Get Rid of Morning Anxiety with 10 Easy Positive Affirmations

“What is love? Love is the absence of judgement. ~Dalai Lama.”

Do you wake up with morning anxiety, feelings of stress and tension even before facing your day?
Did you know that when you first rouse out of sleep, you are your most vulnerable and most susceptible to worry and anxiety and stress?
And did you know that you can heal your morning anxiety quickly and easily with the right tool?
Millions of people experience morning anxiety of some level. On the surface, it may seem harmless.

But if you continue to ignore it, the anxiety will build up tension and stress in your system over the years and can adversely affect your health and mental well-being. Plus, getting rid of this anxiety is entirely within your control so why not do the few simple things to make yourself feel better every morning to greet the day?

Those first few moments as you are slowly waking up are critical to setting the tone of your day. You can take charge and decide how you are going to feel starting with that first moment. This is so easy to do that you do not need any special preparation for it and you don’t even need to be in a particular position. In fact, you can do this even as you are still laying in bed under the covers, noodling over the dreams you just had, and slowly coming to full consciousness.

This easy and effective path to getting rid of morning anxiety is the path of daily positive affirmations. It is a tool that you can use anytime, anywhere, to redirect your negative thoughts and create space for positive thoughts in your mind.

I used to be skeptical but I can honestly say that this truly works. But it just so happens that the power of the mind and the miracle of positive thoughts has also been proven by science to improve our health, productivity, creativity, longevity, and overall state of being.

Of course, the only thing that really matters is that you – not science or I – believe that positive affirmations are going to help you. By believing alone, you have taken the first step towards healing your morning anxiety.

Positive affirmations are simple, first-person, present-tense, active statements that you repeat to yourself on a regular basis. As a result, you create the exact state of mind that you wish to be in and for most of us, that’s a positive, healthy and productive state of mind.

You can create your own affirmations from scratch, use affirmations that resonate with you or modify affirmations that you like but don’t quite feel right to you. I am sharing 10 morning affirmations here that are particularly effective in helping you address morning anxiety.
1. I am feeling healthy and strong today.
2. I am loved, loving and lovable.
3. I have the courage to make this a great day.
4. My body is healing and improving every day.
5. Everything works out for my highest good.
6. I choose to see the best side of people and circumstances.
7. I make a positive difference for someone today.
8. Everything I need comes to me at the right time.
9. My work on earth has meaning and purpose.
10. I am grateful and content with my life.

How to best use these morning affirmations:

Read over them out loud a few times, familiarize yourself with the sound of your voice as you read positive statements. Some of us are not even used to hearing ourselves talk this way.

Then choose your favorite three affirmations from the list and put them on a note card or on your phone where you can quickly access it. Put the phone or note card next to your bed. When you wake up tomorrow, grab the affirmations while still in bed and say each one out loud to yourself three times.

Repeat this for a week. If you want to extend the experience, pick five to seven affirmations and repeat each three times every morning. You can also swap the first three for a set of new three after a week.

When you do this, your mind starts to get used to hearing a positive inner dialogue. As a result, you begin to push out the negative dialogue to the background and change the flow of your thoughts.
Then you create the habit of speaking affirmative thoughts and creating positive self-talk and soon, you will memorize the affirmations and know them by heart. Here’s a free audio sample for morning affirmations to get you started.

Over time, this is your ultimate tool to push anxiety out of the way, as you do the sheets to get out of bed, and wake up to face your day with positive thoughts and productive mind.
What do you think? Are you ready to let positive affirmations bring you peace of mind?

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The First Step To Change

I would forgive you for reading a few personal development blog posts and coming away from the experience more troubled than relieved. After all, *Why don’t you own a business? *Isn’t it about time you traveled the world?

Those things will happen, of course — right after you sign up for the email list.
Phew. Thank God all I have to do to solve my problems is click a button.

In a perfect world, right? Actually, it’s not so far off

The most frustrating aspect of the you-don’t-just-click-a-button-to-solve-your-problems world is…the truth isn’t that different. Small changes in personal behavior do lead to big changes.

You hear it all the time because it’s true: the most challenging barriers to personal change are self-created. Humans have a fantastic capacity for internally-generated excuses inventing and assigning external blame. These excuses protect us from our fear of failure…by protecting us from failure…by protecting us from even trying in the first place.

