Is Anxiety Impacting How You Think?

(by Survive, Thrive And Conquer, Matt)

Every Sunday morning, I do a weekly reading on my Periscope channel. We interactively read through a book, and discuss how we can relate it to our lives. These are of course books to help us in everyday life, whether we are an abuse survivor or not.

I thought I might take this column here that Don has so graciously given me on his blog, and start a monthly series on a topic that millions of us struggle with. Anxiety!

Just the thought of Anxiety can make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, send shivers down your spine, and pretty much make us as uncomfortable as possible. Which is precisely what Anxiety lives for, making us uncomfortable and being stuck.

Let’s chat for a bit about Black and White thinking, or in other words, thinking in extremes.  Is anxiety impacting how you think?

Anxiety loves it when we live in these extreme thoughts. Everything is either completely one way or completely the other way. This is just the type of mindset that promotes self-shame, and keeps us from loving ourselves, and embracing all the good that we are.

Healing happens in the gray area...

There’s a concept that is important to embrace as abuse survivors, “healing happens in the scary middle”, the gray area. That’s where loving ourselves happens too. That middle or gray area where we accept ourselves, flaws and all, and stop trying to figure everything and everybody else, out.

• Stop beating ourselves up because we didn’t get that promotion.
• Stop thinking that we are doomed to a life of solitude and misery because we went through a divorce.
• Don’t beat ourselves up because somebody was rude to us, and it must be our fault. We must have done something wrong.
• If our children make a poor decision as a teenager, it doesn’t mean that we are a terrible parent.

I’m sure you can think of countless situations in life, recent or past, where you blamed yourself for something that wasn’t your fault. That extreme thinking of, “there’s no logical explanation other than I must have done something wrong”, is unbelievably toxic to our self-esteem.

Anxiety loves this, because Anxiety itself is toxic. It uses every trick in the book to make us feel like we have to be at fault, we are broken, we make all the wrong decisions, we are unlovable, etc. Then it feeds on that and just keeps growing and growing until we finally say, enough is enough.

There’s a thousand and one reasons why people are the way that they are, and every day circumstances can change how we react to a given situation. Life is fluid, it’s always changing. Think of this example:

Your coworker, who is normally easy going, talkative, friendly, and helpful suddenly snaps at you out of the blue.  You’ve never known them to act this way, but for some reason today they jumped down your throat when you came to ask them a work-related question.

Many times, our default reaction is, “well I must have done something to them”. Then we start to worry about what we did, why we did it, and how we can fix it…and we don’t even know what “it” is, but it must our fault.

Anxiety is just loving life at that moment, because we spend the rest of the day questioning ourselves and beating ourselves up for something we can’t control.

Once again, there are countless reasons why your co-worker snapped and very few, if any, have anything to do with you. Yet we are so used to blaming ourselves, that it’s just a default response.

Living in extremes, thinking we must be to blame and that we are always the reason for someone’s else’s actions is so self-defeating and just continues to give Anxiety power.

If there’s one lesson that can be very hard to learn, but so yet so important, is that we can’t control anyone else’s actions. You’ll never be at peace by trying to please someone else or fix something. Nor will you be at peace in trying to figure out someone else’s intentions.

All you end up doing is blaming yourself, shaming yourself, and living in the extreme world of you being all wrong, all the time.

That my friends, is no way to live.

I encourage you, to step back, look at a situation from a high level, rational mind point of view. Doing that gives you perspective on what is really going on, not what Anxiety tries to make you think is going on.

If you would like to join Matt on this chat, just watch for his announcement around 10:30am on Sunday mornings.  @SurvivingMyPast

-Matt (SurvivingMyPast.net)



 

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Matt is a regular columnist on Mind Body Thoughts.  He writes Survive, Thrive and Conquer monthly column.  This article is written by Matt.

To learn more about him and see all his other articles, go to Matt's Page, Survive, Thrive And Conquer.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2017 by Don Shetterly and Matt

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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What We Think Holds Us Back

I've seen this so much lately that it makes my head spin around fifty times.  Okay, by the time this is posted, some of what I'm triggered by will have passed.

What we think can truly hold us back in life.  Instead of evaluating something that may be beneficial, we just put the wall up.  We don't even give ourselves a moment to look at it or see it.

Not everything that we believe to be true and put our trust in is true.  We may think it is.  We may fully believe it is.  We may be convinced that it is.  It just doesn't always make it true.

Holding ourselves back in life from experiencing something that could help us or further our lives is not doing anyone any good.  We're too eager these days to believe things others tell us are true, but something that is standing right before us that may help us, we shun it like a hot potato.

