Is Valentine’s getting you down?
Well stop it. It’s just a game, and here’s how to remember how to enjoy it.
Around this time of year being lonely drives some people into total anxiety about finding the one. The thing is, finding a life partner isn’t about being all anxious and desperate. It’s about being chilled, and playing the game flat out with no attachment to the outcome.
But people who hate being lonely and hating the process don’t approach the dating game as a game. Especially around silly days of organized public affection like the 14th – when everyone else seems to be madly in love.
Lonely and anxious
Feeling lonely and anxious starts a downward spiral unless you stop it. For those who hate feeling lonely, each rejection becomes a failure that they are single and they become driven anxiously to eliminate the issue.
The important thing to realize about anxiety is that we feel anxious when we make connections between unrelated events – that’s the real driver to this spreading feeling.
We had a bad date, someone didn’t call back, our boss shouted at work, our daughter is failing school, traffic was bad, the next date cancelled, you reached out to someone on Facebook and they didn’t answer you back and the TV blew up.
Interrelated
They all start to seem interrelated. People suffering from anxiety link these random events together and feel the weight of all of these issues all at once. It’s like when you throw a stone in a pool of water and the ripples go out across the whole pool – anxious people allow the stones of life to disrupt their entire pool of equilibrium.
Stop linking things up
Wake up, and stop linking things up. The root of solving anxiety is being aware that you are needlessly, illogically linking all of these events together, and seeing them as part of a massive, interconnected task that seem impossible to overcome.
The key is not to merge and bring things together and see everything as one big problem.
Things are not connected.
The stone has nothing to do with the pool of equilibrium. Your daughter failing school or your date cancelling is not personal.
It just happened.
So here’s your challenge – a powerful route to breaking this pattern and getting peace of mind once more;
The 6 steps to release your anxiety:
- Write down everything that makes you anxious in circles on a piece of paper.
- Draw links between the circles to illustrate how you have linked these events together in your mind.
- Now imagine an alien from another planet is sitting next to you. Explain to the alien how these events are interlinked and how all these connected events make your life a disaster.
- Now answer these questions:
- Does the alien understand what on earth you are talking about?
- Does the alien agree that these events are linked?
- What is the alien saying to you?
- NOW in the drawing break the links between these events by drawing the break.
- Now explain to the alien that these events are not linked:
- Does the alien understand what on earth you are talking about?
- Does the alien agree that these events are not linked?
- What is the alien saying to you?
- Write down what you observed in this exercise.
Go ahead, do it now!
It’s a very effective exercise, and it might even just make you smile this Valentine’s Day…
And the last step, tell us what you think!
With you in service
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