple times a day.
If you can imagine turning your brain into slow motion and listen to the thoughts that pass through your mind and pick them out, put them on paper and begin to see the patterns of thinking you have, the type of thoughts you’re allowing to reside in your mind and realistically analyse the impact they have on your feelings.
Realistically, any negative thought weakens our body, but also brings us down.
So from now until Christmas, monitor your thinking. Become like a guard at the gate of your mind and see what thoughts you’re allowing in to your mind and feel the immediate effect they have on how you feel.
Then once you recognise that thought..ask yourself? Do I feel good about this thought? How does this thought make me feel? Do I like feeling this way? What thought can I replace it with instead that makes me feel good?
Practice, replacing negative, unhelpful thoughts with ones that make you feel good.
Author, Speaker, Educator
