Anxiety is extremely uncomfortable. If you’re here, you need no explanation. The good news is, you shouldn’t have to sit with your anxiety for long. You have to get rid of it super-fast and continue to live your peaceful life. We don’t have to live with the negative thoughts in our lives.
We need to feel in order to heal. This is a great quote from Candace Van Dell. I absolutely love to watch her videos. She always comes through with Truth that resonates with me. Check out her video below.
While you’re here, check out these anxiety posts that might help!
- Top 10 Foods That Help with Anxiety
- How to Get Rid of Anxiety in the Long Run
- How to Get Rid of Anxiety Forever
- How to Get Rid of Anxiety at Night
We can’t always rely on others to take care of us emotionally. This is because certain things get lost in communication. There is a chance that the person you’re depending on for comfort won’t understand you. If you’re texting them, they might not comprehend your tone through the message. This is why writing therapy is important for mental health issues like anxiety.
It helps you to help yourself. After all, no one GETS you like you do. YOU have the power to unravel your thoughts and understand them.
Journaling for anxiety
Journaling is a very important coping tool. It can help you to figure out how to heal your anxiety. It helps you to breakdown your tangled thoughts into understandable chunks of information. We feel thousands of feelings in one day. Some of the feelings run through our heads and we can’t even give them a label. Some of our feelings are unique to us. We can’t explain them unless we write them down.
If you’d like to read more about journaling for mental health, you can check out my post on How to Journal for Mental Health.
Your Free Anxiety Worksheet
In order to help you with some writing for anxiety, I created a free anxiety worksheet for you. You can download the pdf using the download button, or print the image below.
How do I Feel?
Asking yourself questions like, “How do I feel?” help you to come down to your own level and understand yourself. Sometimes you don’t even know how you feel. That’s okay. You can start by telling yourself that you don’t know how you feel. Ask yourself how that feels. Find the answers within.
I feel sad.
I feel upset.
I feel angry.
It may seem silly or redundant to ask yourself these questions, but the truth is that a lot of us completely disregard ourselves and our feelings. This causes your emotions to bubble up into something that might explode. That’s why we have to deal with our emotions as soon as they come.
Furthermore, giving your emotions attention helps you to feel heard. Imagine an emotion as a young child. If you don’t listen to them, they might keep persisting in the hope that you listen. Or they might have a meltdown later. This is just how we are as well.
Why do I Feel This Way?
From here, go ahead and ask yourself why. Why do I feel sad? Validating your emotions always feels amazing. Every time you work backwards and find the source of your emotions, you will feel so refreshed. I know that every time I get mad, there is always a reason. When I pinpoint that reason, I feel so much better. That’s because I’m not confused and muddled anymore. I begin to understand myself and my emotions. It helps me to calm down.
Like my previous example, emotions love being seen, much like little kids. The moment you see and hear them, they will be satisfied and go away. This is why journaling and writing things down helps yout o understand what’s going in your head.
A lot of the times, it’s just one little baby emotion that demands your attention. The other muddled and tangled thoughts are a result of one emotion, really. Feel those emotions, and heal through them. Here are ways to answer the question, Why do I feel this way?
I feel sad because my sister took my stuff without asking.
I feel upset because I feel like I’m a bad cook.
I feel angry because I was rudely awakened early in the morning.
Fact or Fiction? Are my thoughts rational?
Something else that helps to figure out how to heal your anxiety is to ask if your thoughts are rational. I know it sounds harsh to be asked if you’re being rational. But the honest truth is, anxiety gives us irrational thoughts. You know how you wake up in the middle of the night wondering where your birth certificate is? I mean, why not sleep and find out in the morning? We don’t have to suffer through crazy thoughts like that.
Ask yourself if a thought is fact or fiction. You can also go another mile and tell yourself: if it hasn’t already happened, is it really going to? Paint positive mental images in your head. I know, I know. No one wants to be positive. No one wants to be told to be positive.
Here’s the thing. If you keep saying things in your head, you’re asking for it to happen. It’s better to create some positive mental imagery, just to be on the safe side. I’ve been reading this book called The Game of Life and How to Play It by Florence Scovel Shinn. It impresses the notion that you should create happy and positive images in your head. It’s a great read. It’s short, and I love that because sometimes I find it hard to finish long books.
This is from the book:
For example: A woman once asked me why her life was now one of poverty of limitation. Formerly she had a home, was surrounded by beautiful things and had often tired of the management of her home, and had said repeatedly, ʺIʹm sick and tired of things ‐ I wish I lived in a trunk,ʺ and she added: ʺToday I am living in that trunk.ʺ She had spoken herself into a trunk. The subconscious mind has no sense of humor and people often joke themselves into unhappy experiences.
The Game of Life and How to Play It by Florence Scovel Shinn
What self-care activity can I do to feel better?
This is a favorite of mine. I like to do it in anxiety-filled situations. It’s an imagination activity, and well, it doesn’t have to be an imagination! You can promise to do it for yourself. For example, I was at an interview where I was being made to wait for awful amounts of time. We’d be shuffled from one place to another with no communication. All the waiting was fraying my nerves. I was on hyper-drive. I wished I’d never applied in the first place. I wished it would end already. I wished I could get up and stretch, but I felt really anxious.
I decided to think about doing something that would make me really happy. I thought about going to my favorite café and getting a slice of cake with chocolate words saying I love you. It made me really happy. It calmed me so much.
This activity helps because it makes you feel like you’ve already done it. You know how they say you shouldn’t tell people your goals because you’ll feel like you already did it and lose all the motivation? This is exactly what’s going on here. You feel like you’ve already done it, and it gives you peace. You can imagine going to the mall, and buying yourself something new. You can think about getting home and cooking yourself something great. You can imagine hanging out with your favorite person. This would help with figuring out how to heal your anxiety.
Write to Heal
I hope this free anxiety healing worksheet will help you to learn how to heal your anxiety. It’s very important to validate your emotions and heal them through feeling. The only way out is through! Swim through your emotions. Understand them. That’s when you will heal.
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