This is a follow-up blog to the wildly popular post from March 18th, 5 Steps to a Complete Emotional Breakdown by Wednesday. Now, if you’re ready for a real game-changer, you’ll love this week’s blog.
As the title suggests, you can trigger your own anxiety attack simply by the way you think. Here’s a few ideas to ponder that will shift you brain into stress mode.
- The glass is always half-empty—I would venture that most emotional breakdowns begin with an onslaught of negativity. Sure, things might be stressful at work, but if you keep a positive outlook, you’ll rarely suffer a breakdown. On the other hand, negativity keeps your mind focused on what’s going wrong, what you don’t have, and how unfair it all is—instead of refocusing on what’s going right and coming up with creative solutions.
- Forget about how good you’ve got it—After dwelling on negative and pessimistic thoughts, don’t stop to appreciate that you have a job, a family, or good health. Thankfulness improves your mood by lowering stress hormones in the brain, according to a study at the University of California, Davis. Avoid gratitude by focusing on what you don’t have—or finding fault with the things that are going good in your life.
- Use the three magic words—Always. Never. Worst. Attach one of these modifiers to a pessimistic thought to catapult your self-esteem and outlook on life to new lows. Now of course, our reality rarely is so extreme as to be “the worst” and we don’t really know that we will “always” get passed over for a promotion because the boss has “never” liked us, but using these three words regardless of reality injects these thoughts with more power and influence in our lives. A few additional magic words—Everything, Nothing and Everyone—the more general and far-reaching the better.
Dale Carnegie says, “ Happiness doesn’t depend on any external circumstances, it is governed by our mental attitude.” In the same way, I believe anyone can turn a fairly good set of circumstances into a nightmare by focusing on the negatives, letting their thoughts run to extremes and believing these thoughts more that they believe any positive thoughts. I hope these tips will get you started.