07/01/2020
Letting go of anxiety is more than just practicing self-care and letting yourself rest every so often. Anxiety begins with your thoughts. Thus, if you want to feel less anxious, you need to change your thinking pattern.
We aren’t taught how to think about ourselves and our world explicitly. We pick things up as we go, mostly from our nuclear family, and those experiences impact our thinking process, which then leads to our emotions.
What some people don’t realize is you can change the way you think (that’s part of what therapy helps with!). We can end up drawing negative and false conclusions from disordered thinking. When that happens on a consistent basis, we can become anxious, depressed, or angry.
This is why anxiety, or any mental illness, can’t be resolved after a day at the beach, going to the gym, a new relationship, or buying a new wardrobe. Those things can lift your mood, but real change happens within. It happens when you change the fundamentals of your disordered thoughts.
Changing your thoughts is only one layer of the healing process, as there are so many other aspects that impact us (past trauma, poor diet, hormone imbalance, etc). But this is a crucial element and addressing it can be a daunting task! So even if you are just at the beginning of your journey, be proud you made the decision to start, and be patient with the process.
