This video explains my personal experience with anxiety and depression and the mindset shifts I had to make in order to heal. I talk a lot about how beliefs are at the core of anxiety and low-self-worth.

If you’d rather read than listen, the transcript to the video is below the video on this page.

Find more tools for healing in this post here.

The habit of thought is what creates our mindset. To change your patterns of thought is as challenging as starting a new habit or breaking an addiction.  

To change our mindset, our life, or whatever we desire, whether it be to overcome anxiety, to feel a sense of worth or to accept love or the abundant possibilities available to us, we must begin with our beliefs! Our mindset directly affects us and our personal worlds, no doubt about it! 

Everything begins with what we are allowing ourselves to believe. What beliefs we are integrating into our life through thoughts, speech and actions. Whether we believe we are unworthy, that something is impossible, or that something is not available to us, all these beliefs will cause certain emotions, that cause certain thoughts, certain words to come out of our mouths, causing us to take certain actions that can all be lead back to the intangible belief we took upon ourselves. 

Beliefs can be downright lies, they can be caused by traumatic or less than ideal experiences that leave us with subconscious beliefs we put in place in order to keep ourselves safe and protected but at the same time, putting up walls that block us from experiencing the highs of life and all that is available to us, true love, super abundance, a healthy self worth, or joy and freedom from depression…..to name a few. 

The thing is, without deep inner examination we may never know the core beliefs causing us to miss out on our best life, but there are plenty of clues and triggers if you give yourself patience and time to piece the puzzle together. 

For a long time I thought my sadness wasn’t caused by any particular thing and that I was just mental or crazy. Funny thing, the answers were always in plain view, I just didn’t know the perspective to look at them that would enable healing. That’s where mindset comes in! Literally changing your brain to perceive reality without the pre-existing beliefs that blind you, a good example would be denial….which I was prone to do in the past. I never realized the truth of my past experiences that “Traumatized” me because I never stopped to allow myself to process those things in a healthy way, and not just process them by feeling the feelings, but by recognizing the “Wrongness” of the situation, what beliefs it was causing me to believe and my specific role in the situation. As well as, may I add, the most important ingredient, grace. Empathy for who I was back then when the incident happened, who did not have the perspective or judgement that I do currently. 

Grace & Acceptance are so foundational to healing.  which is the opposite of what I started out with. I started out by beating myself up for not being who I wanted to be and resisting any painful feelings.

I thought I would share about my journey with anxiety & depression, because I am a very sensitive person, so alongside feeling the highest highs of happiness and excitement for life, I also feel the extreme opposite, which used to be at times a full-on-depression.

Although I still experience all emotions, get depressed sometimes, get triggered and have panic attacks, or feel anxiety for long periods of time, I've come to a place where I am finally feeling empowered & feeling better for longer spurts & I would like to share the process that brought me here!

It's been a very long process and it shall continue throughout all of my life. At first when I decided I wanted to change I thought I would be better in one month, then I thought maybe two, then maybe a year? Two years? Three? Finally I realized it is a lifelong journey and there is much to be enjoyed along the way. 

Realizing that I didn’t have to be “better” automatically made me feel better because it gave me some relief by taking the pressure off and helped me disassemble the belief that I needed to be perfect to be loved. 

My husband helped greatly in this process as he has in most all of my healing, his actions have taught me so much about true love, forgiveness, and grace. Because he always kept loving me when I wasn’t perfect or I messed up. He taught me what true acceptance looks like and I started finding grace for myself too! 

The of the first things that I learned alongside giving myself grace, was that you can never truly be rid of anxiety completely, it is a natural biological survival mechanism, that every single human on the planet experiences in some form. 

The things that trigger us may always trigger us, it’s not about getting rid of them, it’s just about handling and responding to them in an empowering way that doesn't cause your life to fall apart!

Anxiety should NOT run your life. Unfortunately, when someone says “I have anxiety” that probably means that they feel bad more than they feel good or that their good feelings are tainted by negative thoughts or emotions.

I'd say that for a while I wasn't even aware that I was anxious, I thought it was completely normal to feel the way I did, because it was normal for me, but certainly not ideal.

Ignorance has always had positive aspects, but awareness or acceptance will set you on a path to be able to deal with things that are bothering or stressing you in a more solutions-oriented manner. Accepting yourself from a blind place will not empower you & at the same time you're leaving a lot of your life on the table

So at first I was learning that I was unhappy with who I was, which is okay, it made things more painful at first but it was a necessary step.There is a lot of freedom in accepting yourself exactly how you are, even from a place of ignorance, but once I started noticing that I had anxiety and noticing that I didn't actually want it, I started not to accept myself, indeed causing even more low-self worth and depression.

