Do you ever have one of those nights – where you find yourself tossing and turning, your mind filled with thoughts and worries, “what ifs,” and feelings of uncertainty or fear? Sometimes these same feelings and thoughts pop up throughout the day, with a sudden sense of your mind racing, your heart rate speeding up, and breathing getting shallow. Suddenly, all you can think about is what you said or how you may have messed things up, and your mind begins to consider all the possible things that could happen or go wrong. All of a sudden, that one small thing feels like it has become a massive storm with certainty that everything will go wrong.
But could you learn to take back control of these moments of worry and begin to find a place of rest for your mind and body? By practicing just a few simple steps, you can start to quiet the storm inside your mind, leading to more clarity, better sleep, and the ability to breathe a little more deeply.
Consider these three simple steps to help clear your mind and begin to rest.
Name the fear. It’s essential to identify what is at the root of our anxiety. Slowing down and naming what you are most worried about can help you see just what you are most fearful of happening. Maybe it’s the fear that you will lose your job or that you may lose someone you love. Whatever it is, taking a deep breath and saying what you fear will help you begin to take a step toward understanding what has you feeling overwhelmed and anxious.
State a truth. Consider the fact that what you fear could happen, but it is essential also to consider that the facts that may support this fear becoming a reality may not be the whole truth. Often there may be some truths that challenge this fear. Maybe it was another project you worked on that proved you competent and a great asset to your workplace. Or that making one mistake does not mean that you are a complete failure.
Imagine the “best-case scenario.” These feelings of fear and uncertainty are often based on the worst-case scenario. What would it be like to ask yourself to consider the “what ifs” for the best-case outcome? Seeing yourself as capable of overcoming or succeeding, rather than imagining only adverse outcomes, may allow you to realize that your fear is only one possibility of what could happen. In reality, there is a possibility of a positive outcome.
As you allow your mind to focus not only on the possibility of what could go wrong and consider what could go right, you may start to notice a mental shift. This shift comes as your mind begins to slow down, and you can think more clearly, sleep more soundly, and feel more energetic in your everyday life.
Clear Your Mind Worksheet
Want these questions in an easy to use free downloadable worksheet? This worksheet will help you take steps forward in dealing with anxiety. You’ll also get access to all our worksheets in Here Counseling’s Resource Library!
Have you ever had the feeling that no matter how hard you try to make a change, you are just not able to “get it right” in the relationships and with the people that matter to you the most? You might find yourself worried all the time, holding back in your interactions, second-guessing yourself, or even finding that you want to give up because you feel so uncertain about if things will get better.
You might be having a depressive experience.
Feeling depressed in a relationship may look like this:
you internalize responsibility for all of your mistakes
you find yourself ruminating on your words and actions
you feel exhausted after being with your partner
you avoid conflict
One of the first steps toward change is naming the myths that often contribute to feeling depressed in your relationships.
Could one of these common myths be keeping you stressed or depressed in your most important relationships?
Myths that may be Keeping you Depressed in your Relationship
“I have to get it right all the time.” It’s impossible for us to do things perfectly every time, especially when talking about relationships. Instead, it is crucial to recognize that we will have ups and downs and let those be ok and normal.
“I always mess things up.” When we make a mistake, it can be easy to go back to a headspace of feeling like all we do is mess up. However, this mindset overlooks everything that has gone well in our relationships and the value we add to those relationships.
“My relationship doesn’t look like “their” relationship.” Comparing ourselves and our relationships with what we see around us is typical. But sometimes, comparison can cause us to begin to believe that somehow we aren’t measuring up or that we are the only one for whom things are difficult. Everyone has difficulties, and sometimes we may need to remind ourselves that there isn’t one way to be in a relationship.
Once we recognize the myths we may believe, we can change these thoughts and decrease the stress that keeps us feeling depressed in our relationships.
As you begin to shift some of these thinking patterns, you can move away from your hesitations and worries. From here, you can continue taking steps toward a greater sense of ease and connection in your relationships.
