Diana Alghoul

To put it bluntly, anxiety is a bitch. It is a crippling condition that controls literally every aspect of your life at any moment. It’s something that creeps up on you, it’s something that remains dull in the background as you try to live your life, it’s something that puts your brain in a kebab skewer and punches each part of it as your brain spins around, it’s just UGH.

Coupled with a side of tomatoes in balsamic dressing known as depression, your mental health is in for a ride.

It really does suck. This time last year, I was unable to even think properly without my anxiety and depression paralysing my thoughts. This year, I focused on my recovery and did almost everything that came to mind to get rid of this anxiety and depression that has plagued me for so long. Some things worked, others were a waste of time. But what I realised, one thing that consistently made me feel better was gratitude.

There are tons of avenues in our lives that teach us to be grateful. For Muslims and other religious people, we’re always taught to thank God to show that we aren’t demeaning him. Take God out of the equation and we’re still taught to be thankful because things could be worse, or to not seem ungrateful to what is around us. When we’re taught to be thankful in this way, we’re in a way taught to settle and are shamed for wanting to evolve. We’re blackmailed into being grateful, which is why we never see the fruits of it.

In reality, gratitude not supposed to snap us out of a self pity party in the slightest. Gratitude is food for the soul.

Gratitude teaches us to be present. When you’re thankful and counting your blessings, you’re snapped out of the regrets of the past and anxieties of the future. It’s just that moment. Look at this moment. Look around you. Nothing in this moment can hurt you. The future will always have its unpredictable nature that can put us in a whirlwind of emotions and the past will always make you look back and cringe, or drown in sorrow on what could have been, but those are out of your control.

I don’t entirely believe that the past and future are sources of negativity. I do believe you can look at them strategically to fuel you, but that’s another blog post for another day. It’s also something that you can only do when you master the power of being present.

Look at it this way: focusing on the present means you’re pooling all of your energy on what is. You’re not procrastinating by drowning in fear and regret. You thank yourself for what you do have, even if you’re not fully convinced that you’re thankful and you just live.

To be grateful also means you’re not so harsh on yourself. Think about how hard it is for you to find motivation when you have someone breathing down your neck, reminding you of your “incompetence” daily. Now think about it again in the context of your own internal dialogue telling you that you’re not good enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not rich enough, etc.

These notions have a root. Somewhere throughout your life, you convinced yourself that you aren’t worthy of your desires, which is strange because we’ve decided that we have limitations that we didn’t even know about when we were born. That only means we learned them along the way as our lives progressed.

We’ve decided that things are tough – that it’s impossible to be at our healthy weight, that money is unattainable, that our jobs will always be suckish. We look at our present reality, which may not be the best and we decide that we’re stuck this way. There’s no progression.

We can lie to ourselves and pretend that everything is okay with the intention of hiding, but that only takes us so far. Something bad happens or we remember that we don’t have our ideal job/relationship/health/etc and we’re back down. What’s problematic is that people think this is how you “affirm” to get where you want to be.

Then there’s affirming what may not already be ours, but feeling like we’re lying to ourselves because we think the mere thought of us even edging closer to a dream is farfetched.

Keep going. Keep giving thanks for what is around you even when you don’t feel very grateful and you want to punch the universe in the face.

By practicing gratitude and affirming that you are where you need to be, you’re rewriting your story. You’re breaking connections in your brain that you’ve spent years cultivating. You’ll meet resistance and you’ll feel like you’re lying to yourself because the thought of you being good enough is so foreign to your brain that you’ll want to quickly fall back into old habits.

When you feel like you want to get back into those comfortable debilitating old thought patterns, thank yourself. Thank yourself for all of the hard work you’re putting in (even if you feel like there’s no work being put at all) and just keep going. Allow yourself to feel shit, but know it’s a feeling and it will pass. Don’t block it and don’t drown in it. Let it go through you. Whilst you’re doing that, keep doing the inner work. Eventually you’ll find your emotions, your thoughts, your feelings and even your actions align and take you to a much healthier place.

