What are you telling yourself?

A friend told me that off and on throughout her life she would find herself thinking, “I don’t want to turn 65 one day and die without living life to the fullest.” That sounds like a great life challenge, but here’s what happened. On her 65th birthday, she was driving down a busy road she had traveled for decades, went through a red traffic light that had also been there for decades, hit another car, and almost died. This lady was a therapist and believes her mind was just following a “dying at 65 script” she had repeated in her mind over and over again.

Be careful about the negative anxiety scripts you tell yourself, like:

I’ll never get better.

Today is going to be a bad one. I’m a basket case.

I’m a failure.

Your mind will follow your script, so replace the negative with the positive, like:

I will recover from this anxiety. Today I am alive, and it’s a good day.

There is no shame in having anxiety.

I am facing my anxiety today, so I am a winner.

We are not the sum of our thoughts. We are what we believe about our thoughts.