Hard work keeps the mental demons at bay.
Feeling anxious? Restless throughout your day?
Dedicate yourself to something hard, and watch the freak outs melt away.
When I had a full-time job, I often found my mind wandering during the many slow periods at the office, and that would oftentimes escalate into a Defcon 5 proposition.
Why?
Because my mind was freed up to go to really dark places where I would become uncontrollably anxious while catastrophizing a wide variety of extremely unlikely scenarios in all areas of my life.
I mean, looking back, kudos to the creativity in my mind, but, shame on me for allowing myself to spiral out of control and sabotage my productivity for the day.
One minute, I thought I was dying of a disease.
Another minute, I was enraged at a perceived slight that never existed.
And then, I’d become an expert mind reader, assuming what a colleague was thinking and become freaked out over their “opinions” about a specific situation.
It was bad,
And what’s worse is that these worry thoughts would carry over for days and weeks, and I would be left an emotional mess in its wake.
Awesome time in my head, lemme tell you, folks, :)
How many of you can relate to this toxic cycle?
But then, I started my own business, and once I got over the initial, “holy shit, I am out on my own, what the hell am I going to do now” anxiety that knocked me on my ass even harder, I noticed a change in mindset over time.
I noticed that on days that were completely saturated with work and other non-related, but time-consuming tasks, that I was too emotionally and mentally exhausted to hold space for as many worry thoughts.
It’s not that the worry over certain things was eliminated, but, it was SIGNIFICANTLY reduced, and it also became easier to challenge these self-defeating thoughts with simple, self-talk that leveraged logic and reason.
Over time, I realized that the biggest challenge that we, as human beings, face is the power of our own mind and the task of re-framing or eliminating worry thoughts that don’t serve us in a way that allows us to show up in the world the way we want.
Although it’s a daily challenge, the best way to combat stress and worry is by engaging in activities that light you up and exert your energy so that your brain doesn’t have the bandwidth to fit in those bullshit, negative thoughts.
Turning to you…
How do you combat worry thoughts? Do you intentionally fill your day with activities that serves to put you in a positive mindset?
Please share your story below.
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