I'm listening to this Anxiety and Depression self help tape. It's a great insight into what anxiety and depression can do to a person. I don't know how much this is actually helping me, but what I can see it doing is actually putting into words exactly what I feel from time to time. I suppose it's like group therapy, hearing other people talk about anxiety and describing what it is and how it affects a person makes me feel more normal in dealing with it.
You know, I blame myself sometimes. I feel like I brought this on myself, or perhaps it's just a co-incidence. Sometimes I think about my fiendish time, going to raves, to nightclubs and spending numerous nights indulging in mental escape through the use of drugs and alcohol. If I were to follow what I'm listening to right now, I would have to believe that it was just a phase in my life, the same phase many people go through, many people still participate in everyday and feel like it's a regular part of their life. Did my time warping my mind with chemicals create a weakened state? Do I have a proclivity for anxiety because I've abused my brain?
Not many people know this, but there was a time that I spent a whole night at a friend's apartment fighting off a very very negative high from "magic mushrooms". I was walking around the apartment trying to make the whole feeling go away and it seemed that the more I tried to fight it off, the worse it got. The whole thing took a very negative turn when a thought crossed my mind I cannot bring myself to even type tonight. I just know that I didn't enjoy that thought at all, that when I think of that thought, I feel a slight panic and fear that I will have thoughts like that in the future. It's not fun. I've always felt in control of myself and what I let happen in my head, and at that point, and it seems to be, ever since, my mind does what it wants and I've lost the ability to talk myself away from being afraid... of myself, my inabilities, my inadequacies and it holds me back.
According to the audio I'm hearing, it's common for people to have around 300 negative thoughts per day, it's what we do with those thoughts that matter. Negative self talk is the biggest road block, stopping us from being productive, both professionally and personally.
What i need to do is learn this positive thinking dealy. I won't be writing down my negative thoughts as this program asks for, since that seems a little too time consuming (is that me being negative again?), but i need to identify the negative so i can move forward and try to flip that around.
- Negative Thinking Defined
- http://depression.about.com/cs/psychotherapy/a/cognitive_2.htm
- http://www.lifepositive.com/Mind/psychology/positive-thinking/thoughts.asp