The next step was learning to accept myself from that place of awareness. Accepting yourself becomes more challenging when you think something is wrong with you and that you need to fix something. 

It wasn't actually until I accepted my new awareness of myself, that I was able to move on and truly start healing. I had to accept that even though I wasn’t who I wanted to be, nothing was wrong with me and that even though I wanted to act and live differently, nothing needed to be fixed.

I had to accept what I didn’t want, to the extent that if it stayed indefinitely, I would still be ok and want to live life.

It is that place of resistance, that I stayed in for so long, that makes change so hard, almost impossible. In fact what change you do manage will only be temporary because you are still holding on to the beliefs that created the issues in the first place. Resistance only creates more uncertainty and puzzles because you are not opening your mind up to see from all perspectives. And a different perspective is key, changing that mindset is key! 

You would think that it's a little counter-intuitive to accept the parts of you that you don't like, the parts of you that you're trying to change. But until you realize that you can't “try” to change and that you don't “have” to change, does change actually begin. Indeed, I was trying too hard, trying too many tactics from a place of “I must FIX this.”

In fact I tried every tactic out there, I used to keep tactic journals with tabs that I could turn to to remind me of what I “should” do in certain situations, I used to blame my diet, I would blame my exercise, only to be discouraged when I would change those external things, but nothing inside of my head would change because all the negative beliefs were still intact. 

I was playing the victim, believing the negative thoughts were coming from outside of me, being spoken “into” my head, as if it were spiritual warfare that I could fight off but never get rid of! Then a pivotal truth came into my awareness, My husband is the one who told me and at first I didn’t believe it, he told me that I create my thoughts!

I was stunned! I tried for a time to make him understand that I had no control over my thoughts that they would just come to me as they do and I had no choice but to think them. Little did I realize I was creating the negative stuff myself by allowing myself to believe the thoughts were true or letting them take me further into new negative thoughts that correspond with the last. 

It was the biggest game changer when I realized that I could control where my thoughts lead me. It wasn’t necessarily that I have control of my thoughts, maybe I couldn’t control the thought from arising in the first place, but I had the choice to decide if I wanted to believe it as true or recognize it’s phony reality & deliberately decide on the next thought that followed. 

Realizing that every thought we think may not be true & that we can let our thoughts pass like clouds around us, experiencing our feelings and then choose where we let our emotions take us. That we are the ones with control over every single thought and we are the ones who decide if we let it bring us down or turn it around and choose a different thought, “choosing” to elevate our emotions by digging into good feelings more often and for longer periods of time! 

This helped me integrate a pivotal tool, to watch what I say out loud, because the words we speak have a direct effect on our lives because they are created by thoughts we think and those thoughts are created by the beliefs we hold.

Because for example, at one point I believed that I was only worthy of love, life, or to be accepted if I was productive and proving myself, if I was “valuable” in a tangible sense. So I kept thinking, “Oh I better get this done and I better prove I’m capable in this area” then I would think, “I better hurry because there’s only so much time in a day” and I would try to control everything, wanting to control what people thought of me, or control time itself! 

But I didn't really find breakthroughs until I gave up the control and found a place of surrender and trust. Because a lot of my anxiety was tied up in my self-esteem & the need to control others perception of myself, as well as the fear of the future and the need to control circumstances, as well as believing in conditional love that I had to earn and continue earning.  

Healing became learning how to find my true worth outside of circumstances and conditions! 

Making space to heal is vitally important, for me personally, it begin with rest & self-care because I was moving so fast as a way to drown what I needed and distract myself with constant doing (aka productivity) so that I didn’t have to face or look at my worth because I was fearful of finding I was worthless outside of tangible proof, because that was the belief I was holding.

Fear is always at the foundation of negative beliefs we take on. Everyone will experience personal differences in the core beginnings and foundations of their anxiety or depression. Mine was always a lack-based-fear; lack of love, Lack of control, lack of time, and lack of worth were the biggest ones for me. 

 Let me explain.

And for your own purposes realize that much of the clarity around these anxieties came from finding the core belief causing them, which I found primarily from finding their source. Where they began in time based on memories, how they started and what caused them to start, and what I was trying to protect and keep my heart safe from?

 First I’ll explain my experience with love and self esteem, which are so closely connected. 

Although not 100% of the time, but when triggered I felt a lack of love to some extent, either dramatically unloved, or a fear of losing love.

In fact I had created a wall to love as a protection mechanism, although I did not know I had subconsciously done this, but I could feel the effects. I could not accept the love that was given to me, I couldn't let it seep into me. If I experienced love or security in the moment, that was lovely, but when the external proof of love was gone I would become fearful as if I hadn’t accepted it as true in the first place. 

