How does anxiety and OCD impact habits?
Anxiety can significantly affect habits by intensifying certain behaviors, disrupting routines, and fostering avoidance patterns. When anxiety becomes chronic or overwhelming, it often leads to habits that are designed to alleviate immediate discomfort but may not be sustainable or beneficial in the long term. Anxiety impacts both the formation of positive habits and the reinforcement of negative ones, creating cycles that can be difficult to break.
How does depression impact habits?
Depression can have a profound impact on habits, both by disrupting positive routines and reinforcing negative behaviors. The condition affects motivation, energy levels, concentration, and emotional regulation, which in turn can make it difficult to maintain healthy habits or to break harmful ones. Depression often creates a cycle where poor habits exacerbate the symptoms, leading to further emotional and physical decline.
The science of habit formation
Habits are patterns of behavior that, through repetition, become automatic and embedded into our daily lives. They play a crucial role in shaping our actions, thoughts, and overall lifestyle. Whether positive or negative, habits influence how we spend our time, interact with others, and achieve our goals. Understanding the formation and function of habits can help us develop healthier routines and break free from detrimental patterns.
An introduction to worthiness
Fostering a sense of intrinsic worthiness involves cultivating self-acceptance and self-compassion. Research suggests that individuals who develop a strong sense of self-worth, independent of external factors, are more resilient and better equipped to navigate life's challenges.
The Relationship between Faith and Hope
Faith is about trust and belief, while hope is about optimism and expectation. They both play important roles in shaping our attitudes and outlook on life, offering comfort, guidance, and motivation in different ways.
Being Strategic about Hope
Hope, like wellness, is a feeling, a process, and an outcome. Work on the process by which you feel hope and you'll get a hopeful outcome.
Everything is meaningful when we pay attention
When we recognize that everything is meaningful if we pay attention to it, we realize that our lives are not just a series of random events, but rather a continuous unfolding of meaning and purpose.
Making values-based decisions while feeling uncertainty and having doubting thoughts
All anxiety disorders and OCD are associated with intolerance of uncertainty, meaning that those who experience anxiety disorders and OCD are more prone to doubting thinking than those without the disorders.
Sharing joy and pride
Pride is delight or elation arising from an act, possession, or relationship. The major shift I want you to make is away from mere understanding that you have to work on your mental health, with force, with pressure, with seriousness. I want you to be elated by the way you get to grow.
Experiencing growth through pride
We have to stay awake to our experiences to understand what’s happening within us and respond effectively. We are co-creating reality with our environments. In striving to respond effectively, we can use the human proclivity to add meaning to experience to create lives that are more and more values-driven. If you pay attention and learn to read your feelings well, you can add meaning that helps you build your life in a way that is more and more meaningful to you over time.
Building shame resilience
Shame gives us the urge to hide and withdraw. The way through shame is for you to remind yourself of your humanity and share your shame in settings where that sharing reconnects you to others.
Helping yourself by helping others
There is a unique reciprocity in meeting someone who you might never meet in any other context of your life and feeling a sense of connection with them. In addition to the connection, if what you know about yourself and your suffering can uniquely offer them a different perspective and contribute to their healing, it feels especially good.
Knowing yourself by knowing others
You see patterns of suffering of other people and you understand yourself a little better. You can see the pattern as a disorder. You feel compassion for the disorder, rather than shame about it. You start to get curious about the details of the disorder that start as very subtle thoughts or behaviors that can gradually take over your experience. My hope is that as you hear suffering in others, you both understand what’s happening for you and you reframe your attitude towards it with curiosity and compassion.
Experiencing common humanity
Common humanity reminds us that we are all connected. Where trauma, including the trauma of experiencing mental illness, makes us feel alone and disconnected, common humanity pulls us back into connection.
The gift of time
Time is the most precious resource that any of us have in our lives. Money may seem more important, but the wealthiest people will tell you that time is the great equalizer. Each day, we all have the same amount of time.
The terror and joy of being known
Psychotherapy can heal the parts of you that didn’t feel understood or worthy of being understood. Healing is painful because it will shed light on parts of your experience that are currently outside of your awareness. We naturally avoid dynamics that are painful and much of what is painful for us is outside of our conscious awareness. As you bring attention to these feelings, they will be painful to discuss at first. Experiencing feelings as feelings that peak and pass, rather than truths that haunt you, heals your pain and alleviates your suffering.
Rupture and repair in psychotherapy
When we talk about how you feel, we’ll be able to discriminate between the parts of the situation that are problems for us to solve and the parts of the situation that are based on a painful memory or a painful interpretation of what is possibly happening.
Relationships are long conversations
As you surrender to the process of being cared for, your sense of self-worth and safety will increase. You’ll become less afraid and more curious about your internal world. Thinking and talking about your internal experience becomes fun, rather than burdensome. Like any other trusting relationship, as you begin to trust the psychotherapy process, to feel efficacious and curious about your experience, psychotherapy can become really productive. At that point, rather than urgently needing psychotherapy to reduce your suffering, the psychotherapy relationship becomes a long conversation that you can choose to enjoy.
Changing your emotional template through psychotherapy
Psychotherapy is helpful because it strives to not only teach you more effective ways to cope with your emotions, but it can also change the way you perceive what’s happening in your world. It can change your outlook, which changes your options.
Coping skills build the therapeutic relationship
In addition to coping more effectively, and while you’re practicing acceptance, psychotherapy is meant to help you feel integrated and secure. Psychotherapy facilitates a deep sense of security as the result of being understood and known which becomes deep self-understanding and self-knowledge.