Exercises To Calm Your Anxious Thoughts
Journaling
4 WAYS TO CHANGE YOUR THOUGHTS & RELIEVE ANXIETY
1. CHANGE HOW YOU THINK
The most powerful ways people can lift themselves out of the grips of anxiety is to change their thinking patterns. This is why cognitive therapy is such a profound method of change. The approach is based on the fact that thought processing errors contribute to anxiety.
By changing how you think, you automatically change how you feel. Once you become aware that changing your thinking is important, you are presented with an active choice you can take to benefit your mental health.
2. KEEP TRACK OF YOUR THOUGHTS
Some people are in denial about their thought patterns. They don’t want to believe they are overly negative or pessimistic. Catching yourself and recording as many negative thoughts as you can will help you to see your own thinking patterns. If you don’t increase your awareness and insight into your thought patterns, you cannot change them.
What will these thoughts look like? You could write things like “I’m going to fail.” “No one at work likes me.” “I can’t stand feeling this way.” “Something is going to go wrong.” “I don’t know what I’m doing.” “I don’t feel any sense of purpose in my life.”
3. IDENTIFY TRIGGERS TO ANXIETY
Once you get an idea for the frequency of your negative thoughts, try and pinpoint the triggers for them. Your journal will come in handy here, because it will point out certain types of events that set off a chain of negative thoughts. Triggers can include feeling rejected or ignored, or having an unkind remarks said about or to you.
4. POSITIVE CONVERSION
To create good thinking habits, you’ve got to start converting all those negative thoughts into positive ones. This is called thought challenging. It will be hard at first, and you will most likely feel as if you’re lying to yourself and pretending to be a glass-half-full Pollyanna.
However, as they say, “You’ve got to fake it until you make it.” Changing thought patterns, specifically negative thought patters, takes time. Thinking positive may feel foreign to you and like a waste of your time, you are re-training your brain to think (and feel) good.
Every time you have a negative thought, stop, recognize it as negative, and immediately challenge the thought and reframe it with a positive thought. This could look like:
Negative thought: “I’ll never get this report done on time.”
Positive reframe: “I’m making great progress and being careful to always check my work.
The most effective way to get the hang of this is to do it repeatedly and consistently and to use a journal. Create a separate column in the journal in which you write the challenge to many of your negative thoughts.