Your Inner Critic may not be the cause of your depression, but it sure isn’t helping you get out of it. The Inner Critic can exacerbate many of the most common symptoms of depression.

Anxiety usually shows up when we are disconnected from ourselves in some way. Consciously, you may know that there is nothing to feel anxious about, so when anxiety shows up, you dismiss it, you push it away, you suppress it.

As humans, we are survival beings, which means that we are designed to continue existing despite hardships or difficult conditions. The brain that is wired to survive can’t also be wired to self-destruct.

Depression isn’t just sadness or loss of interest in life. For many people struggling with depression there is another often quieter burden they are also carrying. That burden is the guilt for having depression in the first place.

Anxiety is a spiritual messenger. It isn’t our enemy and isn’t just a problem to “fix.” It’s a sign that our soul is in desperate need of our own attention.

Coping skills, like deep breathing and grounding exercises, are absolutely essential when you are in the heat of a crisis. But they are still band-aids. They are used to get us through the challenging situation, not to heal us from it.

Be honest-when you read the word selfish, do you get a knot in your stomach? A lump in your throat? A feeling of nausea? If so, chances are that you, dear reader, likely have some people pleasing tendencies.

This past weekend when I was doing yard work I thought to myself “this process feels familiar, what does it remind me of?” And then it dawned on me-doing yard work is a lot like doing mindset work…

Believing that we have to do something to deserve what we want holds us back. If my underlying belief is that “I am not worthy” and that I don’t deserve the thing I want, I am not going to allow myself to have it because the thing I want doesn’t match with my belief about myself.

The problem with using positive affirmations is that they ignore one gigantic thing…the subconscious mind.