Identifying the myths that may be keeping you feeling depressed is an essential first step in the journey toward feeling less depressed and moving toward more profound, more intimate connections.
When Therapy may be Helpful for your Relationship
Therapy may be a helpful step for individuals or couples struggling with finding deep intimacy in their relationships. A therapist can provide a safe space and support to help you identify the myths that have you feeling depressed and help you move forward toward finding the sense of connection you have long desired.
Kristi Wollbrink, AMFT
I help individuals and couples decrease anxiety in order to find meaning and connection.
You’re concerned for the safety of your loved ones.
Some days just seem doomed from the start no matter the effort.
This toll on your body and mind diminishes your sense of hope and peace, until you find yourself grasping to the idea that the best you can hope for is to find rest some day in the future, because it sure doesn’t seem reachable today.
What’s happening in your brain and body?
Thankfully, this is a pattern you can break. Our brains are wired to fall into the same paths each day. If those paths gravitate towards stressful or depressive thoughts, then those are the directions our minds want to keep taking.
Imagine sledding in the snow. The first few times you take a path down a hill, it’s a little slow, a little difficult. But the more you take the same path, the snow gets worn down, solid, and lightning fast. This is what’s happening in your brain every time stress or depression try to have their way. This then has greater implications for your health.
Muscle tension.
Gastrointestinal issues.
Fatigue.
Insomnia.
Weight gain.
Extreme weight loss.
None of these things contribute to an experience of peace in your life.
What can you do about it?
Stress and depression are usually accompanied by a small nagging voice that threatens your identity or safety. This lie about yourself can be identified with a negative “I am” statement.
I’m unloved.
I’m a failure.
I’m not safe.
You get the point.
So FIRST I want you to take just a moment to quiet your mind, and ask your stress what negative message it’s trying to communicate to you today about yourself.
NEXT, ask yourself what positive message you’d rather believe about yourself instead. What centering affirmation do you need to set to feel empowered for the rest of the day? These affirmations are meant to answer the negative message from above. Here are some examples.
I am loved.
I’m important.
I do the best I can.
Choose the positive voice that speaks to that part of you that needs hope today.
LASTLY, and this is key, remind yourself why this centering affirmation is true. When you say “I’m loved”, whose face comes to mind? When you say “I’m a success,” allow your mind to venture to the times you made something happen, instead of dwelling on the times you didn’t. When you tell yourself “I matter,” picture the reason you matter.
Why should you set a centering affirmation each morning?
These three steps: 1) asking what negative message stress or depression are trying to share, 2) asking what centering affirmation combats that negative message, and 3) reminding yourself why your centering affirmation is true, will take you about a minute once you get used to the practice.
Returning to the sledding metaphor, your mind will continue to prefer its old paths for a while. As you practice this new preferred path, the path that leads to peace, what you’ll experience at first is a lot like dragging a sled down the stubborn fresh snow. The more days you choose the better path, the more solid it will become, the faster your brain will naturally make more positive connections. And before you know it, that old path won’t be so well-worn, and your brain will prefer to operate out of your centering affirmation.
Now that you’ve set your centering affirmation, you’ll want to come back to it occasionally throughout your day when the normal stresses of life show up, as they always do. Just a simple deep breath will do, inhale the centering affirmation, exhale the stress, and move on with your day.
Taking the next step
Sometimes, you’ll find stress seems beyond what you can manage. Maybe you poured your heart out to a trusted companion and you still feel awful. Or maybe the negative thoughts seem too numerous to count. If you need to discuss therapy as a potential option for you, contact us for a free consultation to discuss your best options. We’re more than happy to help you get set up with the right person. I help with anxiety, healing from trauma, and connectedness in relationships. And together with my colleagues we can help you make sense of any number of other concerns.
Be free to live again.
Now go and walk in your centering affirmation for the rest of the day. Let this be the voice that sets the background music of your life. And send a clear message to your stress and depression that they don’t get to call the shots anymore.
