Is there anything you like to do on your ‘low days’ to lift you up?

 

We all have good and bad days. Personally, I struggle with anxiety and overwhelm. Well, I used to.

 

It got so bad that I would lie awake at night, staring up at the ceiling and stressing about everything that could go wrong both in my personal life and my business.

 

It was not fun. It felt like I was trapped in my own misery and the worst part was that I was the one putting myself there. I held the key and I could let myself out of that dark frame of mind, but I didn’t know how.

 

Then, low and behold, I came across a quote that helped me to move past my anxiety and overwhelm.

 

“If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.” ― Lao Tzu.

 

After reading this quote and thinking about it carefully, I suddenly realized what I had to do to free myself from my anxiety. Gratitude.

 

When you’re anxious and overwhelmed about something, you lose sight of what’s important.

 

So, that’s what I’m going to talk about. I’ll also be including some actionable gratitude practices to help you out and how all of this affects how you show up in your business.

 

{If you want to listen to the podcast episode on this topic, click on the player at the top of the post. Alternatively you can watch the video below, or read on…}

 

Live in the present moment 

When you’re dealing with depression and anxiety, it may feel like there’s no way out. But that’s not true. Do you want to free yourself from the burden of anxious thoughts and feelings of depression? Then you need to live in the present moment.

You shouldn’t second guess yourself or over-analyze every decision you make or have made in the past. However, what has worked for me is gratitude.

 

When you actively take time to be grateful and think about what and who you’re thankful for, you’ll start to see the good in your life.

In episode 29 of Lessons of a Lashpreneur, I opened up about my mental health. And, although it was tough, that episode and the very raw conversation I shared with you, really helped a lot of people. If you want to find out more about my struggles with mental health, you can have a listen.

So, here are a few things that I do to help me overcome anxiety by replacing it with gratitude.

 

1. The Calm app

With so much going on in my business, I was feeling really stressed, overworked and anxious. I felt like I was constantly behind. But, when I feel like this, I grab my phone and spend some one-to-one time with an app called Calm.

The Calm app is designed to help reduce stress and anxiety. But, not only that, it also helps to boost confidence and helps you to sleep better too.

So, I open the app and it tells me to take a deep breath, which I do.

Then, I open the new feature called Mood Check-in. It prompts you to pick an emoji that describes your mood, which I’m all about cause hey, who doesn’t love emojis?

Next, you choose words that describe your current emotion such as content, happy, excited, sad, scared, fearful and unsure. I choose unsure and it moved on to other things associated with feeling unsure. I selected work as the one thing in my life I’m the most unsure about.

After that, the app asks you to write out your thoughts based around your current mood and the source. In my case, I wrote about why I felt unsure about work. Then I wrote why it was making me feel so anxious. It was a bit like journaling and there was something so cathartic about it that I actually started to feel a lot better pretty quickly.

2. Eliminate the illusion of control

If you’re in the habit of trying to predict the future, you’ve got to break that habit asap. It’s impossible to 100% predict the future. And, the last time I checked, there’s no such thing as a time machine. So, you need to do yourself a favor, and stop trying to predict what’s going to happen (or not happen) next.

The same goes for living in the past.

You can’t change what happened. So don’t put yourself through hell now by continuously thinking about it.

If you struggle with anxiety, you probably have an illusion where you think you can control things. So, if you know what’s going to happen next, you can control the outcome. Of course, this isn’t true. It’s just the illusion of control because you can’t control everything and sometimes things just don’t go the way you want them to go.

There’s no way I could have predicted my husband would have PTSD. I couldn’t predict that we’d live separately for almost a year or that we would move into a new home. But I also couldn’t have predicted that my business would be as successful as it is right now.

What got me here today was the result of lots of small decisions that led me to my current reality.

It’s by no means perfect but worrying about the future didn’t get me here. Instead, it was the day to day decisions and actions that got me here. Rather than worrying about the future, I make the decision to focus on the present.

 

 3. Practice gratitude in your life

When I felt super anxious recently, I opened the Calm app again and practiced a 10-minute meditation. It took a few minutes for me to get into it. And, then I was able to silence the voice in my head that repeatedly told me, “you need to work, you need to work!”. But, once I stopped thinking those thoughts, I was able to let go of the built-up tension and be present.

I was present and able to be grateful for my business. I looked back at this past year and saw all of the growth and progress we had. It was difficult to remember that I no longer had to run my business from a place of scarcity like I once did when money was tight. Fortunately, I’m at a place in my business where that’s not necessarily the case anymore. Yet, I still find myself making decisions from that mindset.

So, when I was worried about all of the different things I had on my plate, I reminded myself that I run my own business.

I get to choose how much work I do and how much I don’t. There’s nobody telling me what to do, setting deadlines for me or looking over my shoulder and micro-managing every second of my day. And, I’m really grateful for that.

I show up for my business because I want to provide great content for you guys. And, I also want to keep helping Lashpreneurs build businesses they can be proud of.

If you’re coming to work from a place of anxiety, depression, stress, worry or fear, you need to ask yourself what are your clients getting from you when you’re in that zone?

Probably not your best self, am I right?

You tend to attract what you put out into the world. So, you have to be the unstressed version of yourself. If you want to have the effect of great clients coming in, you have to be the person that great clients want.

I have one last question for you. What is the one thing that your most grateful for about your business?

 

Please share your answer with me on Instagram Stories by screen-shotting an image of yourself listening to the podcast or reading this post. Remember to tag me @thelashpreneur so that I can see it!

Have a Good One!

Tara Walsh

The Lashpreneur