What you focus on will manifest in your life.
If you find that anxiety is a significant part of your daily life then doing these exercises will help you turn your anxiety into excitement.
Self-talk can initiate or even aggravate a panic attack.
You see a panic attack can start off with increasing physiological arousals such as a more rapid heartbeat, tightness in your chest, or even sweaty palms.
Biologically this is the body’s natural response to stress.
The fight-or-flight response is normally experienced when we perceive threat or danger.
Understanding what role/roles you play will help you understand your self-talk and how to change it.
What Role Do You Play?
Are you “the Worrier?”
This is usually one of the strongest super personalities in people who are prone to anxiety.
“The Worrier” creates anxiety by imagining the worst-case scenario.
The worrier” promotes your fear of what is happening is dangerous or embarrassing.
In short “the Worrier” dominates your mind.
It anticipates the worst.
It overestimates the odds of something being bad.
Their favorite expression is “What if.”
Are you “the Critic?”
“This Critic”, promotes low self-esteem.
“The critic” is the part of you that’s consistently judging and evaluating your behavior. It tends to point out all of your flaws and limitations whenever possible. It jumps on any mistake that you make to remind you that you are a failure.
The critic” might be that voice of your mother or father or that dreaded teacher or anyone who’s wounded you in the past.
Their favorite expressions would be, “That was stupid. What a disappointment you are.”
The typical critic self-talk would be, “You’re so stupid. You can’t get anything right. Why are you always this way? You could have done better.”
You might be “the Victim.”
The victim” promotes depression.
“The victim” is the part of you that feels helpless and hopeless.
It generates anxiety by telling you that you’re not making any progress. That your condition is incurable and that the road is too long and too steep for you to make any real recovery.
Their favorite expression will be “I can’t. I’ll never be able to do that”.
You see “the victim” holds negative self-beliefs as I’m hopeless and nothing is ever going to work out.
Maybe you are the perfectionist?
You see “the perfectionist” promotes chronic stress and burnout.
“The perfectionist” is closely related to the critic, but its concerns are less put on you putting you down and it pushes you to be better.
It generates anxiety by constantly telling you that your efforts aren’t good enough.
“The perfectionist” has a tendency to try to convince you that your self-worth is dependent on something outside of yourself such as money and status, acceptance by others, your ability to please, and how nice you are to others.
Regardless of what they do “the perfectionist” isn’t convinced by any notions of inherent self-worth but instead pushes into stress exhaustion and burnout trying to pursue these goals.
“The perfectionist,” favorite expressions will be “I should, I have to, I must.
“The perfectionist” may even provide instruction as “I should always be on top of things,
I should always be considerate and unselfish,
I should always be pleasant and nice.
I have to get that job.
I have to make this amount of money.
If you are like me then you might be a combination of the different roles.
The most effective way to deal with negative self-talk is to counter it with positive supportive statements.
Changing from negative self-talk to positive is the first step but you have to do it daily for 63 days to truly make a new habit/behavior.
Each day I want you to write down all your negative self-talk and then write a counter to it. Change the negative to a positive.
Now if you have some negative self-talk that’s just not that easy to switch over find a positive statement to say I want you to ask yourself these questions for those beliefs.
What is the evidence for this?
Is this always true?
Has this been true in the past?
What are the odds of this really happening or truly being real?
Are you looking at the whole picture?
What is the very worst possible thing that could happen?
How bad can it really be?
What would you do if the worst did happen?
So I’m going to teach you a simple mind trick.
This trick is going to lie to your mind so that you can get the results that you want.
What you’re going to do is when you feel anxious and you start telling yourself that you have anxiety instead I want you to say I am feeling excited.
This excites me.
This is causing me excitement.
What I want you to understand is that the same exact physiological symptoms that happen in your body when you’re excited as when you are anxious. The palms sweat, the heart rate goes up and you feel butterflies in your stomach.
So switch the word to excitement.
I’m excited to do this.
This makes me excited and as you lie to your mind about the situation you’re going to notice that your emotions and your mood will go in alignment with this excitement.
You’ll start to feel happier, and even peace can fall over you when you change from anxiety to excitement
Do this practice daily for the next 63 days.
If you want it faster then schedule an appointment with me to have an RTT session.
Donel Rourke, C.HYP.