Setting a Centering Affirmation Worksheet
Want these questions in an easy to use free downloadable worksheet? This worksheet will help you take steps forward in dealing with anxiety. You’ll also get access to all our worksheets in Here Counseling’s Resource Library!
Reducing stress at work is both simpler and harder than it seems at first glance. As a psychologist who specializes in anxiety and works in Downtown Los Angeles, I want to give you a few tips to reduce your stress at work… and be more productive.
Meet Ian. Ian just accepted a new job at a law firm in Downtown Los Angeles. Ian’s excited, and willing to put in whatever work is required to prove his value as a lawyer. The first 2 weeks go well, and while he’s tired, he also gets a bit excited when he gets an email from a client on a weekend – he doesn’t mind replying, after all, it seems to be expected of people at his firm.
But 2 months into his new job, Ian is exhausted. The things that he loves are less exciting. He used to go on hikes on the weekends, but now he needs to be around his phone in case a client calls. He wishes he could couch in at the end of the day and not check email, but he feels an implicit pressure to answer emails immediately, even late at night. Now he isn’t sleeping well, he’s not enjoying things he used to, and he is having trouble calming down.
How do you know if you’re stressed?
Have you ever felt like Ian? Each of us comes up against tasks, whether in our professional or personal lives, that feel too overwhelming. Our anxiety or overwhelm is often a signal that we’re “red-lining”, that our brains are taking in too much information to regulate effectively. While stress is a normal experience, it becomes problematic when the body can’t calm back down. This inability to regulate anxiety is what constitutes workplace stress and overwhelm. As a way to manage the stress, often we work harder. Here’s a list of common behaviors people engage in when they experience chronic stress at work:
Taking on more projects, despite busy schedule
Checking work email during personal times or breaks
Working or responding to email during weekends
Social expectation to match work load or habits of others
Giving unrealistic deadlines for finishing projects
How many of these behaviors do you struggle with? Often they co-occur – people stressed at work do all of these to a varying degree as a way to reduce their anxiety. The trouble is, working harder to avoid stress doesn’t work – it seems to entrench the person in the same exhausting and stressful pattern. The more you respond to your anxiety by working harder, the faster the train goes, and the more difficult it is to get off. There’s a different way to manage stress: caring for yourself and setting boundaries.
Caring for yourself increases, not limits, your productivity
It’s true. The only way to escape stress is to slow down. And when we escape stress, we actually free ourselves up to work in a more productive way… a way that’s actually backed by neuroscience.
How can this be? We usually think of “self care” or “setting boundaries” as something warm and fuzzy. Something that’s for “me” at the expense of work or other obligations. Yet there’s more going on here. Think about it this way: You wouldn’t drive your car without changing the oil, or getting regular maintenance, especially when the warning lights come on. Caring for your car isn’t simply about making the car feel good, it’s about the reality that a car has a very finite ability to push itself without receiving the care it needs to continue functioning.
Just like a car’s warning lights, when we don’t listen to our overwhelm, we increase our chances of getting sick, suffer from lack of focus and lower energy. You know the feeling, don’t you? I’m sure you’re familiar with how well your body performs on a task when you’ve had good, peaceful rest. The opposite is true when we don’t listen. We start to break down, effecting our mind and body’s performance in all areas.
There’s a few common things our bodies feel when they’re trying to get us to slow down and take care:
Lack of energy
Lack of focus
Irritability at work
Inability to be present in personal life and relationships
Overeating
Undereating
Lack of restful sleep
When we don’t listen to these signs, it’s impossible to avoid the cost of overwhelm. The only way to move past these things isn’t more caffeine, or a fresher cold-pressed juice. There’s 2 ways to reduce your stress at work, the short way and the long way. I think you’ll find both apply to most situations of stress at work.
How to reduce stress at work: The Short Way
Your brain is made to swing like a pendulum between two primary modes: active and passive processing. Active processing is when your mind is actively working on a task. Your brain receives, processes, and acts on information it receives from its environment. Passive processing is what your brain does when it doesn’t have a task to do. Rather than turning “off”, your mind actively sorts through all the connections made during active processing, pruning them back and retaining the important details.
