How to change your thinking

Learning yesterday about using anchors to change my emotional state, I realized that I have several techniques available to change my thinking about myself, all derived from working on my ED.

• Thinking like an investigative reporter: trying out something, like legalizing foods, paying attention to how it makes me feel, then deciding if I will incorporate it into my life
• Yelling at the negative thoughts inside my head
• The ABCDEF technique for replacing irrational beliefs with rational ones
• Leaning into the curve during intense emotional moments: giving in to the emotions, and exaggerating them, helps me get through them
• Using anchors to control my emotional state

The anchors process is new for me. The process is defining a physical means of changing your emotions, rather Pavlovian in nature. It goes like this:

1. Choose a physical method you want to connect to this strong emotion. Something like touching your wrist, or snapping your fingers, or tapping on your hand, that sort of thing.
2. Close your eyes and think of a time in which you were really confident, energized, etc.
3. Increase the intensity of the emotion, and do the physical thing (e.g. touch your wrist).
4. Open your eyes for just a moment, bringing yourself back to reality
5. Repeat the process several times.

Continue practicing this over several weeks until you find that just doing the physical thing will put you into the state. It’s classic Neuro-Linguistic Practice, and certainly seems to work for me.

My positives:

1. I worked unbelievably hard this week, and am now playing just as hard. It’s exciting.
2. I’ve been able to open up about my ED to strangers this week, both face2face and otherwise.
3. I’m glad about my progress with the anchors for the eating process, and now want to apply it to my work thinking as well.
4. I ate just exactly the way I wanted last night, and brought home the leftovers for some other day
5. I’m choosing new kinds of clothes that make me feel pretty and feminine