Yes, anxiety and depression may come and visit you, but eventually, you’ll be able to mentalise better when these ebbs do hit because you’ve been training your mind to look at a picture that extends your limiting beliefs.

Here are some affirmations you can use:

• I am a magnet for money
• All of my relationships are healthy and happy
• I am more than enough
• Daaaayuuumnn I look goooood today!
• Kindness is oozing out of people around me
• Everything I think about manifests

I’m going to be off now – but this post is just an overview. I’ll get into detail with each topic later on. Just let me know which ones you want!

Honestly, I don’t know where to begin. Life taught me this lesson the hard way. Thinking back to how I got to where I am is so traumatic but at the same time I am so thankful because God knew the only way I could learn this is if he put me through so many trials. I was always told that I am what I think I am, but I never believed it until I hit rock bottom and had no choice other than being positive. I had nothing to lose and was already used to disappointment, so whatever if this whole thing ended up fake and I disappointed myself even more.

It wasn’t fake.

I’ve proven this to myself time and time again – we all have. It’s just, our confidence came naturally and things started working out for us. The trick is when you’re feeling down and you have to get yourself out of a spiral through affirming what you ultimately question or don’t believe about yourself.

Trust me, I know how shit it feels to tell yourself you’re successful when you feel like you’re at the bottom of the pit. I know how it feels to tell yourself you’re loved when you feel lonely. It’s a joke. But the irony in which is beautiful because the joke becomes your reality.

This is the power you have.

Your words have matter and have the ability to quite literally change your life. Your words dictate your relationship with God (or the universe or whatever source of life you believe in). It’s not a coincidence that everything you’ve faced difficulty with are the things you told yourself would be difficult, or have shown a form of lacking in. It’s no coincidence that when you tell yourself money, love, etc are hard to come around, they become and remain hard to come around.

These views are not something that come out when you face difficulty. These views are embedded in you from past traumas, events and experiences that have shaped your life experiences. They are a product of things you have been told from childhood. You know yourself, you know where your insecurities lie and you know your own story. Stop running away from all of these things — face them head on and defeat these thoughts. Fight them. Tell yourself you are worthy of love, you are worthy of abundance, you are worthy of financial stability, you are worthy of your customers/clients taking you seriously.

It can be as simple as affirming your professionalism if you are a businessperson and you want a friend to take you seriously and not expect discounts from you because of a service. Before seeing this friend, you will refer to them as a client in your head. You will keep reminding yourself that your products/services are worthy to be sold. You will keep reminding yourself that you are professional and you will act on all of these things. Yes, you may want to go into gossip mode during the meeting, but that’s your insecurities telling you to do so because you’re afraid of not being taken seriously enough if you do attempt at putting on a more strict mask.

Hence, affirmations.

I know I’m always banging on about these, but they are so important. Be kind to yourself. Fill your personal internal space up with kind words. Even if you don’t believe the kind things you’re telling yourself, even if you feel like everything is spiralling away from you; be kind to yourselves and believe. Eventually, what you want will manifest.

Take each day and each moment as it comes. Be thankful even when you’re in a rut, not because it’s the “positive” thing to do, but because you know you will come out stronger no matter what.

Last week, I was walking from the gym in Strand and I thought to continue walking until I got to King’s College (my old University). I kept walking towards Temple Station and I remembered all of the times I took this route with heavy weights on my shoulders, considering dropping out, fearing failure and feeling like an incompetent piece of shit. It never occurred to me that four years on, I would have passed my Masters, I would have been in a job that I’m happy in, yet still managing to blog and I would never in a thousand years considered myself a failure.

Moments like this will keep happening. Things will recycle and repeat themselves. You’ll find yourself walking paths you currently walk, weeks, months and years down the line and smiling at how things panned out.

But to trust that this will happen, you need to trust yourself. To trust yourself, you need to be kind to yourself.

