Make your own positivity sanctuary to combat anxiety

It’s not easy to maintain a positive attitude to life. But it’s not impossible. And even if it were impossible, I’d like to draw your attention to world champion boxer, and motivational speaker, Mohammad Ali’s attitude to the word ‘impossible’. He famously said, ‘Impossible is not a fact…  It’s a dare.’

I love to collect these nuggets of wisdom. They come in very handy in the therapy room when I’m wanting to illustrate a point. And I gather them from all kinds of sources. The internet is full of them, of course, and if I see something inspiring, I save it to a special folder. One of my favourites that I stumbled upon on social media is Sean Patrick Flanery’s quote:

‘Do something today that your future self will thank you for.’

Using that as a mantra is really motivational. It helps me move forward positively to achieving my goals. And if I’m two minds as to what to do in a given situation, I ask myself, ‘What will my future self thank me for doing?’

Greetings cards are also a great source of positive messages. A few years ago, a wonderful client sent me a card when she’d completed her course of therapy. The message summed up the work we’d done together. It read:

‘Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday, and everything is fine.’

Wow! So powerful and so true.

Not only do I use these meaningful sayings with clients, I also use them to keep my own positively battery topped up.

Another great source of positive energy comes in the form of affirmations. An affirmation is a positive phrase that you repeat to yourself to challenge unhelpful beliefs. Now here again, there are plenty of sources of ready-made affirmations: ‘I am deserving of happiness’ or ‘I am joyfully working towards my goals’. And these can be really helpful in turning negative thought processes around.

But it’s very easy to create your own custom-made affirmations. Phrases that are relevant to you and your current situation. Here are a few ground rules for creating your own affirmation:

• It needs to be expressed positively, as in ‘I am…’ rather than ‘I’m not’. So ‘I am calm’ rather than ‘I am not stressed’.
• It needs to be expressed in the present, as in ‘I am…’ rather than ‘I will be’.
• Whatever comes after the ‘I am’ needs to be a positive word or statement. So, ‘I am choosing to spend time with positive people’ rather than, ‘I am avoiding spending time with negative people.’
• You can add extra oomph to your affirmation by using an uplifting description like, ‘I am amazingly calm’ or ‘I am actively choosing to spend time with positive people’.
• Everything about an affirmation needs to be in the present and positive.

And that’s pretty much it.

And another great way of maintaining a positive attitude is to record your wins. We’re all familiar with the fact that we can be buzzing immediately after achieving something significant, and yet a week later we’ve either forgotten about it, or it feels totally ordinary.  There’s a reason for that. The feelgood chemicals that get released when we achieve something are short-lived. They have to be, so that we don’t rest on our laurels. We’re motivated to achieve more because we want the hit of the feelgood chemicals again.

So, it’s useful to get in the habit of writing down your achievements. And they don’t have to be major milestones. It could be anything, like finding the perfect gift for a friend’s birthday, putting tender plants in the cold frame before the first frost of the winter, getting rid of worn-out clothes. It could be about overcoming discomfort or a fear, like speaking out in a meeting, negotiating a better deal with your mobile phone provider or saying ‘no’ to something you don’t fancy doing. By writing it down you can get a secondary buzz when you revisit your list.

By collecting these uplifting quotes, affirmations and achievements, you can create a ‘positivity sanctuary’ to help keep your anxiety at bay.

Here are a few ideas for putting it into practice:

• Post-It notes are a cheap and easy way to record your positive reminders. You can either plaster a whole wall with all of them, or you can scatter them around – inside cupboards, on the back of doors, in your diary, on the dashboard of your car (passenger side for safety) or in the kitchen drawers.
• If you’re artistic and computer-savvy, you might like to create posters or booklets that you can display around the house. If you’re really creative and adventurous, you could even construct a massive dream-catcher or message tree.
• If you know how to use the record function on your phone or computer, you could create an audio file of your favourite sayings or affirmations, so you can listen to them while doing other things.
• Another easy way is to write each message on a separate piece of paper and pop them into a big jar or plastic container. You can take one message out a day, or whenever you’re feeling in need of a positivity boost.
• If, like me, you spend a lot of time at your computer, you can set your screensaver to rotate around a series of images, each one showing a different positive statement.

How ever you do it, make sure that you have easy access to the messages in your positivity sanctuary and get in the habit of looking at them daily. It will help to keep anxiety at bay.