If we don’t ever give ourselves room to pull back from a stimulus, our minds struggle to find new ways of approaching a problem and to stay focused on what’s important. When we never pull back from our task, we slowly lose energy, and approach tasks repetitively. Doesn’t sound like the smartest way to work, does it? Here’s some quick things you can do to allow that pendulum to swing back toward passive processing, so you can regain energy.
TURN OFF EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS.
This is a quick win. You want to protect the time you spend away from your desk, so you can allow your mind to enter passive processing. Turn off email notifications on your phone. In fact, you can experiment with taking email off your phone, that way you’re only checking it when YOU decide to. Take Gmail off your phone, see what it feels like for 24 hours.
WALK.
Put down your phone, and take a walk in the middle of your work day. Maybe that means going out to lunch without your phone, or parking farther away from work so you need to walk. This is an easy way to give your mind space to passively process. Notice the energy you have when you return to your desk.
NEGOTIATE REALISTIC DEADLINES.
You might consider, just as an easy rule to start with, to extend your deadlines for projects by 25%. Most of us have a future bias concerning time, meaning we overestimate the free time we’ll have in the future. Account for this extending your expected time to complete a project. If you finish it early, you’ll have another win. Plus, you’ll be setting a different expectation for others about how available you are.
SET APPOINTMENTS.
Instead of jumping on the phone immediately with a client or colleague, give them appointment slots they can apply for.
“BUT! I can’t do those things!” Let’s think about this. There are some very real things that seem to inhibit you from following this list. You operate within a powerful culture of ceaseless work, constant availability, instant access. I’m very aware that I’m directly pushing back against that.
But let’s think about what happens if you don’t make these changes. There is an unavoidable cost to being constantly available. You’ll likely spend at least 50% of your waking hours at your job during your adult life. And these costs add up. It will be difficult to actually get off on weekends and holidays to enjoy your life. Maybe you can already feel the costs. You feel the exhaustion, the burnout, the “why did I get into this job?” feeling. So what is it worth to you to slow down? Is it worth possibly disappointing your co-workers? Or losing a client? Or having to find a different job?
Slowing down won’t just make you happier, it’ll help you work better too.
How to reduce stress at work: The Long Way
One very common voice that pops up, even as we consider letting go of being constantly available, is “I don’t want to”. The truth is, many of us, for many reasons, don’t want to make these changes. It’s not that we can’t, it’s that we won’t. The mind is like that – sometimes very divided and at-war with itself. We don’t just have a foot on the break pedal, there’s another foot on the accelerator that likes the speed.
Let’s take a look at some of the common reasons people like the speed of the Stress Train:
I enjoy feeling overwhelmed
“People pay attention to me when I’m busy”
“I’m only valuable when I’m busy, I feel good about myself when I accomplish a lot”
“I feel powerful when I’m busy and stressed”
“I’ve always had to do everything for myself, at least I have control over my life”
If I slow down I’m afraid worse things will happen
“People won’t understand my need to slow down, they’ll look down on me”
“People will be angry with me if I don’t meet expectations”
“I’m afraid I’ll be discarded if I don’t produce the value I feel is expected of me”
Now I realize often there are real expectations we’re up against. Our job may require a certain amount of hours or deadlines. Yet if we’re not careful, the employer can unknowingly collude with the parts of us that WANT to pick up speed, pressing two feet down on the accelerator. Only when we’re self-aware can we notice this happening and slow down. Slowing down means being willing to negotiate, to encounter conflict, and even disappoint someone.
So I challenge you today to slow down and care for yourself, no matter how difficult that might seem. Set a realistic boundary, even knowing it might invite a difficult conversation. A more productive and happier life is on the other side.
Connor McClenahan, PsyD
I help lawyers and other professionals overcome difficult emotional and relational patterns through psychotherapy.
