[THREAD] I want to share a few exercises that anyone can do at home to help them out a little with their anxiety and depression as a temporary measure. I will do my best to keep them as simple as possible. The first one and perhaps the most important is writing goals.
In the first phase of this exercise, you can write all your bigs goals regarding recovery from your mental health, career, relationships, etc...Then for each goal, write them as many sub goals as possible. Here is the important part. If your mental health isn’t doing well,
you will need to start with one of the sub goals. It could be as simple as taking a shower, eating. We will stick with one sub goal a day. We want to prime our minds to achieve small goals for a few days then slowly increasing them. We want to set ourselves up for success.
One of the biggest issues I notice is that we dream big, try to achieve everything at once, then give up when it turns out too hard or we don’t have enough energy for all these goals. Another very important exercise is about cognitive restructuring.
Whenever we are depressed or anxious, our “mental lens” is focused and registering negative events that fit with our current mental health. We write down everything positive that is happening, from watching a good movie, going to a walk, etc...in order for them to register!
A final exercise and this is my favourite is also part of the cognitive restructuring. We will have 6 columns. In the first column we write down the thought or situation, the second one the emotion we feel from those thoughts, the third one is evidence for, the fourth evidence
against. The fifth we will write conclusions based on evidence for and evidence against. The last one will be writing a new thought that can replace the previous one and would be more realistic than the original thought we had. Let’s go with an example.
Let’s say one thought is “I am unlovable”. In the second column, we write that it makes us feel sad and hopeless. Third column: Evidence for can be “I am currently not in a relationship” . Fourth column: evidence against can be “my friends and family love me and appreciate me”.
The conclusion in the fifth column can be: “even though I am not in a relationship right now, there are still people who love me and appreciate me”. Finally, in the last column, the new more realistic thought can be “I am loveable because many people love me”.
This exercise is so important because depression and anxiety tends to send us in a spiral that makes us believe things that are not true. So when we look at the evidence for and against and look at it from a realistic perspective, we realize those thoughts don’t hold.
It is an exercise that we can do for all our thoughts that give us anxiety and depression or intrusive thoughts that happen when our mental health is not doing well. I hope that these exercises help you all a little. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask 😊💚
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