It’s not even a “matter-of-fact-hey-this-can-happen” issue. Big changes cannot happen without small changes. The entire published works of Tolstoy could never exist without a rough draft first page, handwritten somewhere back in 19th-century-Russia.

Prove it to yourself

There wouldn’t happen to be any goals in your life that you’ve been meaning to do for a long time despite no recorded progress…would there? Big goals — like learning another language, or starting that business, or traveling the world or any of the other lofty aspirations we’d prefer to think impossible.

Well (if you do happen to have anything like that going on) here’s what you can do “rightnow” to make a start. Commit to one small personal change, do it everyday for one week, and write it down.

No ideas? Here are some good ones:

*Put your pants on left leg first
*Blink 3 times every time you walk into an elevator
*Take a 5-minute walk around the office every day at 3:17
Why??? At the end of one week, you will have undeniable formal proof of your personal capacity to change. Then you can think about more obviously-beneficial changes.
*Writing for 5 minutes a day gets you 15,000 words in a year; conservatively
*30 minutes a day practicing guitar & voice gets you 80 hours of practice in under 6 months, or enough practice to go from zero ability to competently singing along
*Studying a language 30 minutes a day for a month is more than enough time to learn the Russian alphabet
*That thing you’ve been meaning to start for a few years now

Of course, if you are struggling with personal change and would rather not take action, you still maintain the option of making excuses for yourself and rationalizing how impossible it would have been anyway.

Which choice do you prefer?

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10 Toxic Habits that Drain Your Energy

It’s time to break the habits that have been holding you back.  Respect yourself enough to let go of the mindsets and routines that have been sucking you dry.

Bear with me for a moment.  You know when you’re driving to an unfamiliar place, blasting the radio while simultaneously watching your GPS spit out directions?  Then you suddenly get to that one part of the route that’s ridiculously confusing, so you lower the volume even though it has no direct impact on the way you read the directions?

That is your life.  The radio noise you need to cut out to concentrate?  That is the needless, energy-sucking noise in your head.

Turning down the radio in the car re-energizes your mind and offers you clarity when you need it most.  You don’t really think about how or why this makes such a huge difference, you just know that it does.

Now it’s time to apply this same principle to all the other noise in your life, starting with the noise in your head.

But how?

The first step is to eliminate toxic, energy-sucking habits that support this noise.  With over ten years of experience as life coaches behind us, here are ten such habits Angel and I have seen thousands of people struggle with, again and again:

