Short messages on Positive change from Respect Yourself, the guidance site for young people to help make good decisions in life.
If you don’t want to change how often you see someone who makes you feel stressed, recognise drama triggers. When the conversation moves toward their favourite horrible situation, steer it somewhere else.
Take an inventory of which people in your life leave you feeling stressed and unhappy more often than not. If you don’t want to completely remove a toxic relationship, minimise the time you spend together.
Do some research to understand your actual risk versus perceived risk. Recognise that the worse-case scenario is highly unlikely. Begin to re-structure your thoughts to not engage in catastrophic thinking, and start to challenge back to those thoughts.
Many fears are based in false beliefs or catastrophic thinking. When you see a snake, you may immediately have a belief that says it will harm you, and that you will die. Identify these patterns of thinking, and start to question them.
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts” – Winston Churchill
“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it” – Edith Wharton
“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted” – Aesop
“Inner peace begins the moment you choose not to allow another person or event to control your emotions” – Pema Chodron
It’s common for a fear of the unknown to accompany change. Feeling fear about change does not mean that change is bad — what seems frightening at first may well turn out to be for the best.
To handle changes in your life, you need to accept what is beyond your control and focus on your own internal transition to the new reality.