The Mountain Is You by Brianna Wiest

134 BRIANNA WIEST
to—we start to associate worry with safety. See? I thought
this through so many times that I’ve avoided it.
But that’s not what’s happening at all.
Just telling someone to stop worrying and be present
strengthens their impulse to be fearful, because you are
effectively asking them to place their guards down. Making
yourself feel more vulnerable when you’re already at
your edge is not the answer.
Instead, you have to find a different way to feel safe.
Rather than spending your time rehearsing how much
you’d panic if such-and-such a situation were to come to
fruition, imagine how a third party would handle it if they
were in your shoes. Imagine getting to the other side of
the issue, perhaps even treating it as an opportunity to
create something you otherwise couldn’t.
Rather than spending your time shrinking yourself and
your life out of fear of potentially confronting some kind
of hardship, work on developing your self-esteem and
know that even if you were to fail, you wouldn’t be judged,
exiled, or hated in the way you fear.
Rather than spending your life trying to identify the next
thing to worry about and then “overcome,” learn to move
into a new pattern of thinking in which you recognize
that you don’t need to balance out the bad with the good