1. Pretending like everything is OK when it isn’t. – Do you feel overwhelmed?  Do you feel like giving up?  There’s honestly no shame in it.  You are not a robot; and even if you were, you’d still need to stop for maintenance sometimes.  There’s no shame in admitting to yourself that you feel exhausted, doubtful, and low.  This is a natural part of being human.  The simple fact that you are aware of this means you are able to turn things around.  It’s okay to fall apart for a little while.  You don’t always have to pretend to be strong, and there’s no need to constantly prove that everything is going well.  You shouldn’t be concerned with what other people are thinking either – cry if you need to – it’s healthy to shed your tears.  The sooner you do, the sooner you will be able to smile again.
2. Letting pain from the past devastate the present. – I am stronger because of the hard times, wiser because of my mistakes, and happier because I have known sadness.  The same is true for you.  Every difficult conversation you have had included someone who was teaching you something about yourself.  Every trying situation contains an opportunity for deeper self-reflection and learning.  Every irritant, heartbreak, frustration, disappointment, and fearful moment is a teacher.  Remember, nothing is as bad as it seems.  Nothing.  There’s a benefit and a blessing hidden in the folds of every experience and every outcome.  So don’t you dare give up on today because of the way things looked yesterday.  Don’t even think about it.  Every day is a new day to try again.  (Read The Road Less Traveled.)
3. Believing that your best days are either in front of you or behind you. – You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape one day, and how incredible it will be, and imagining that pristine future keeps you going, but you never do it.  You just use the future to escape the present.  This is precisely what keeps so many of us stressed and unhappy.  The flipside is true as well – obsessing about the past.  What you need to accept is that there are only two days in the year that nothing can be done.  One is yesterday and the other is tomorrow.  So today, this moment, is the right time to love, to laugh, to work and to live boldly.  Yes, this moment needs your undivided attention, for this is the only time and place you are truly alive.
4. Trying to hold on to who you were before one of life’s storms. – Hard times are like strong storms that blow against you.  And it’s not just that these storms hold you back from places you might otherwise go.  They also tear away from you all but the essential parts of your ego that cannot be torn, so that afterward you see yourself as you really are, and not merely as you might like to be.  This is a great thing.  It may seem impossible now, but one day you will look back at the storms you have weathered and give a silent thank you.  For many of us, it is the storms of our lives that have given us compassion, kindness, and gentleness that we otherwise may not have known – and that we can now give away to others, because these qualities are inside of us.  (Angel and I discuss this in detail in the “Adversity” chapter of 1,000 Little Things Happy, Successful People Do Differently.)
5. Resisting change and growth. – You must consistently check with yourself and ask: “Am I committed to feeling good, or am I committed to growing?”  Because growth does not always feel good, and feeling good does not always provide growth.  Neither is wrong, as long as there is balance.  The important thing is to remember that being uncomfortable is important too, and this discomfort often arrives right on time.  Don’t avoid it – embrace it.  Channel your energy into progress.  All growth begins at the end of your comfort zone.  When you’re feeling uncomfortable, know that the change taking place in your life is a beginning, not an ending.
6. Worrying and worrying and worrying and never taking action. – Worry is the biggest enemy of the present moment.  It does nothing but steal your joy and keep you very busy doing absolutely nothing at all.  It’s like using your imagination to create things you don’t want.  Break this negative habit!  It is far better to be exhausted from effort than to be tired of doing nothing but worrying.  Don’t waste your effort avoiding effort.  Go ahead and get it done.  Today, ask yourself what is really important and then have the courage to build your day around your answer.
7. Sacrificing all of your Self for everyone else. – Don’t sacrifice yourself too much, because if you do, there will be very little left that you can give to anyone, even those you love dearly.  Whenever you feel trapped and it’s difficult to breathe, let me remind you – don’t forget to secure your own oxygen mask first.  Taking care of yourself does not make you selfish; it makes you selfless.  In fact, it’s the truest form of selflessness one can experience.  Only through attentive self-care can you care for others.  In order to truly have a loving, supportive relationship with someone else, you need to learn how to be your own best friend first.  It’s all about falling in love with yourself first and sharing that love with others who appreciate you, rather than looking for love to compensate for a self-love deficit.
8. Taking everything personally. – There is a huge amount of freedom that comes to you when you take nothing personally.  And rarely do people do things because of you anyway.  They do things because of them.  So even when it seems personal, it probably isn’t.  Remember this.  And when you find yourself feeling angry, heartbroken, or victimized by the actions of another, see if you can you find within you any seed of softness, some place deep within that understands how much pain that person must be in, how burdened their soul must be, how devastatingly hardened they must be in their heart in order to behave in a way that is surely out of alignment with their own integrity.  (Read The Four Agreements.)
9. Letting negative thoughts get the best of you. – Don’t believe everything you hear – even in your own mind.  Choose to be miserable and you’ll find plenty of reasons to be miserable.  Choose to be happy you’ll find plenty of reasons to be happy.  It is this simple 99% of the time.   Talking about our problems is our greatest addiction.  Break this negative habit.  Talk about your joys, your loves, and your dreams instead.  Be outrageously and unreasonably positive.  Be funny and creative and ridiculous and joyful all at the same time.  It’ll make you feel better.
10. Refusing to let go a little and open up to uncertainty. – True happiness takes courage.  I’m talking the vulnerable, put yourself out there and risk looking like a fool sort of courage.  It’s not easy, to push the limits of your vulnerability, to dig deeper and deeper into the core of who you are as an individual and not only love and accept the imperfect parts of yourself, but also expose them to others.  You’ve got to be willing to break free from the norm, appear uncool and stop caring so much about what everyone thinks.  It’s about taking a stand.  In fact, we’ve ALL got to take the time to slow down, to break away from the crazy pace in life and take a minute to sit and stare at the sky without checking for the next text, watch the sunset without uploading it to Instagram, and just free ourselves to be ourselves.  We’ve got to shelve our egos and say “yes” to the present moment, to love, to opening ourselves up to being hurt beyond hurt again, and above all, to saying “yes” to taking chances.

