Don’t Feed The Cat!
If you’ve been following my blogs for some time, you will already be very familiar with my ‘Don’t Feed The Cat’ analogy. This analogy is what my very first blogs were based on, around 4 years ago, which you can read here.
‘Feeding the cat’ refers to the concept of feeding our worries and anxieties, and in turn making them grow and get worse.
If you imagine, one day you notice a stray cat in your garden. At first, you don’t pay them too much attention, you let them roam around and then they leave. The next day, the cat returns, so you decide to leave it some food. The cat returns the following day, so you feed it some more, and this cycle continues, until the cat is coming into your garden for food every day and growing bigger and bigger.
You try to start ignoring the cat and stop feeding it, but the cat has got so big that you can no longer ignore it. The cat does everything it can to get your attention, scratching at the door during the day, meowing through the night and keeping you awake, so eventually you give in and you continue to feed the cat more and more, until you feel completely trapped and the situation has become out of control.
Of course, it’s unlikely a cat would ever get so big that it became out of control, but if you swapped out the cat in this story, with your worries and anxieties, and pictured your mind feeding these worries – they can quickly become out of control and consume you.
The good news is, you can change these negative thought habits. The ‘cat’ is only there, because you fed it in the first place. If you’re able to create the habits, you’re also able to change them.
There are a number of ways you can work on reducing your negative thought habits and in turn, decrease your worries and anxieties too. Allow your worries to enter your mind and then find ways to distract yourself and your brain so that you don’t dwell on these thoughts and feed them to the point that they grow. Yes, the cat may return, but as long as you have methods in place to stop yourself from feeding it, the cat won’t grow.
You can read all about the ‘Don’t Feed The Cat’ analogy, and ways to deal with overthinking, worry, anxiety and negative thought habits, in my previous blogs below:
‘The Cat Is Back’
‘The Cat Lives On’
‘I Can’t See The Cat’
‘Don’t Feed The Cat Mini Series’
‘The Cat Is Back Mini Series’
Thank you for dropping by, Sara x
HYPNOSARA 