One thought about dealing with social anxiety is to go into the social situation that makes you anxious and act the way you truly want to act. Difficult? Yes if your anxiety level is rather high. Try to increase your willingness to have that high anxiety and still be the person you really want to be. See an attractive person you would like to start a conversation with-let yourself be very anxious and start talking to that person. Don’t know what to say and or having brain freeze because you are so anxious, start asking them questions about...
Learn MoreHelp for anxiety and depression: Changing our thoughts should probably read: Changing our relationship to our thoughts. I have plenty of experience using CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy), a form of CBT, to see how they are very similar and yet different in their approaches to thoughts. Using CBT we try to find a more logical thought to counter a distorted or unhelpful thought. If you have the thought you are a loser we may ask you to look at the evidence that that thought is true and the evidence against it and ask what conclusion you can make (e.g. I have strength and weaknesses). So every time you have the thought you could remind yourself of that conclusion or again use the evidence technique to help you change your relationship to that thought. Using ACT with the same thought we might ask you a question like how often in your life have you had that thought…has it been helpful to pay attention to that thought? Likely you would be able to then distant yourself from that thought so that you are no longer buying into it. I do think that paying attention to many of our thoughts in these manners may help reduce...
Learn MoreI am offering some ideas about dealing with depression. If you are depressed it is very important that you seriously consider getting treatment. If you are planning on suicide than calling your emergency number, likely 911 in the USA, and or go to the nearest emergency room if you are a risk to hurting yourself or others. In addition to what is stated above here are some ideas to consider: 1. Often in depressions there is a tendency to withdraw and do as little as possible. I suspect this is something hardwired into our brain and just like many things related to our psychology are hire wired does not mean it is helpful at all for us. It seems that this tendency to do as little as possible may keep us depressed longer. So to counter this we need to ACT on what we would be doing if we were not depressed by using Acceptance from Acceptance and Commitment therapy (ACT) which is a form of Cognitive Behavioral therapy (CBT). Here we allow in the urges to do nothing and still take actions to keep ourselves actively engaged in life. This could be in the form of calling friends that normally you would want to call and or calling...
Learn MoreDealing with Anxiety takes some different coping styles to help you through. One of these is the act of learning how to reduce or stop your struggle with anxiety. We do not like to feel uncomfortable and I would say that humankind is allergic to it. Its like a fire and if we see an unplanned fire we want to out it out right away. So we reach for water but what if this type of fire requires something else to put it out? Instead of reaching for water we would reach for something else. In Acceptance and Commitment therapy (ACT) we say what you reach for are the tools for acceptance. These tools are not tools to make your fire go away (anxiety) but rather to stop struggling with it and allow the uncomfortable feeling and physical sensations that come along with it to stay where they are. If you do that you stop the inner conflict. This could allow you to make room for this as well as to move past...
Learn MoreCoping with rejection can be a challenge especially if you love the person who rejected you. If could hurt a lot. If it does you need to allow in this pain. The non acceptance of this pain can keep you more focused on causing you to suffer even more. You may also need to learn to cope with the negative thoughts you have about yourself in a more helpful thought. What happens to you if your mind tells you that you are a loser and or that you will never find anyone to love. You could ask yourself if buying into those thoughts help you get back on track again. If you are struggling too much or really down in dumps seeing therapist may really be of...
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