A bulk of my counseling work with clients is on the topic of fear and anxiety. So many people live anxious, nervous and consumed with fear or worry. It's hard to enjoy life and feel confident when fear is eating you alive. One thing we discuss often in therapy is how we are perceiving threats. If I'm looking at a situation and thinking "This situation is dreadful. It's going to overwhelm me and I'm not going to be OK.", my anxiety is going to be quite high. On the contrary if I think to myself, "This experience will be uncomfortable but I know I can get through it as I've gotten through many uncomfortable things in my life.", then my anxiety will be lower. How we think affects how we feel. If I step in and regulate my thoughts by speaking more rational truths, my feelings will adjust. This takes time and practice but research bares this out to be true. What threats are you perceiving to be insurmountable? What situations are merely uncomfortable but are being viewed as dreadful? How might you be contributing to your anxiety by the ways you are thinking? And how might you be able to take some concrete steps to regulate those thoughts so you're speaking rational, reasonable truth to yourself? Can you look in your past and find difficult experiences that you were able to survive and perhaps thrive through? Allow those to be evidence to the fact that you can get through tough situations! If all this sounds confusing or you're wondering more about putting this into practice, counseling can be a great help.