Examining Your Thoughts: A Powerful Tool to Calm Your Anxious Mind

If the stress of the current global crisis of COVID-19 has you feeling anxious, uncertain and overwhelmed, you are not alone. These are unprecedented times. I happen to be in the “epicenter” here in NYC and it is collectively causing stress and anxiety that can be felt in the air here…and I’d imagine everywhere.

I wanted to offer this practical, evidence-based technique that you can implement immediately to help release some of the mental and emotional stress you are experiencing. This technique will help you calm your anxious mind. When you are overwhelmed, it may feel like your thoughts are racing, like there is impending doom, like there is no hope. When you use this thought examination technique, you create space to understand how your thoughts are impacting you, practice releasing them and offer yourself opportunities to get into a solution-focused mindset. 

Thought Examination Technique

This technique allows you to examine your thoughts and the impact they have on you closely. This technique changes your relationship with your thoughts and creates empowerment. Often thoughts and faulty beliefs are happening on a subconscious level, they are running in the background of your mind, however your physical body through the stress response, responds accordingly.

If you are having catastrophe based thoughts, then most likely your body will enter into a sympathetic nervous system response, or fight-or-flight mode. This is not a helpful place to be unless there is truly an immediate emergency. While this circumstance is an emergency for many, it is not helpful, and actually is damaging, to remain in this heightened state of stress and anxiety continually.

To begin practicing the technique, get out a piece of paper and practice going through the following questions based on any fears and anxieties you are experiencing and use it regularly to manage and change your relationship to any stressful thoughts.

1. Choose a fear-based thought that has been on your mind or troubling you recently.

2. Ask yourself what emotions are driving that thought.

3. Where do you feel these emotions in your physical body?

4. Ask yourself, is this thought true? Unless it is a present fact, the answer is no!

5. Ask yourself, is this thought useful? Unless you are trying to problem-solve, most likely the thought is not useful.

6. Ask yourself, what is it doing to me to have and believe this thought? This is important to evaluate how detrimental this one thought can be.

7. Ask yourself, how would I feel without this thought? This is important because it allows you to recognize how this thought is limiting your present moment experience and essentially causing unnecessary suffering.

8. Ask yourself, what is the opposite of this thought?

9. Notice how it feels in both mind and body to sit with the opposite thought. The purpose of this is not to lie to yourself or move into positive-thinking mode. The purpose of this part of the exercise is to be aware that if you are believing the first thought in this moment, then the opposite could just as well be true.

10. Mindfully reframe the thought, transform the thought into what is true right now, this process creates a reality-based thought.

11. If this thought does come true, what are three things you can do to cope with that occurrence?

Example:

1. What is the thought? If I lose my job during this health crisis, I will lose my home.

2. What are the emotions connected to having this thought? Fear, sadness, anxiety, helplessness, hopelessness.

3. Where do you feel these emotions in your body? Increased heart rate, nausea, tightness in my chest, tight jaw, neck and shoulders.

4. Is this a true thought? It could become true, but in this moment, no it is not true.

5. Is this a useful thought? Definitely not, it is causing me to suffer.

6. What is the impact of this thought on the present moment: Not be able to sleep well, pain in my body, no energy, can’t think clearly, feel sick.

7. How would I feel without this thought? Rested, peaceful, relaxed in mind and body. 

8. What is the opposite of this thought? I won’t lose my job or my house during this health crisis.

9. How does it feel to sit with the opposite thought? Better, but I still feel so uncertain.

10. What is a way to reframe this thought? Although I am afraid of losing my job, in this moment I am still employed and for that I am grateful. If I do lose my job, I will deal with that circumstance at that time.

11. What three things can I do now to prepare for if the thought comes true? If I do lose my job due to current unstable economy three things I can do now to prepare are: 1. look up how to file for unemployment, 2. update my resume, 3. look at my budget and see where I can immediate reduce expenses and create savings to prepare.

Notice how much different it is to be with the thought in a mindful way and engage with creative problem-solving? This process allows you to engage with the thought in a proactive responsive way rather than remaining in reactive-mode, which is emotional, stifling and illogical. 