It defies logic and common sense...

So much of what we think and believe is not grounded in science or fact that can be proved.  It is in the falsifying of what defies logic and common sense that we stand on as if we know all the answers.

If we continue to only see what it is that we think and believe, are we truly exercising our ability to be human?  A human should advance and grow, not stay stagnant in what someone has convinced them to believe.

Each one of us needs to evaluate what we hold on to and what we think and believe.  If we don't continually challenge it, we're staying stuck in one place.  This is not good for us or human civilization.

I think back to the story about the town down in Southwest Florida where Thomas Edison wanted to install his new electric lighting.  It was his gift to the town.  However, the townspeople were so afraid of it at the time.  It went against their beliefs of how lighting should be that they stopped him from doing this.

Just think, if each one of us does the same thing that the townspeople did, where will that get our civilization?  If you don't think you do this, guess what - we all do it.  There is not a one of us that doesn't hold on to something we think or believe without fully evaluating and challenging it to its core.

We will grow and become more if we allow what we believe to be challenged to its core.  It is then that we will see whether it is something solid for our life or if it needs to be let go and replaced by something that is. Maybe I'm just an odd-ball in life but I always keep pushing myself to be more than I am today.

I Thought I Knew It All

At one time, I thought I had it all together.  I thought I knew it all.  When it came to taking care of myself, of course I did that.  When it came to eating right, of course I did that.  When it came to understanding all things about the universe and being spiritual, of course I did that.

The thing is, I didn't know as much as I thought I knew.  I had swallowed up all that had been shoveled down my throat by my family, society and the church.  I was gulping it as if it was my last meal.  Unfortunately, it didn't get me too far in the direction I needed to go.  Sorry, if this doesn't sound like something you want to read, but it is the truth.

We can convince ourselves...

We can convince ourselves that we know all, but when our actions don't align with what we think and say, then who are we fooling the most?  We all do it, whether we want to admit it or not.  Its part of being in a human body that is functioning every day.

I am not saying this because it is a pie-in-the-sky concept.  I've seen it first hand in my own body and I've seen it in a lot of other bodies.  We often don't know as much as we think we know or see or understand or believe or I could go on and on.  I know that steps on toes.  It stepped on mine many years ago.

Back in 1991 when my life came crashing down and I took my last breaths of air, I realized one thing.  What I thought I knew was not what was true.  In fact, in order for me to heal and come back from the brink of death, I had to discard most of what I had been taught.  I had to discard most of what I thought I had learned.  It was the only way to move forward and to walk again and to function normally in life.

Yes, I tried to convince myself and others that I knew a lot, but when life knocks you flat on your butt and you are gasping for your last breaths, you realize just how much you don't know!  You begin to see what you have not seen up until this point.

Yes, I fought it.  I didn't want to change and let go of all that I depended upon in life.  I didn't want to let go of the foundation of what I thought I knew.  Yet, the more I was clinging to it, the more my life was drifting out of my reach.

Afraid to let go...

I see many that have done the same thing I did.  I see many that cling on to that which does not work, but they are too afraid to let go.  I was too afraid as well to let go.

I'm not going to sit here today and tell you what you have to do or how you need to get to your next point on the journey of your life.  This is for you to figure out and understand as you take steps.  How would I know the truth of what lies ahead for you anyway and if you listened to me on that, you'd be missing the best part of discovering that truth for yourself.

If we are talking about truth and fact and fiction, the following blog post addresses this in more detail.

 

(click here to read)

We, as humans, are super pros at convincing ourselves that we know more than we do and we have life figured out more than we do.  Its called being human.  However, the evolution of our consciousness and awareness is what leads us to discovery.  Its the moments where we let go of all that we know and venture into the unknown that we truly discover more about ourselves and who we are as humans.

Question Of The Day - Have you ever had a moment where you thought you knew it all?  Leave a comment below and let me know if you or have not.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2016 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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Do Plants See, Feel, Smell And Think

Everyone thinks of animals and humans as being the highest of life forms.  We often see them as the only entities in our world that can see, feel, smell and think.  However, according to researcher and author, Daniel Chamovitz, plants are much more than we currently realize.

Daniel is the author of the book, What A Plant Knows.

Through his initial work he discovered that an unique group of genes in plants also could be found in the animal world.  This group of genes had much to do with how plants grow and determine lightness or darkness.  The same set of genes is also a part of human DNA.

Daniel Chamovitz goes on to share how plants have a sense of smell, but not necessarily in the same function as humans or animals do.  It is more like a receptivity to chemicals or pheromone, rather than as something we react to as humans.