Healed People Heal People - Anxiety Defeated

Anxiety is:

1. Fear in the absence of real danger.

2. Overestimation of the probability of danger and exaggeration of its degree of terribleness.

3. Imagined negative results.

Most anxieties are related to four things:

1. Dread of making public mistakes.

2. Fear of making someone else angry or upset.

3. Losing love.

4. Physical pain and death

Getting rid of your anxiety means to

(1) recognize, your fears are often exaggerated. Diminish the danger you tell yourself you’re in

(2) realize you create your anxiety (you create your own misbeliefs);

(3) resist these misbeliefs, challenge them (“is this really as terrible as I’m telling myself?”);

(4) replace the misbeliefs with the truth. Don’t worry about how weak you think you are. Jesus said, “My strength is made perfect in weakness.” Here are some words of truth with which to argue those lies:

A positive attitude is one of your most valuable resources in life

why not take care of it and nurture these good feelings proactively? It’s weird, when you think about it, just how many of us prioritize stress in our lives. We allocate all our available time to activities that worsen our mood and leave us feeling anxious or depleted, while putting recuperation and contemplation way at the bottom of the list, if we think about it at all. When was the last time you deliberately prioritized rest and relaxation?

Decide on your values and priorities in life.

What three things matter most to you?

Observe for a week the way you spend the time available to you. Log every hour and what you do with it.

Analyze this data: where do you spend the most time? And least time? Finally, look to see if how you actually spend time reflects your values. For example, if you most care about your family, building your own business, and staying fit, does it make sense that you spend ninety percent of your waking hours on work alone?

Guided by your values and principles, restructure your schedule to better reflect your priorities. Observe again to see how you’re doing, what’s working, and what adjustments you can make.

Negative Thinking

All-or-nothing thinking - never, always, absolutely, completely, or nothing.

Over-generalization - Overgeneralization. This is related to all-or-nothing thinking, where we make sweeping, all-encompassing statements using very little data; for example, “All men are like this,” or, “This happens all the time,” when in reality, only one man was like that, and the thing happened literally once.

If only thinking – conditional peace. If all the circumstances line up the way I believe they should be I will be at peace.

Internalizing or externalizing – we are the reason for the negative events and reprimand ourselves (internalizing) or reprimanding others (externalizing) by blaming others for what is rightly ours. For example, “It’s not my fault she’s upset by what I said; she shouldn’t be so sensitive.”

Favoring the negative, discounting the positive. Doing things well most of the time but making a mistake and focusing on the mistake or error while negating or diminishing the good.

Emotional reasoning – If we feel a certain way, we automatically assume our feelings must point to the truth.

Recognizing Cycles Of Behavior

Recognizing antecedents, buttons, hooks, triggers, open doors, hurts, hang ups, etc. that cause behaviors.

Behavior – the actions resulting from a trigger being pressed.

Consequences – the outcome, good or bad, from the behavior.

Attitudes to adopt

1. Focus on what you can do not what you can’t

2. Focus on what you have and not what you don’t

3. Focus on what you can control and not what is out of your control

4. Focus on the present and not the past or the future.

5. Focus on what you need not on what you want

6. Focus on solutions and not problems – do not ruminate