It all came down to my mind, that mindset based on beliefs, basically sometimes I did not feel loved if I was not being shown love all the time, it was simply my ability to perceive it and hold onto the love even when it wasn’t tangibly present through the actions of others. It all came down to if I could believe I was loved despite having external proof though my situations and circumstances. It came down to believing the love I was shown and believing I was lovable.

Part of the love I could or couldn’t accept was tied to my ability to love myself, because if you don't love yourself, when someone else shows you love, it actually causes you to feel even more unlovable because you are arguing with the love coming your way silently inside of yourself. Saying “I don't deserve it” or “They don’t really mean it” 

Whereas the healing comes in all areas of anxiety when you believe the truth about yourself or your situation despite the external things that show up, because,

“You look for the proof of the beliefs you hold” ~Kathy Heller

I also heard someone say that if you can be detached from the positive opinions of others, then it will be easier to be detached from their negative opinions too. Then little did I realize, this actually causes us to be detached from our own opinions of ourselves, such as those negative ones and that inner critic. 

Furthermore, if you love yourself, then you know you are loved and lovable, even though it may or may not be shown to you by those around and outside of you. So then, if and when you aren’t shown love in a way you can understand, it doesn't have the deep effect of pain on you as it would have in the past when you held the beliefs that weren’t serving you. 

Funny, the walls we put up, keep us from this pain too, and we don’t have to do all the inner work after all, BUT remember the inner work is NOT just to relive the pain of situations but to open us to to the abundance of love and life available to us when we do not sho it away, block it, or say that it isn’t real!!! To experience true enlightened life is why we embark on this very challenging journey!   

Now about the need to control and perception of time, which are so connected. Anxiety arose when I felt a lack of time or a lack of control. I was an excessive planner and didn’t want to accept when it wasn’t going my way.

But acceptance and surrender are the choices that lead to freedom. 

Of course!...we would feel insecure when trying to control what is out of our hands. But releasing resistance and embodying trust will allow us to start to believe in the perfection of the future already laid out for us, to believe that it leads to a place of beauty in the end. 

Releasing is so important when it comes to dealing with anxiety, whether it is releasing control, the need to be perfect, or get everything done. Releasing resistance makes space for acceptance! Which leads to a perspective that gives you the feelings of self worth or security in uncontrollable situations, despite external “proofs” your old systems of belief would have focused upon.

Indeed it is a mind game, where does your focus reside based on the habits of thought you’ve practiced for years? And what mindset shifts will you integrate for healing? 

It's really about getting past yourself, past your circumstances, and past other’s opinion, into a new reality that you feel anything that you desire. This truth of knowing that I can feel any which way I choose, has been what has given me the momentum and growth in the long run. Which all began with wanting a feeling of peace and knowing that peace is always available if I can simply tune into The Presence of Peace. 

Although I had to learn that we cannot just jump from depression to peace instantly, but rather we must work our way up, it is a process requiring grace and patience. Beginning at depression, we must move towards a feeling of worry, maybe anger, maybe indifference, then boredom, sliding up what others have called the emotional scale, all the way up to hope, to optimism, to gratitude, to love, to joy or whichever order works best to rise up from a low place. 

 Because if you cannot feel peaceful or empowered before your anxiety is gone, you will never really find yourself in a peaceful place. We imagine we'll feel better once it's gone, but it’s true we can choose to feel peaceful or at least choose an emotion on the way to peace, beforehand. And actually until you feel these feelings beforehand will you even begin to move up the emotional scale towards your desires. You have to feel what it would be like before it happens. 

These days, I continue to learn and gain a deeper, more clear understanding of myself and focus on only identifying with what I desire for myself in the future-now and NOT with any negative patterns of belief from the past. This slow gradual change through constant focus and awareness of our thoughts is what will rewire our brains and overwrite the old programs. So that one day we choose the path we want to take without even thinking about it and refuse the slippery slope with ease. Becoming familiar with the unfamiliar new reality and letting the old familiar feelings fall away, knowing that what is unfamiliar will trigger feelings of fear but also knowing we are empowered to push through and continue the hard work of becoming the best version of ourselves, even beyond our imaginations!

Find more tools for healing in this post here.

Sources & Teachers:

Life Experience and Spiritual Guidance from The Spirit
My husband Sam

My Mom
My Accunect Therapist, Seranna
The teachings of the Bible
The teachings of Marisa Peer
The teachings of Abraham Hicks
The teachings of Dr. Joe Dispenza
The book Super Attractor by Gabby Bernstein
The teachings of Teal Swan
The teachings of Leo/actualized . com on YouTube
A few notes from Kathy Heller on her podcast