 Welcome to The Anxious Morning. Every weekday morning we'll take a few minutes to go over some important lessons that you can use in your anxiety recovery journey. Away from the endless noisy scroll of social media, The Anxious Morning brings you support, education, inspiration, encouragement, and empowerment. For more, visit us at theanxiousmorning.com Our community is quite full of people that identify very strongly with their thoughts. They have formed the habit of latching onto their thoughts almost automatically. They see thoughts as sacred, powerful, and worthy of attention, honor, and respect at all times. This must be important. It comes from inside me. If you feel that statement in your bones, then you are likely used to following some basic rules surrounding thinking and interpreting your thoughts. Do any of these statements about thinking sound familiar to you? I must trust my gut. My thoughts are my intuition telling me something. I must find out what that is. My thoughts are who I am. They signal my virtues and represent the core of my being. My thoughts are the voice of my soul. To heal, I must examine my thoughts to find out what my soul is saying. These are just a few short examples. If any of them resonate with you, then there is a chance that you are on the habit of identifying with your thoughts and treating them as very important automatically and by default. This is likely having a real impact on your mental state by helping to fuel your anxiety or at least keeping you stuck and struggling in recovery. Now let me be clear on this to avoid any confusion. Nobody is ever telling you that you're not allowed to have thoughts or that nothing you think ever matters. This is not an Ein Rand book. I am only saying that automatically treating all or most of your thoughts as sacred and worthy of attention and examination can be problematic. Why? To put it bluntly, our minds are capable of producing extreme genius and astounding beauty, but they are also capable of producing mundane nonsense or even complete garbage. The ability of a human mind to produce crap becomes especially pronounced when understressed. A stressed out anxious mind will throw all kinds of stuff at the wall just to see what sticks. Much of it winds up being unhelpful to say the least. If you're reading this, the odds are high that you've experienced rapid, persistent thoughts that tell you that you are in continuous danger of dying, losing control, going insane, or performing unspeakable acts against your will. These thoughts never come true, no matter how loud and powerful they may seem, yet they persist. Here we have real world examples of the ability of a human mind to produce content of questionable value. Now before you freak out, take a breath. You are still a beautiful being, but sometimes your mind just doesn't bring its A game. That's okay. When you stop and look at this situation, can you start to see why operating from the assertion that you must follow every thought could cause a problem? Maybe you can start to see how viewing your thoughts as sacred and important has already contributed to anxiety and recovery problems in your life. If you're in the habit of following your catastrophic what if thoughts every single time they pop up, you know what I'm saying. The goal today is to point out the habit of living as if every thought is special and why this is not terribly helpful, especially in the context of anxiety and recovery. This is a topic we will return to and touch on pretty regularly here. For now, see if you can take a few minutes today to consider how you relate to your thoughts and what you believe about them. Are you relating to your thoughts in a way that is helping you or hurting you? Do you really want to be your thoughts? Tomorrow we'll take a look at the benefits of doing one thing at a time. Hey, if you're enjoying the podcast and you'd like to get a copy of it delivered every morning into your email inbox, including a full text transcription, head on over to the anxious morning dot email and sign up for the newsletter. And if you're listening on iTunes or Spotify or someplace where you can leave us a rating or a review, take a moment and rate the podcast and maybe write a small review. It really helps us out or just tell a friend about us. Thanks a lot.