Be gentle on yourself

October 6, 2011

In your life, you are often confronted with situations that create negative emotions. I always advise my patients to invest their mental energy in devising actions rather than strong feelings.

By strong feelings, I mean guilt, fear, stress, worry and other emotions generally associated with less than optimal health.

Talking about changing these feelings is a lot easier than restructuring your response.

So what do you do? Most of these feeling are “automatic”. I’m suggesting that some of the feelings are learned responses. They are not wrong, but they do have harmful side effects. I continuly strive to lower the intensity of my reactionary feelings and replace them with positive actions.

Probably the biggest emotion with a harmful downside is worry. As an alternative reaction, do something creative to help the possibile outcome, do something spiritually aligned with the thing you are worrying about. Just sitting an worrying creates feelings of dread, fear, and negativity. In fact, just worrying does nothing to change the outcome. Instead do a blog posting about the thing you are worrying about so others may benefit, take the situation up a level and summarize the problem in a more general sense and make a you tube video about it. Write an article.

In short, doing something brings a sense of contribution, takes your mind off yourself, and gets your body involved, all are stress reducing and that helps your health.

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