Is the glass half-empty or half-full? The answer to this age-old question is all about positive thinking which reflects your viewpoint on life and your mindset toward yourself. Research shows that personality characteristics, such as optimism and negative thinking, can affect your health and well-being in various ways. Optimism that starts with positive thinking is necessary for every aspect of our life.
If you are a victim of anxiety and direct to be pessimistic. Don’t despair-by following a few strategies and understanding the root cause you can overcome anxiety.
How the Anxious Mind Works?
Anxiety is distress, worry or unease about future situations and uncertainties. It is a part of the stress response, which in individuals is a complex reciprocation between emotions and thoughts.
The primary purpose of the stress response, well-known as the fight-or-flight response, is to make sure we are not in danger. It prepares our response, both mentally and physically, so we can either run away from the threat or deal with it.
There is a rush of stress hormones that follows extreme anxiety and doubt, which reduces our access to higher-level cognitive thinking. When our brain is on stress hormones, understanding perspective is temporarily unavailable to us, resulting in undermining our abilities to resolve difficulties and make rational decisions.
Being anxious and stressed changes our views, and we evaluate vague circumstances negatively and expect the worst. We, as human beings, tend to give more thought to frightening and critical information than positive, and encouraging experience.
At times when you are anxious about something, you can observe that this might result in keeping you in balance and making you a sensibly cautious human being rather than a thoughtless person.
How to Overcome Anxiety?
Here are the six techniques to boost your optimism in your life:
The practice of deep Breathing: Deep breathing exercises assists us to calm down our anxious thoughts and feel focused rather than feeling overwhelmed with the confusion of racing thoughts.
Sharing with family and friends: When we share our concerns or distress with our close ones, we get many viewpoints concerning the same situation. We feel lightened as we can express our thoughts and feelings which support us to overcome anxiety and boost optimism.
Limit your distress to one time period throughout the day: If fear or worries appear inevitable, then we can try to confine it to a precise period, so we don’t consume all our reactions on it and preferably designate more time on the analysis of problems.
Start a gratitude Journal: This is an excellent strategy to boost your optimism and overcome anxiety. When we form an attitude of concentrating on the particular aspects of our life and anything that gives us happiness, then our anxiety does not move to a level that it overwhelms our rational reasoning and negatively affects all areas of our life.
This practice takes about a change in our focus and ultimately results in a concrete structure of mind which improves our mental health.
Go outdoors and be attentive: If you can be completely present at the moment, there is no anxiety, as anxiety is something that occurred or is persisting in happening.
Writing your concerns down: When we draft, we can take ourselves out of the prevailing circumstances, and look at the bigger picture and get a holistic vision towards our present worries.
Expressing our emotions such as rage, disappointment or grief on paper decreases the depth of our feelings. It delivers us a much more soothing atmosphere. It allows free the negativity that we hold angering within us.
If we continue worrying, we tend to stick in a circle. The negative feelings keep building up, which begins to pent up distress, and we are incapable to overcome the anxiety.
Building positive thinking into practice
Negative self-talk: Will there be a time when I stop being such an emotionally up and down, insecure, overthinking person?
Positive self-talk: Will there ever be a time when you stop judging yourself for just being a human?
Negative self-talk: I feel so afraid because, with everything that’s going on, the future is untold.
Positive self-talk: The future has always been unknown. That unease is your mind adapting to the expansion of your awareness, a challenging but essential process.
Negative self-talk: I am not strong enough to handle this. I’m too emotional and sensitive.
Positive self-talk: Strength is being honest about your vulnerabilities and taking it one day at a time. You’re already handling it.
Negative self-talk: I’m lonely.
Positive self-talk: I’m learning how to love my solitude.
Negative self-talk: I won’t feel valid until I have the things I’ve always wanted.
Positive self-talk: Searching for validation in things is like trying to find yourself in all the places you don’t actually exist.
Negative self-talk: How am I not supposed to feel overwhelmed by the news and politics and all the scary things happening in the world?
Positive self-talk: As human beings, you tend to feel overwhelmed. You might not be able to control what happens in the world, but you can control how you care for yourself.
Negative self-talk: How do I stop negative thoughts?
Positive self-talk: You don’t have to stop them, you have to stop believing everything they tell you.
Negative self-talk: I’m lost.
Positive self-talk: No, you’re evolving, so your surroundings are going to feel unfamiliar.
Negative self-talk: I have been indulging in guilty pleasures.
Positive self-talk: There is no such thing as a guilty pleasure. It’s either guilt or pleasure. Choose pleasure because it’s nothing to feel guilty about.
Negative self-talk: I need to reinvent myself.
Positive self-talk: You need to realize your worth isn’t determined by how useful you are to people.
At the end of the day-As human beings, we are likely to feel anxious. It is a survival tool that drives us to seize life. We need to know how to handle it. When your mental health is optimistic, you’re able to overcome anxiety everyday more constructively and can boost your optimism.
Also Read: Essential Oils To Beat Anxiety And Stress