If there’s one thing we underestimate, it is the power of repetition. Because our minds register absolutely everything, without realising, we absorb information that our conscious doesn’t know exists on a daily basis and unfortunately, whether we like it or not, have a huge role in forming our opinions.

I noticed this in myself recently when I saw myself giving into a form of pressure without realising. With everyone around me wanting me to “hurry up and get married before I expire”, and me being told by various people on an almost daily basis that I am going to end up alone if I don’t take advantage of my beauty and youth while I still have it to secure that part of my life, I almost felt myself starting to believe them and panicked for a tiny bit.

Why? I don’t believe in their crap. I never have and I never will. I believe naseeb is naseeb and I believe that we should never turn such matters that are out of our control into something we stress about.

The reason their mentality started to creep into my mind is because of how often I hear their reasonings and the conviction they use to express them with.

Essentially, repetition is key.

Thankfully, I unlocked that quite fast because the thoughts that have begun to creep into my mind are so out of my actual opinions and have a clear source. So why not use the power of repetition to my own advantage if it’s this powerful?

What we tell ourselves is so important. The inner dialogue we have with ourselves not only manifests itself because the conversation dictates the kind of energy we put out to the universe, but because it tells us what we can and can’t do. We physically limit ourselves based on the limiting beliefs we impose on our mind.

Dictate your own story

We’ve been telling ourselves the same story about ourselves for years; some which we can trace the source of, some we can’t. Some that we’ve had since childhood, some because they’re just comfortable to say because we’re too scared to set ourselves up for disappointment. Ironically, this is what holds us back.

Make conscious decisions to leave your mental comfort zone and tell yourself stuff that you don’t usually tell yourself. The power of repetition has been used against us since birth, telling us that we aren’t good enough in so many ways. This only proves how powerful repetition is, so use that power to your advantage instead.

It’s easy to tell ourselves that we’re unfit when the evidence is in front of us, but it’s painfully difficult to tell ourselves that we are fit and we are getting closer to our goals every day, especially if we don’t feel it. Why? Because we lean to what is comfortable and the discourse that we’re used to. Deep down, we don’t believe we can reach our goal, which is why it’s so hard for us to affirm. Let go, take the risk of being kind to yourself and watch yourself move forward.

Tell yourself amazing things, even if you don’t believe them. Allow yourself to feel silly telling yourself that you’re beautiful, fun, fit, radiate attractive energy etc and watch everything manifest into your life.

When you affirm your positive attitude to yourself through repetition, not only do you eventually start to believe what you affirm to yourself, you become more patient in attaining what you want. You know it’s coming, so you won’t resist it as much. You know you deserve what you want and you know you’re not standing in your own way. You know you’re good enough for it, so it’s just a matter of receiving it at the right time. You know a kind, merciful omnipresent higher power dictates such timings. It always turns out okay.

Self-sabotaging blessings

One of the reasons we self-sabotage our blessings is because we believe we don’t deserve them. We don’t think we’re good enough. We believe we don’t have what we want because we think don’t we deserve what we want – the moment we get it, we ruin it because we don’t think we deserve it.

This is how powerful our thoughts are. Not only do they dictate what we manifest in our lives, but they dictate the course of how they manifest. Prepare yourself for your blessings by not only believing they will come, but believing you deserve them.

Honestly, relax. This moment can’t hurt you. When you feel yourself regretting the past or worrying about the future, reconnect yourself with your breathing and absorb the moment. We may not always be able to control how we feel, but we can control what we tell ourselves to dictate our future later on. Even when you’re feeling like shit and you would never believe the positive stuff you’re telling yourself, while you’re connected to your breathing, affirm as you breathe in and feel the release of your tension when you breathe out.

In the morning, even if you don’t believe it, just tell yourself that you’re going to have an amazing day. Keep doing it even if you don’t actually have an amazing day.

Forgive your past self, be kind to your present self and know your future self will appreciate it.

Good luck xox