Walking The Walk

Welcome to the third and final installment in the What Are You Saying To Yourself? series. In the first part of this series, I talked about that negative internal dialogue that so many of us seem to have, and how to get a handle on how we talk to ourselves. In the second part of my series I talked about some common sources of this negative thinking.  And as promised, in this one, I'm going to tell you why it is so important to silence as much of this internal strife as we can. Learning some of these lessons, and practicing some of these techniques I've talked about has not been easy. But the benefits have made all that effort worth it. And I'll tell you why. Because I can sit now quietly and think.  I can think clearly. I can think without all that clutter that used to make it impossible to reflect--instead I was always reacting. And by reacting, I caused more problems, which lead to more stress, and more mental clutter, and more anxiety.  I finally broke that cycle. I...

"Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” ~Matthew 11: 28-30 As I said in PART I of this series, how we think is how we feel.  A lot of what creates stress and anxiety for us is internal, not external. The things we say to ourselves. And when that internal dialogue is predominantly negative, we become predominantly negative in our view of the world. If we want to reduce our stress and our anxiety, we have to work first on that internal voice. And as I said before, I used to be an expert at finding clouds rather than silver linings. And there were three things that always seemed to drag me down that road of negative thinking that was at the root of my anxiety. Things We Can Control Vs. Things We Can Not Control As I mentioned previously, I used to spend a great deal of time worrying over t...

"Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." ~Philippians 4: 6-7 How we think is how we feel. It took me a long time to figure that out. We all have that constant internal mental dialogue that runs incessantly in the background. It's so normal and we're so used to it, we don't think about it very much. But we should be thinking about it much more because that dialogue is coming from us, and for many of us it is a constant stream of negative thoughts. You wake up in the morning: Ugh! Another day! You hear a funny noise coming from your car: That's going to be $1,000 bucks to fix . . . It rains during the night: my sump pump will probably quit. I'm too old and too set in my ways to change now . . . I'm not talented enough  to do this . . . I'm not sma...