You eat healthy, exercise regularly, and spend time in nature, but something’s off. Even though self-care routines are on point there are low-grade chronic anxious thoughts running in the background and you can’t exactly put your finger on the source of them. Have you taken the time to become aware of and sit with your thoughts?
You Are Not Your Anxious Thoughts
We’ve all heard it, it sounds poetic, but what does it mean?
Since the average person has between 12,000 and 60,000 thoughts each day, 95% of which are exactly the same as the day before, having awareness of anxious thoughts is an important part of forming our reality. After all, our thoughts create our feelings which inform our actions. Without awareness of our thoughts, we may subconsciously stay in familiar patterns that cause us suffering.
Our anxious thoughts are derived from our conditioning – the people who raised us, whether parents or caretakers, teachers, friends, or social circles. The good news is that since thoughts were once learned we have the ability to unlearn them.
Thought Awareness Precedes Change
Our anxious thoughts don’t actually cause our suffering, but our attachment to thoughts and the stories we make them mean about ourselves does.
Take, for instance, a client of mine. She came to me for body image coaching claiming that she spent all her mental energy on calculating food and exercise and was exhausted as a result. We analyzed the actions she would often take because of feeling exhausted and came to realize that emotional eating was a combination of her body’s way of seeking energy (calories) and her brain’s way of soothing the guilt she felt. Her brain was protecting her against the thought, ‘I’m not a healthy person’. Once she got curious about her behavior, rather than feeling guilty about it, she was empowered to make changes that better served her.
Another client came with the complaint that she couldn’t stop seeing her flaws when she looked in the mirror and was constantly comparing her body to others. She felt ashamed of her appearance. Her way of coping with shame was to restrict her food (which usually backfired) and over-exercise (which lead to injuries). Her brain was protecting her against the thought, ‘I’m unlovable’. When she took the time to unpack her thoughts about what a body should look like, she realized that her mother had modeled a negative relationship with her body which occupied her entire life. With that insight, my client then made the choice to practice accepting herself as to not perpetuate the cycle of body shame.
If we want to end suffering, we have to change our anxious thoughts first.
Commonly Accepted Thoughts
Our society has adopted many commonly accepted thoughts about humanity. Many of them tie back to white supremacy and patriarchy:
- Men have power, women have looks
- Men achieve, women stay small
- Thin=health, fat=disease
- Thin is beautiful, fat is ugly
How are these thoughts serving us as a society? Do they inspire actions of love or actions of hostility?
If we are willing to self-reflect for clearer understanding and knowledge, we have the power to see the roots of anxious thoughts as separate from ourselves. Simply by acknowledging them we lessen their power. With practice, we can release our attachments and believe thoughts that support more conducive behavior. That’s a reality I want to live in.