When you practice this technique regularly, it will help to bring you into a more grounded, present-moment focused mind frame. This technique is helpful to practice anytime you are experiencing fear-based, anxiety provoking, catastrophizing thoughts. 

When you go into problem-solving mode you create more hope and experience less fear. The next time that you find you are stuck in a negative thought cycle, use this technique and end with finding solutions. Notice how this allows you to put your mind at ease and feel more in control and empowered.

Inner Strength Focus: Growing Hope to Heal Emotional Eating

Over the past several blogs I have been talking about building six specific inner strengths to help you create more contentment and happiness in your life—specifically related to your relationship with food. The final inner strength that I will cover here of the six inner strengths is hope. Hope is linked to faith and it’s an inner belief that all will be well without having to feel as though you need to control every aspect of your circumstances. This is an experience of surrender. Hope allows a surrendering to an inner belief and trust which is deeply personal and a spiritual endeavor.

If you attempt to control every aspect of your life, you will become exhausted. When you find the elements that are controllable and connect that to the hope and belief that all will be well, you can lean into the process of surrendering, the process of letting go. When you lean into surrendering and letting go, you create an experience of happiness, inner peace and contentment. Hope provides optimism and optimism ultimately keeps you moving forward with a positive and determined mindset.

When you apply the inner strength of hope to healing emotional eating, you are able to remain in a more positive mindset when it comes to challenges, emotions and trusting yourself—and trusting the process. Shifting from the dieting trap of restriction (and then the inevitable over eating) into a more mindful and intuitive eating space, you will need to access an inner hope and belief that you can truly free yourself from emotional eating and create a healthy and peaceful relationship with food.

Food is pleasurable and nourishing. The purpose of feeding ourselves is to remain healthy while also providing your life with pleasure that you derive from cooking, tasting, eating and even sharing a meal with others. When food becomes your primary (or only) source of pleasure—or your tool for managing stress—you may not have much hope that your life can be different. The cycle of emotional and stress eating is hard to disrupt. Change is difficult. Not changing is even harder because you remain stuck in that negative cycle. Building the inner strength of hope is a process of surrendering to the awareness that your relationship with food has derailed and needs support to get back on track. Hope keeps you connected to the possibility of change and creates effort.

To begin to build the inner strength of hope, it will be helpful to create a vision for what a peaceful relationship with food means to you. Understanding why you want this change to occur makes it even more powerful. When you have your vision established and connect with it regularly, you create an inner hope, a belief and faith in yourself that why you want what you want will allow you to put the effort into creating your vision as your reality. When you have faith in yourself you are more likely to be kind to yourself, to handle challenges and be more proactive.

To begin to connect with your vision in order to build hope as an inner strength, spend time journaling about the following questions:

·      What is your vision for your relationship with food?

·      Why do you want this vision?

·      What are the challenges you can foresee as you set forth to put your vision into action?

·      How can you stay connected to your vision?

·      What does hope mean to you?

·      What does having hope look like within your life, how might it change your current life?

·      What do you need to do to increase your faith in yourself?

Once you have your vision established, create 3-5 action steps that you can take daily or weekly to move you in the direction of living your vision. Find where you can access hope daily and build faith in yourself to take the action needed to create a peaceful relationship with food. Connect with your vision daily, fine tune your action steps regularly, bring on support like a friend, coach or therapist to help you stay the course.

When you connect with hope, you create more inner happiness, peace and contentment. Always remember that you deserve to live the life of your dreams.

Inner Strength Focus: Gratitude to Heal Emotional Eating

Gratitude is an inner strength that is often present in those who feel happy and content within their lives. While gratitude is a strength, it is also a practice, a way of being, and an attitude that can be cultivated over time. The act of being and feeling grateful is powerful. Right now, take a moment to think of one thing you are grateful for and notice how it makes you feel to bring this to your mind. Did you smile? Did you feel any warmth in your heart and body expand? Gratitude gets a lot of press these days and while taking a moment just to be grateful is wonderful, it is the practice and cultivation of it as a deeper strength and inner resource that allows it to enhance your life through your attitude and outlook every single day.

