08. Practice negative visualization. Create tangible solutions for your intangible fears. Show yourself that you won’t actually die if you lose a job or a boyfriend. Make a list of the things you worry about most, imagine the worst outcome, then make a plan for exactly how you would deal with it if that came to pass.
09. Stop being so cerebral. Do things with your hands. Cook, clean, go outside.
10. Evolve past one-dimensional thinking. People who worry a lot are usually very firm in their convictions of what is and isn’t. They fail to see complexity, opportunity, the majority of the iceberg that is the reality they don’t know and can’t see.
11. Practice healthy discomfort. Learn to lean into your stress, not resist it.
12. Change your objective. The goal is not to feel “good” all the time, it’s to be able to express a healthy range of emotion without suppressing or suffering.
13. Ask yourself the following questions when a thought upsets you: “Is this true? Can I absolutely know this is true?” Most of the time, the answer will be “no” to one or both.
14. Do more. If you have time to be regularly consumed by irrational, spiraling thoughts, you need more to focus on, more to work toward, more to suffer for. Make sure you’re living more than you’re thinking about living.
15. Accept the fact that everyone, everywhere, has weird, incorrect, disturbing thoughts that have no bearing on reality. You are not a freak. You are (probably) not sick. You just have to learn to not be intimidated by your own mind.
16. Freaking out is not usually what happens when something in your life actually needs to change. Depression, anger, resistance, sadness…that’s what happens when something isn’t right. Stop gauging how bad things are by how much you panic, and start by gauging what your emotional homeostasis is. That’s how you know
what’s really wrong or right—what you consistently do and how you regularly feel.
17. When you are spiraling, be able to say out loud: “I am having a panic attack. I am having irrational thoughts.” Doing so is the first step toward bringing yourself back to reality.
18. Identify your comfort zones, and step back into them now and again. Moving past the place that you’re used to is a gradual process
—going too quickly is a recipe for a breakdown.
19. Prove yourself wrong. Show yourself that your thoughts have no basis in truth. Go to the doctor and confirm that you aren’t dying of some incurable disease. Ask someone how they feel about you if you don’t know. Do not live in the grey area when answers are available.
20. Do not always trust yourself. Give yourself space to be wrong.
Open yourself up to the idea that you don’t know what you don’t know. If your feelings are informed by irrational thoughts, they can very well be incorrect.
21. Trust what gives you peace. Even if the idea of an intimate relationship or a career in the field of your dreams scares you initially, if it’s what you really want, it will also give you a feeling of “yes.” Trust your “yes” feelings.
22. Take the instances in which you’re most uncomfortable to mean that it’s time you expand yourself. You need to learn to think differently, see differently, do differently. You need to open yourself. If you don’t, you’ll be stuck in the cocoon phase forever.
23. Fall in love with the unknown, for the fact that it will almost always bring you things better than you could have imagined—things that are worse than you could have imagined are almost always products of your own thinking or perception of what they mean about you or your future.
24. Practice radical acceptance. Learn to tell the parts of your story you’d rather shove under the rug. You’re allowed to say: “I don’t love my body. I feel a little stuck right now. I am not happy in my relationship. I am in debt” without it being a condemning statement.
25. Realize that there are three layers of you: your identity, your shame, and your true self. Your identity is your outermost layer, it’s the idea that you think other people have of you. Your shame is what’s shielding you from expressing your true self, which is at your core.
It is from your shame circle that irrational thoughts breed and thrive. Work on closing the gap between who the world thinks you are and who you know you are. Your mental health will change significantly.
26. Learn deep breathing exercises. This sounds kind of annoying if you’ve tried it and it hasn’t worked before, but it’s actually one of the most effective non-prescription solutions to a freak out.
27. Expand your perceptions. If you’re uncomfortable, you’re being pushed to think beyond what you’ve known. You’re being called to see yourself in a new way. Open yourself to possibilities you normally wouldn’t consider, or layers of yourself you’ve yet to see.
28. Practice rational thinking, and often. You shouldn’t trust your mind to think healthfully on autopilot. You have to train it.
29. Part of that training will include knowing what to do when something irrational pops up—which is to evaluate it objectively, determine if it serves you, and laugh about it if not.
30. Irrational thoughts are sometimes products of intense, rational fears you’ve yet to fully acknowledge or deal with. When you’re in a stable state of mind, sit down and be honest with yourself about what those are.
31. Differentiate the fine line between what you can and can’t control.
You can, for example, control how much effort you put into your work. You cannot control how other people respond to it. You can control what you wear each day. You cannot control how good other people think you look.
32. Stop pretending you know what other people are thinking.
33. Stop pretending you know what the future holds, indefinitely.
34. Understand that your sense of self is entirely a mental thing, and it’s the foundation of your sanity. If you believe you’re the kind of person who can bear pain or loss, you will be the kind of person
who can bear pain or loss. If you believe you’re worthy of love, you will experience love when it comes.
35. Work on redefining your sense of self by things that aren’t material or shallow. Instead of thinking you are someone who is attractive and successful, learn to think of yourself as someone who is resilient, hungry for new experiences, capable of deeply loving others, and so on.
36. Learn to see each day from the perspective of your older self.
37. Think about who you were two years ago, or even five. Try to remember a random day in your life during those times. Notice how your focus immediately turns toward what you had to be grateful for. Learn to do that with today.
38. Sometimes, the best way to get over anything is just to work on forgetting about it. Not everything requires analysis.
39. The best way to forget is to fill your life with new, better things.
Things you may not have expected, things you didn’t know you didn’t know about, things you never imagined you’d like.
40. Accept that irrational thoughts, much like anxiety, or sadness, or anything else, will always be a part of your life. They aren’t going anywhere. Experiencing them isn’t a sign that you’ve backtracked or that you’re off-path or that something’s desperately wrong, per se.