101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think

5. Recognize that anxiety stems from shame. It is the idea that who you are or what you are doing is not right, therefore eliciting a rush of energy designed to help you fix or change it. You're suffering because there's nothing you can fix to make that urgent panicked feeling go away. It's a mismanaged perception of who and how you are. 6. Remedy your tunnel vision by writing your narrative on a piece of paper. Start with, my name is, and then go on to list where you live, what work you do, what you've accomplished, who you spend time with, what you're working on, what you're proud of. 7. Realize that thoughts are illusions but powerful ones. Take inventory of all the things you've thought and worried about that have turned out not to be real. Think of all the time you wasted preparing for outcomes that would never manifest and problems that were only in your head. 8. Practice negative visualization. Create tangible solutions for your intangible fears. Show yourself that you won't actually die if you lose a job or a boyfriend. Make a list of the things you worry about most. Imagine the worst outcome, then make a plan for exactly how you would deal with it if that came to pass. 9. Stop being so cerebral. Do things with your hands. Cook, clean, go outside. 10. Evolve past one-dimensional thinking. People who worry a lot are usually very firm in their convictions of what is and isn't. They fail to see complexity, opportunity, the majority of the iceberg that is the reality they don't know and can't see. 11. Practice healthy discomfort. Learn to lean into your stress, not resist it. 12. Change your objective. The goal is not to feel good all the time. It's to be able to express a healthy range of emotion without suppressing or suffering. 13. Ask yourself the following questions when a thought upsets you. Is this true? Can I absolutely know this is true? Most of the time the answer will be no to one or both. 14. Do more. If you have time to be regularly consumed by irrational spiraling thoughts, you need more to focus on, more to work toward, more to suffer for. Make sure you're living more than you're thinking about living. 15. Accept the fact that everyone, everywhere, has weird, incorrect, disturbing thoughts that have no bearing on reality. You are not a freak. You are probably not sick. You just have to learn to not be intimidated by your own mind. 16. Freaking out is not usually what happens when something in your life actually needs to change. Depression, anger, resistance, sadness. That's what happens when something isn't right. Stop gauging how bad things are by how much you panic and start by gauging what your emotional homeostasis is. That's how you know what's really wrong or right. What you consistently do and how you regularly feel. 17. When you are spiraling, be able to say out loud, I'm having a panic attack. I'm having irrational thoughts. Doing so is a first step toward bringing yourself back to reality. 18. Identify your comfort zones and step back into them now and again. Moving past the place that you're used to is a gradual process. Going too quickly is a recipe for a breakdown. 19. Prove yourself wrong. Show yourself that your thoughts have no basis in truth. Go to the doctor and confirm that you aren't dying of some incurable disease. Ask someone how they feel about you if you don't know. Do not live in the gray area when answers are available. 20. Do not always trust yourself. Give yourself space to be wrong. Open yourself up to the idea that you don't know what you don't know. If your feelings are informed by irrational thoughts, they can very well be incorrect.