The floor is yours…

If you can relate to any of these toxic habits, remember, you are not alone.  We all get caught up in our own heads sometimes, doing things that hold us back from our true potential.  The key is awareness – recognizing these habits and changing them.

So, what’s one toxic habit or thinking pattern that sometimes drains your energy?  How do you cope?  Leave a comment below and share your insight with us.

Article source | Photo by: Lauren Rushing

32 Things You May Regret 10 years From Now

Some of us are just existing and not living. Wouldn’t you rather set the world on fire and do something that challenged you, caused you to get up out of bed each morning actually looking forward to the day ahead, do something about that dream you’ve always had, start that business you’ve been talking about for years, or write that book?

We’ve all got something we’d love to do. It would be fantastic to say to your grandchildren, I gave it my best shot, instead of saying ‘I sat in and watched TV a lot and didn’t really do much with my life.
It’s easy to get caught in the trap of doing nothing, which actually drains your energy more than doing something; anything.

Here are 32 Things you may regret 10 years from now

1. Caring what other people might think

2. Doing what you thought would please others

3. Staying in that job you’ve hated for so long

4. Not going after a dream

5. Giving up at the last hurdle

6. Settling for second best

7. Putting others before yourself

8. Sitting on your arse watching TV

9. Not paying attention to the people who really do matter

10. Not taking risks to do something you’ve always wanted to do

11. Thinking that it’s all about the money

12. Not getting over your fears in life

13. Staying in a relationship you knew had ended a long time ago

14. Not taking care of your body

15. Not finding enough time to sit and enjoy the journey

16. Not laughing at yourself enough

17. Not opening your mind to new possibilities

18. Always thinking about the past

19. Chasing money instead of seeking happiness

20. Always thinking ‘mañana, mañana’ – you’ve got to make your own tomorrows

21. Accepting only the love you think you deserve, when you should have set your standards higher

22. Not realising that it’s your own thoughts that create your world

23. Thinking that the world owes you a favour

24. Listening to reason ALL the time, sometimes you’ve got to just follow your heart

25. Not being braver

26. Not trusting yourself enough

27. Not realising that something good comes out of every bad situation

28. Knowing that you chose this life and that it’s up to you to manage it the way YOU would like

29. Letting someone else use you as a way to realise their dreams

30. Allowing yourself to follow someone else’s beliefs instead of investigating your beliefs for yourself

31. Not being honest ALL THE TIME with yourself and with others

32. Not letting the small things go, and focus on the things that really matter

What about you, is there anything you would add to this list? leave a comment below with your thoughts

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How to Take Control of What Is Controlling You

What would you think of someone who really wanted to play mind games so that he could covertly influence people to do what he wanted them to do? To most people, it sounds at least a little sleazy and more than a little selfish.

Now what if I add that the person in question is living under an authoritarian regime? And that it's a woman who might have to depend on her skills in covert influence to sustain her life, freedom and ties to her family. How do you feel about the mind games now?

As an NLP (neurolinguistic programming) trainer, I work with lots of clients who arrive wanting to play mind games. Some of them frame it in the socially acceptable language of therapy and coaching: they want to "motivate" or "help" other people. Others frame it in the language of sales, "I want to sell more" or "I want to close more deals." And some call us on the phone and ask, "Will this help me get girls?" We are probably the only training that is sought in equal measure by people who want to pick up dates and by people serious about helping others overcome trauma, anxiety or other obstacles to well-being.

We can help all of these people, although often not in precisely the way they expected when they googled NLP for the first time. People with power and experience find that NLP calls on them to check in with their assumptions, their demons, and the voices in their head. To heighten their influence over others, they need first to become more aware of the way their own experience is shaping their ability to read people, to make choices, and to assign meaning to what happens in their lives. People who hunger for enough influence to survive or feel better often find they need to become more conscious of the relationship between what they observe in others and what they want congruently for themselves and from themselves.

