I’ve always been a big believer in positive thinking and in the idea that if you set your mind on something, you can achieve it. With anxiety, though, that belief and drive have been knocked out of me quite a bit, and the things I used to rely on to motivate myself just don’t seem to work in the same way anymore.

For most of my life, I’ve used affirmations as a way to help create what I want and to programme my mind toward the future I’m trying to build. If you can believe it, you can achieve it, as they say. But anxiety and panic disorder forced me to completely rethink how I was approaching this.

I tried using affirmations to convince myself that I was well and healthy, repeating things like “I am healthy” and “I am energetic” in the hope that if I said them enough, my body would eventually catch up.

When Your Nervous System Knows You’re Lying

What I noticed though, was a quiet voice underneath those statements that would immediately respond with, “But you aren’t healthy. You don’t have energy. You feel awful and nothing is working.”

The problem was that this voice wasn’t wrong. It was describing my reality. I was exhausted, I didn’t feel well, and I had very little energy. So every time I repeated those affirmations, my mind would essentially tell me to stop lying.

I fought this for a long time because all I wanted was to feel better. I kept trying to talk myself into being well, but every attempt to do that just led my mind to list all the reasons I wasn’t. That only made me feel more hopeless and more stuck, as if I was failing at something I was supposed to be good at.

Eventually, I realised the issue wasn’t positive thinking itself but the way I was using it. The affirmations were asking my nervous system to believe something that didn’t match what I was actually experiencing, and my body simply wouldn’t accept it.

Changing the Language

So I changed the language.

Instead of telling myself I was already healthy, I started saying that I was in the process of becoming healthy. Instead of saying I had energy, I reminded myself that I was in the process of creating more energy in my body and that I was in the process of healing and recovery. Those statements were something I could genuinely get behind and believe in.

My mind couldn’t argue with them because they were true. I was doing things to support my recovery, and I was creating more calm in my body, even if it didn’t always feel that way in the moment.

Now, when my mind tells me that I feel awful or that I have no energy, I don’t try to shut it down or argue with it. I acknowledge that it’s true and then gently remind myself that I am healing and that I am better than I was yesterday. It’s a slow process, but it’s working, and it has stopped a lot of the internal fighting that was draining me even further.

How Fighting Anxiety Keeps You Stuck

Another thing I’ve noticed is how many “why” questions come up throughout the day. Why do I feel so unwell. Why do I have no energy. Why am I so tired all the time.

My mind desperately wants an answer it can fix, and when it can’t find one, it becomes frustrated. That frustration creates tension in my body, and that tension feeds the anxiety even more.

The truth is that constantly asking those questions was keeping me stuck in a loop. The search for an explanation was creating more stress rather than relief.

What I’ve come to understand is that anxiety doesn’t respond to force or fantasy. Positive affirmations didn’t fail because they were wrong but because they asked my nervous system to accept something it knew wasn’t true. When the body is exhausted, anxious, and overwhelmed, it will always reject words that don’t match reality.

I used to think that the inner voice saying “stop lying” was negative thinking, but now I see it as honesty. Fighting that honesty only creates more tension.

From Forcing Positivity to Trusting the Healing Process

What has helped is meeting myself exactly where I am and learning to accept the sensations and feelings I’m experiencing rather than trying to override them. I’ve stopped pretending I feel great, stopped forcing positivity, and stopped asking my mind to jump ten steps ahead of where I actually am.

In many ways, I’ve had to give in to myself and stop fighting, because it was the fight itself that was creating the tension. When I feel particularly bad now, I’ll say to myself that this feels uncomfortable but that it will pass, and then I’ll try to get on with something else while letting the feeling sit in the background without trying to fix it.

That approach doesn’t create resistance. It starts to create trust. It tells my mind that I’m not worried about the sensation, which allows it to stop constantly scanning and trying to solve the problem.

The same applies to the endless “why” questions. Anxiety isn’t a maths problem with a neat solution, and chasing answers only keeps me stuck in my head and disconnected from my body.

So instead of asking why, I’ve started asking different questions. What does my body need right now? What is it trying to tell me? What is one small thing I can do that supports recovery?

This whole experience has been pretty wild because I’ve discovered that my body actually communicates with me when I slow down enough to listen. I’ll place my hand on the area where I feel tension or anxiety and breathe into it, giving it space instead of trying to push it away.

Sometimes nothing happens and the sensation simply fades because it’s been acknowledged. Other times, memories from my past surface, bringing emotions that I wasn’t able to process at the time. It feels like rewatching moments from my life and giving them a new meaning, as if emotions that were stored in my body are finally being released.

That shift from fixing to allowing has been a struggle for me and still a work in progress but I think I'm getting there slowly.

Recovery hasn’t come from telling myself that I’m already fine It’s come from accepting that I’m not and trusting the process anyway.

And slowly, almost quietly, that’s where things have started to change.