Moving from an anxious thought to a reflexive one requires time, commitment to oneself and a willingness to change . Because, when the mind becomes accustomed to process reality in a certain way, it is hard enough to convince it to do so in another way. However, “educating her” to learn to think healthier is undoubtedly one of the best steps to achieve well-being.
Gandhi said that he wouldn’t let anyone go through his mind with dirty feet. Somehow, this symbolic suggestion fits perfectly to our need to take care of everything that enters the immense cabin that is our mental universe. Because, after all, hygiene is not just bathing every day or washing our hands before eating.
Hygiene is also to attend to what ideas we value, what thoughts we let gain strength in our day to day and what approaches we give them validity. Knowing all this would help us to cultivate a little more psychological balance. However, sometimes we feel like that traveler who waits on the platform and only sees trains pass at full speed.
Everything is going very fast and we don’t know what happens inside our mental vehicles. We neglect and get carried away worrying about what can happen tomorrow, without knowing what is happening today in our own being, in our own existential platform.
I want to move from an anxious thought to a thoughtful one, how to do it?
There are times when convincing a person that he must move from an anxious thought to another thoughtful one, a sudden resistance arises . It appears because there are those who link their anxiety only to external factors. Because his life is very busy, his many responsibilities and his infinite problems.
We are the result of the stories we tell ourselves , which is why it is very difficult for us to begin to unfold certain ideas and thinking schemes from the mind.
Generalized anxiety disorder is fueled by a large number of cognitive distortions . They are wrong ways of processing reality, those to which we are giving more and more power over months and years. Thus, a few examples of these distortions would be the following:
- Selective abstraction or tunnel vision (only bad things happen to me, everything is against me, etc.)
- Confirmatory bias (I was wrong and I already knew what was going to happen, because it is clear that I am not good for this)
- Overgeneralization (that negative thing that happened to me in the past will happen again)
- Personalization (my boss has a bad face, it sure is my fault)
Our mind acquires the obsessive tendency to function in the worst possible way. Moving from an anxious thought to a reflexive one requires changes . These would be some keys to generate them.
Cognitive distance
One way to reduce anxiety is to start seeing your thoughts as mere conjectures and not as absolute realities.
Be critical of every idea that your mind produces or that arises as a result of your mood, then let those who do you no good leave – they will soon be forgotten if you think they are something external to you; neither own nor defining.
Yes to mindfulness ( mindfulness )
There are those who still see the practice of mindfulness as that baseless fashion that everyone talks about. However, studies confirm its effectiveness in reducing stress and anxiety.
Learning to focus on the present moment, attending to our thoughts instead of reacting to them, is an exercise to which we should devote time and effort. Meditation is a way of moving from anxious thought to a reflexive one.
What you feel is real, what you think is not always true
The mind creates its own stories, while we give them truth. You may tell yourself that you are denied for certain things, that you are too sensitive and there are certain aspects that you can never handle.
Stop feeding ideas, biases, erroneous schemes … The only real thing is your mood, your emotions. Take care of them, take care of them, manage them.
Look up, relativize and say yes to useful thinking
People are like that. We have the unique tendency to make a ball of five coats, a grain of sand a beach, a couple of grains of rice a paella … When anxious thinking takes the reins, any insignificant problem is magnified, being unable to act in a manner Tight and creative.
In these circumstances, it would be very wise for us to learn to look up, to relativize and then, from that psychological distance, to see things as they are, without dramatists or negativities. At that time, the second step would come: to encourage our mind to generate useful ideas, thoughts that act in our favor and not against us.
To conclude, moving from anxious thought to a reflective one is an act of will and also of strength. It requires the signing of a contract with oneself where we can re-educate our mind and convince it, that we deserve respect, that we have it to value ourselves as we deserve and use in our favor all the potential that we have inside.