My anxiety, helps me to better my client's lives..

One of the many reasons that led me to pursue a career in counseling was my own experience with anxiety and negative thinking. Most of my life was spent talking myself out of happiness, and as I grew in this world and in my career, I started to realize how much of an influence my own thinking had on my mood/feelings/behaviors. A lot of my blog posts are similar in that I talk about changing your thinking, but I feel like I can't say it enough. I say it in many different ways, because I hope that those reading it can understand how helpful changing your thoughts could be--I also feel I need to repeat myself because it's a silly concept that you challenge your thoughts and they go away..poof so easy, but sometimes even the corniest of cliches are true.

What actually is happening in the world around us matters very little compared to how we perceive it. Our perceptions become our realities and sometimes we have very negative perceptions, which in turn influence our moods and our behaviors and just about ruin any positive experiences that could be had. Sometimes we hold on to these perceptions because they are familiar and secure, even though they are bad for us. Once we make the active choice to widen our view of a situation, we are woken up and are able to expand the ways that we deal with it.

I have felt anxiety and how serious and painful it can sometimes(or most of the time) be, which I feel allows me to better understand my clients and help them to know they don't have to suffer. I was able to (slowly at first, and then easily after a while, rather a lot of practice) change the way my brain filtered in stimuli. I changed from the same old filtering process that left me sad, stressed, and irritated to a new perspective that is able to pick when I want to let my thoughts consume me--and honestly sometimes I do because I'm tired or lazy, but I always set a time limit. When anxiety or negative thinking is at it's most severe it's really hard to challenge, so I don't. Sometimes it's a bully and you need to just stare it in the face and let it spit it's nonsense. There are times when you just need to feel without wondering why, and that is 100% okay. In all of my efforts I feel like I have gotten superpowers that allows me to choose my mood, and that is the approach I take in my therapeutic work.

I saw a meme somewhere that said something along the lines of "did you ever realize that in order to fall asleep you have to first pretend to be asleep?" This really resonated with me because it's so true--in order to overcome your sadness, baggage, anxiety, fears, etc you have to first pretend that it doesn't bother you, until it actually doesn't. Pretend you're over your useless ex, pretend that you're not nervous about that presentation, fake it and watch how quickly you get comfortable in these once imagined thoughts and feelings.

You also need to really know how your symptoms operate--what makes them tick. Quoting Tyrion Lannister(because Game of Thrones is absolutely amazing and I can't wait until 2019 to get it back in my life), "You need to take your enemy’s side if you’re going to see things the way they do, and you need to see things the way they do if you’re going to anticipate their actions, respond effectively, and beat them." Know the game plan your anxiety is following and beat it to the punch. Don't live your life according to someone else's plans, even if it is your own mind.