Ahhh, the struggle of negative thoughts taking over.
A quick tally of the number of hours I have spent lately fighting the negative thoughts floating around in my head was about 6-8 hours a day. What a waste of energy. I've been reading about my specific thoughts, and how to move beyond them. As I suspected, the most common treatment is medication, but I'm determined to not do that. Why apply a bandaid. I think my anxiety has just been kicked into overdrive by my new job.
So instead, I'm going to try a technique to retrain my thinking. The more a thought comes to mind that is distressing, the more attention it gets, and in turn the more it keeps coming up. It's like having a cupboard full of chocolate and telling yourself not to thing about it. Impossible!! So I'm going to try "mindful acceptance." Whenever I have unwanted thoughts, I am going to stop, breathe and observe the thought passing by like a cloud in the sky. So rather than stressing, I hopefully will instead focus on the thought drifting away. I hope that I won't be bothered by the thought if I think of it like a cloud, and if I'm not bothered by the thought, it won't come back so often. The cloud thing makes sense to me.
I know that lots of people have the same unwanted thoughts, let's try this mindful acceptance thing. If nothing else, I'll spend lots of time thinking about clouds. That'll be an improvement.
A quick tally of the number of hours I have spent lately fighting the negative thoughts floating around in my head was about 6-8 hours a day. What a waste of energy. I've been reading about my specific thoughts, and how to move beyond them. As I suspected, the most common treatment is medication, but I'm determined to not do that. Why apply a bandaid. I think my anxiety has just been kicked into overdrive by my new job.
So instead, I'm going to try a technique to retrain my thinking. The more a thought comes to mind that is distressing, the more attention it gets, and in turn the more it keeps coming up. It's like having a cupboard full of chocolate and telling yourself not to thing about it. Impossible!! So I'm going to try "mindful acceptance." Whenever I have unwanted thoughts, I am going to stop, breathe and observe the thought passing by like a cloud in the sky. So rather than stressing, I hopefully will instead focus on the thought drifting away. I hope that I won't be bothered by the thought if I think of it like a cloud, and if I'm not bothered by the thought, it won't come back so often. The cloud thing makes sense to me.
I know that lots of people have the same unwanted thoughts, let's try this mindful acceptance thing. If nothing else, I'll spend lots of time thinking about clouds. That'll be an improvement.
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