Brianna Wiest - The Mountain Is You_ Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery (2020)

THE MOUNTAIN IS YOU
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You’re missing a part of your reasoning process.
Let’s start at the beginning. Anxiety is a normal emotion
that every person experiences at some point in their lives,
typically when circumstances are stressful, tense, or scary.
When anxiety is chronic and begins to interfere with dayto-day
functioning, it becomes a clinical disorder.
We understand the importance of speaking about mental
health with the same degree of legitimacy as physical
health. However, in the same way that we’d question
what someone keeps tripping over if they repeatedly
sprain their ankle, a lot of anxiety is similarly circumstantial,
as many illnesses are. Specifically, anxiety tends
to be the result of an inability to process acutely stressful
and ongoing circumstances.
If we want to heal, we have to learn to process.
This applies to everyone, not just those with a diagnosis.
One of the hallmarks of anxiety is rapid thinking. Because
you are focusing on some issue so deeply and for so much
time, you assume that you are also thinking through the
issue thoroughly and arriving at the most likely conclusion.
However, the opposite is happening.
You’re experiencing a logical lapse. You’re jumping to the
worst-case scenario because you aren’t thinking clearly,
and then you are engaging your fight-or-flight response