Times like these are why they invented the word bittersweet. Your child is getting married. You’re thrilled and excited for them. You’re proud of them. Still, of course, there’s a twinge of sadness and a sense of them moving on.
How To Deal With Anxiety Over Current Events
Learn To Control Anxiety By Understanding What It Is
Tips For Calming Your Anxious Mind
Letting Go Of The Old Year And Your Anxiety
While most folks are talking about resolutions, you may find yourself stuck. How can you focus on the new year when parts of the old year seem to still have their claws in you? Anxiety has a way of blocking the path forward. It wants to keep you mired in the past — ruminating and obsessing. There’s no shame in this scenario. But there’s plenty of joy to be found in letting it go.
Breaking news: You do not have to replay and relive the past. In addition, you can reduce worrying and live in the reality you desire this new year.
Understanding Your Inner Voice
Anxiety is a convincing liar. It will highjack your inner voice and turn it into your inner critic. That critic will tell you lies like:
You can’t get over past mistakes (or perceived mistakes)
The future is dangerous and risky
You’re not ready to grow and mature
What happened last year matters more than you realize
More breaking news: You can talk back to that inner critic. This life-altering process begins once you identify it as an offshoot of anxiety. It doesn’t mean you harm. On the contrary, your anxious inner critic believes it is protecting you. But it’s not a true voice.
Your truest voice can be heard when you practice self-care and offer yourself appropriate positive affirmations. This is not about practicing denial. The counter to anxiety is balance. Talk to yourself with a nuanced perspective and trust yourself more. Stop fixating on past events because you can reframe them this new year — and beyond!
4 Ways to Reframe the Old Year
1. Past Events Can Inspire You to Take More Calculated Risks
Negative episodes are inevitable but they have the power to build resiliency. You endure them. In some cases, you suffer through them. But you also recover from them. You come out on the other side wiser and stronger. Errors and screw-ups can often be very useful motivational tools.
2. Last Year Taught You to Think Like a Sculptor
When a sculptor works with a hunk of clay, they do a fair amount of molding. They also hack away anything that doesn’t save a great purpose. As you assess the old year, you have the opportunity to see your mistakes and down periods as a lesson. They show you what you want to hack away or at least, mold into a new shape. What a gift!
3. More Compassion and More Self-Compassion
Every time one of us fails or disappoints, it is a reminder of our humanness. It is crucial to carry this humanness with us. Our mistakes don’t have to define us. Every person we know has the same ups and downs. There is no logical reason to let anxiety or an inner critic try to convince you that you are uniquely flawed.
In addition, what we don’t like about the old year can guide us to a place of empathy. We understand that everyone is vulnerable to similar mistakes and mental health issues. This understanding can help ease our burden by feeling more compassion for ourselves and others.
4. Practice Mindfulness
The past is where regret may live. Anxiousness dwells in the future. Fortunately, all of us can only exist here and now — in the present. Mindfulness practice reminds us to embrace the moment and make the most of it. Working with a therapist (see below) is an ideal way to learn mindfulness skills.
If the anxiety of the old year feels overwhelming, you are not alone. I invite you to reach out. Let’s connect. Let’s get you on a path away from anxiety and toward abundance. Or click Anxiety Treatment if you want to read more.
Finding Peace When Your Mind Is At War
What Is Toxic Positivity And How Does It Affect Anxiety?
The Highly Sensitive Person and it's Connection to Anxiety
How an Insecure Attachment Can Create Anxiety
3 Tips To Take Control Over Your Anxiety
4 tips to cope with anxiety after a break-up
Why Anxiety Strikes at Night
Anxiety and Depression: can you have both at the same time?
It seems to be an oxymoron to say that people can be both anxious and depressed, yet it happens regularly. There is a circular action to it, both in the physical response and the emotional response ~ the physical response goes something like this: you get anxious and wound up, your heart beats faster, maybe your breathing speeds up and drains your body of energy.
How to handle COVID-19
The truth is that every few years a new virus comes along and scares us all because we don’t know what it is, or how it will affect us. This year it’s COVID-19, in 2009 it was the swine flu, in 2016 we feared the Zika virus. Those diseases have come and gone, and we have survived and even thrived since then. Taking the long view about this will help you through this one.
Three tips to set the stage for a good night’s sleep
There you are in bed and your anxious mind is recalling the things you didn’t get done during the day—unwanted thoughts coming at you like pop-up signs “why didn’t you______, you should have________” fill in the blanks: resisted that cookie, exercised, called that person, not watched so much TV… the list goes on and on, and sleep eludes you once again. Many people have trouble falling asleep at night, and some have trouble going back to sleep once they’ve woken up. We’ve heard over and over that we need 7-8 hours of sleep in order to function. If we get less than that on a regular basis we make more mistakes and can be cranky and unpleasant. No matter how much work you have, you need to schedule enough sleep so that