As you engage in the practice of being grateful daily, you begin to harness the power of gratitude as an inner strength. While that may sound like a nice skill, it is not necessarily easy. We are hardwired to remember danger, to notice possible problems and remember them for future security and survival. The problems and unpleasant experiences can conjure up discomfort and fear in a heartbeat but we tend to forget the positive experiences more easily. The part of the brain that is always on alert for danger does this on purpose as a survival mechanism. The part of the brain that stores the good stuff does not let it all sink in quite so easily which means that we have to work at it to make the good stuff stick!

Practicing is an act of creation. We get better at what we practice, so if you have been practicing fear and lacking thoughts, you might be really good at that. The good news is that if you begin practicing gratitude, you can get good at that too. Gratitude is one of the best anecdotes for anxiety. Anxiety is loaded with fear of the unknown and tends to create catastrophes based on all of the possible dangers that the brain has stored and this causes a lot of internal distress. One of the most commonly soothed emotions with food is anxiety. Food can be calming and grounding, and when you are feeling anxious it can do the trick. Sugary foods can trigger the pleasure center in the brain making you temporarily feel less anxious. However, this is not a very effective coping mechanism as the anxiety will not just go away, it is just temporarily numbed out by the food.

Gratitude can calm and release anxiety because it brings you back to being grateful for what is true right now, what you do have, and what is going well. This is mindfulness in action with a specific attitude. Anxiety lives in future catastrophe while gratitude lives in the present moment. When you bring the energy of gratitude to the present moment it can transform the moment and create an amazing shift in perception causing your inner experience to transform.

When you apply the inner strength of gratitude to the process of making peace with food it is incredibly powerful. When we are along any personal healing journey there will be trials, there will be ups and downs and of course there will always be the inevitable backsliding. When you apply gratitude to your journey it allows you to focus on what is going well, where you are being successful and an ability to tap into the inner knowing that all will be well.

When you focus on what has gone wrong or on where you weren’t perfect, you create a dampening of energy and may even think to yourself, “why do I even bother trying?” or you may think thoughts such as, “I always fail, I’m weak…” These are defeating, self-limiting beliefs that have absolutely no use or purpose along the path to healing and wellbeing. When you focus on what has gone well you reinforce the belief that what you want is indeed possible and on the way. Most importantly, when you reflect on what went well and what you are grateful for, you are able to build energy to keep going, to keep moving forward. You know that it feels good to feel good, it feels good to make progress, it feels good to heal and grow into the healthiest and most whole version of yourself over and over again.

Gratitude is a practice, you have to do it over and over again for it to be effective and to truly sink in as an inner strength. Gratitude is also an attitude. It is a mindset of looking for what is good, what you do have, what feels positive and to continue to search for it even when it may be difficult to find. When you engage in the practice of gratitude and work to intentionally create a mindset of recognizing what you are grateful for and shift away from longing and wanting you grow the inner strength of gratitude as an integrated part of who you are, a resource you can draw from over and over again.

This week, begin to integrate these practices in order to grow the inner strength of gratitude within you each day.

1.    Keep a gratitude journal. Focus at the end of the day on two things you did that moved you in the direction of your own personal healing and wellbeing journey and write it like this: Today I am grateful that I…__________________ (took a long walk, drank a ton of water, took a yoga class, ate a leafy green, meditated…) just be sure to focus on what you did do. Then write, I am grateful that I created the opportunity to feel __________________ by doing ______________ (strong, relaxed, empowered, healthy, vibrant…. By doing yoga, meditating, eating a leafy green….)

2.    Tell someone you care about something you appreciate about them every day.

3.    Be grateful for the food you eat, don’t judge it, just practice gratitude.

4. Begin each day by saying Thank You.

If you try these four action steps, let me know the impact they create in your life—especially in relation to your relationship with food.