What is controlling you is outside of your control, but it is not outside your influence. Whether you are limited by the rules of powerful authorities or by the criticism of voices in your head, you cannot break free. You need to wriggle free: to move in small increments until you achieve the momentum and mobility you want. In NLP, we call these increments "shifts," the small changes that indicate that significant change is on the way. When you make a shift in yourself, you alter your state or your mindset to gather new information and make different choices. When you get someone else to shift, you build an agreement that motivates and moves.
Shifts happen when you begin to notice two things:

1. what information is available that you're not using yet?
2. when have you experienced the thing you want in another form or context?

People train with us because we give them the tools to make shift happen. We don't promise that they will control anyone's mind (not even their own) but we do offer a better measure of control over the choices they make and the impact they have. Some of them learn to loosen the grip that their past has on their future. Others learn that they have more influence than they thought over what other people notice or choose to do.

All of them choose training because it gives them access to the trainers' belief that they will find what they need to have more control and the trainers' perception of where shifts are possible. The trainers point the way to shift and the students make shift happen.

When you control your ability to shift, you find that you influence others without mind games and that you look forward more often than you look back. It's not a control game: it's a game played for control of your own well-being and the impact you will have on others.

Linda Ferguson, Ph.D. is a senior partner at NLP Canada Training Inc. in Toronto, Canada. She and her team train clients to take more control over their lives and influence. Clients experience rapid, sustainable change and long-term learning about how their thinking drives success.. Read more from Linda at http://www.nlpcanada.com or http://www.nlpcanadatraining.blogspot.com

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If Winning Was Not An Inside Affair, The Genie Would Be Real Now

Well, I have read the Arabian Nights stories so many times, it could be amazing. But who has thought of this, in this vein: Sure, all legends and tall tales are based on some sort of reality, truth and honesty, but, not like we think, or it may take some abstract realization to understand how these legends and tall tales are based in reality. With that seemingly convoluted beginning, I begin this article. Sure, when things get seemingly hard to achieve, we naturally want "unbelievable" short cuts at times, such as a genie or a universally powerful and controllable butler to do it for us in an "easy" way that requires a little less effort, or at least an "open sesame" password to open opportunities like Ali Baba had as his "short cut". My point is, to genuinely get these type of advantages, we must look at reality differently, and between the lines of reality to get genuine advantages that really do work. We cannot escape into fantasy or wish for advantages to just come out of "nowhere".

Even real magic and real wishing takes real effort, yet it is simpler than finding a genie or finding the password to it all. Let me explain what I mean:

First, you must know your goal genuinely. (That is key, to know genuinely why. That in itself is more important than how or when.)

Second, you must be steadfast in wanting it. (When you really want it, whatever it takes, that is when it comes the best. Not necessarily the easiest, but the best.)

Third, adjust course and consult your intuition until you get it and even after for the best way to use it. (This is the seemingly hard part, because you must use what is inside of you to genuinely know what to do, why to do it and when to do it at all times for it all to work genuinely.)
Sure, those three steps are simple and powerful, and easy, the more you really want the goal. But, I have to warn you: Those steps are really hard when you do not really want the goal. But when you do, they are easy to enact in every way.

I do not know, call this article one of those things as close as you are going to get to getting a genie or an "open sesame" password. But, when you want it, you can get it. This message is not original to me, but it just has what is real to me in it and from it. Note: I said"call this article one of those things as close as you are going to get to getting a genie or an "open sesame" password. But, when you want it, you can get it." So many show and know this reality in different ways, some explicit and transparent, some not. But, know this, if you take this article and all articles and books like this seriously, you will discover a principle that varies in terms, but not in the way worked out by all who work it and for all who work it, it could be greatness producing. But for those who are uncertain, this is the hardest thing in existence. Be certain, and the miracle principle is your genie, is your password and will work for you ideally, with perfect brilliance. All you need is certainty within yourself.

My name is Joshua Clayton, I am a freelance writer based in Inglewood, California. I also write under a few pen-names and aliases, but Joshua Clayton is my real name, and I write by that for the most part now. I am a philosophical writer and objective thinker and honest action taker. I also work at a senior center in Gardena, California as my day job, among other things, but primarily I am a writer.

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