One More Technique to Deal with Anxiety and Depression.
.I call this the Volkswagen Technique. Did you ever notice that when you buy a certain type of car soon after that you start to notice a lot more of those cars on the road? The idea here is that you find what you look for. When you feel anxious or depressed usually that is followed with a lot of negative self talk that you constantly repeat in your head. Folks say things like: “Here we go again.” “Why does this always happen to me”, “Nothing works for me, I’ve tried everything” “This will never stop” or they picture bad things happening as a result of feeling anxious or depressed.
Getting past your anxiety and depression is, in part, about changing the conversation in your head. To feel better you have to think about what you could say to yourself to feel better.
Here are some things that you can say: :Let me stay calm” (in therapy you can learn ways to do that), “Let me try some of the other strategies I’ve learned and see which one will work and let’s see if I can bring down these bad feelings from a minus 10 to a minus 5. I will be discussing additional techniques in future blogs; also, in therapy there are many many things people can learn do to reduce or limit bad feelings.
The key here is to say the right things to ourselves. The computer folks have a saying “Garbage in “Garbage out”.
In Summary:
The ways to deal with these feelings are:
1. Be aware of what you are saying to yourself and make sure you are feeding your brain positive statements
2. Either keeps a journal of what happens when you use these techniques or stop and listen to the voice in your head and listen to what it is saying to you. When you either record what you do or become aware of the conversation in your head rate on a scale of 1 – 10 how strong that negative voice is.
Try the techniques and notice what happens to the strength of the message.