When life is making us anxious or things are challenging this can impact us in many different ways. This melting pot of different feelings is unique for all of us and often how we are thinking and responding to things is at the bottom of us feeling the way we do. If we are being challenged by life and we spend time with worrying thoughts it can take us down many different routes. This in turn will negatively impact how we feel and can then cause us to feel even worse about what is happening. If we put ourselves down and blame ourselves for what’s happening then we can make ourselves depressed and have those blue, low feelings that can come with some levels of anxiety. We all have to accept that we are not perfect and all we can do is our best, things don’t always work out how we would like them to do but beating ourselves up with these negative thoughts won’t help either. If we keep pecking at ourselves with these insults and over-blame ourselves then after a while, we have pecked so much at ourselves that we have made ourselves bleed. This way of treating ourselves will just make our mood low and even make us feel quite blue and tearful at times.
It’s time to stop and look at this habit and why we are doing this to ourselves. For many people when I ask them this question, they often say it’s always been this way and that they don’t know any other way to think when things go wrong. This is normal as for many of us our habits good and bad have been around for so long that we just take them for what they are and don’t even question them anymore. The thing is you don’t need to stay this way and you can stop this and learn how to cope better when things are challenging or anxiety-provoking. Most of our habits are learned at an early age and then we just keep following the lead our minds send us. But why not choose today to stop this and break away from these habits of putting yourself down and choose to love and value yourself instead. If we put ourselves down over these issues it won’t help to solve them or make things better for us in fact it has the adverse effect, causing us to feel low, blue and depressed. This can then make dealing with this challenging situation much worse because we are not in the best headspace to now try and cope as well with the issues that are coming as we are just not feeling great about ourselves.
None of us are perfect and we are not mind readers or fortune tellers so we can only try and navigate life the best we can. These old habits of beating ourselves up with those inner thoughts and responses to ourselves can stop we just have to take the time to break the habit. The key is to not give them any traction and the minute they come brush them away and distract yourself by doing something else. If you have found you have been horrible to yourself with your inner thoughts then internally just apologise to yourself and say that those thoughts are not true, they are just an old habit. The more you push those thoughts away the less your mind will send them to you, it’s just an old habit but you will need to give your mind time to learn to let this go. Pushing these thoughts away once or twice or for a few days just won’t be enough to change the habit. It needs weeks to break down the habits, just like choosing to get fit it won’t happen overnight. Remember that many of us we have had this habit for as long as we can recall so it is not just going to disappear after a day or two when you have had thousands and thousands of days behaving this way. But over time this will change, don’t let your mind trick you and make you feel bad about not changing quickly enough. This is just your mind trying to get back to the normal it knows, but it doesn’t have to be this way, your mind just doesn’t know any other way at staying way to be responding and living at the moment. But it is not a compulsory thing, it’s not something you have to live with, or even need to live with its just an old habit your mind is sending you. Your mind is just a big computer and this is just an out-of-date program, your inner mind doesn’t realise the impact this is having on you or even how you deal with things that challenge you in life because of this habit, it is just on an old programmed inner pattern of responding in this way.
Take the time to train your mind out of these habits, don’t beat yourself up if you can’t always get it right know that time will help you change. Apologies to yourself and move on when those old habits of beating yourself up have sneaked under the radar, and know that when you look back in a month or two and see how you are feeling now, compared to back then and you will see the difference. Then just keep going until you have broken this habit and then you are then coping better with things, having a brighter mood and a more positive mindset about yourself. Sara x
HYPNOSARA 