Validate Your Feelings, Analyze Your Thoughts: A Therapist's Advice

Saw my therapist yesterday and thought I’d share this because I found it really helpful. Validate your feelings, but analyze your thoughts. She explained to me that means whatever you are feeling as a reaction to an event is natural and human, and therefore should be validated. However, your thoughts may not entirely line up to those feelings and you could be having catastrophic thinking without ever realizing it. This would put you into a more fight or flight response to a situation that is entirely theoretical. So the idea is to step back and take a look at all the possibilities of the situation rather than accepting the one anxiety-provoking response as fact. I deal really badly with anxiety and negative thinking, so I just found it helpful. I hope you all will, too.