If getting depressed or if overthinking or if feeling shame or guilt predominantly

Helpful suggestions for what to do when doing exposures and not able to be mainly working with anxiety:

If I'm mostly feeling shame or guilt, try mindful self-compassion. Write out what I would say to someone else in my shoes. What would I want someone to say to me?

If getting depressed while doing exposures, try cognitive restructuring.

If getting depressed while doing obsessional exposures, switch to behavioral exposures.

If overthinking, then go to obsessional exposures. Just say the same sentence over and over again.

Struggle makes it worse - believing it's not gonna be better until I feel good

It's not gonna be better until I feel good.

That's a belief that keeps me stuck...like I'm struggling in quicksand...the struggling makes things worse.

With both depression and anxiety, I can see how this belief has made things harder.

Feeding the desperate need for relief leads me to be more stuck.

Climbing a mountain

I'm finally committing to investing a lot of time and effort in working on my anxiety issues by doing exposure and response prevention. Someone described what I've been doing for the last year as circling a mountain that she and others have been encouraging me to climb.

I want things all figured out before I try them. I spend far more time thinking about doing things than actually doing them. Hence all the circling of this mountain that I've finally started climbing.

As with other things*, I'm finding with doing exposures, actually doing them is very instructive. I'm making far more progress and am more able to get things figured out now that I'm actually doing the exposures.  Even having experienced this and seen just what a profound difference it makes, I still find myself tending toward too much thinking about how to do them and which ones to do, etc. etc. etc.

I'm hoping that starting this blog will help to remind me of this and the other things that help so much to keep in mind...like the big picture goal with all this...I want things to be less of a struggle in my life. I want there to be more ease. So, that's how I came up with the name Ease for this blog.



*My advisor used to point out that I needed to do more with actually writing rather than all the time I was spending thinking about writing. I tend to want things to spring perfect from my head. Getting stuff out onto paper and working with it there works far better than trying to do too much of it in my head.