Attitude 5: Focus on what you need, not what you want

Attitude 4: Focus on the present, not the past or the future

Attitude 3: Focus on what you have, not on what you don’t have

Attitude 2: Focus on what you can do, not on what you can’t

Attitude 1: Focus on what you can control, not on what you can’t

How we feel is not because of what happens, but because of how we think about what happens. When we change the way we look at things, we change the way we feel. In fact, if you’ve done some observations on your own thinking as described in the previous section, your conscious attention is already changing the way you organize yourself mentally.

Another way to reduce overthinking and anxiety is to work directly with maladaptive thoughts, especially those behind behaviors that have consequences you don’t want in your life. A “dysfunctional thought record” is a structured way to gather all those automatic, even unconscious thoughts in one place so we can analyze them and decide if an

The model below can help you understand and identify your own cognitive distortions by looking closely at what comes before (antecedent) and after a behavior (consequence) inspired by a particular thought process. The ABC model focuses primarily on actions and behaviors, but as we’ve seen, our actions are driven by our thoughts and beliefs. The

In the following sections, we’ll look at how to identify thoughts that are not working for you, challenge them, and then restructure them or replace them with thoughts that are more helpful and accurate. Learning this process is essentially a coping skill, which teaches you not only to understand your anxiety on a deep level, but to face and work