It is a fact that anxiety, depression or medical conditions with a physiological basis are like diabetes and high blood pressure. There is also no denying that just like diabetes and high blood pressure, anxiety and depression can be helped with the person making some conscious choices and changes in their thought process and actions.

What follows are five steps individuals with anxiety or depression can do to help manage their diagnoses.

  1. Don’t get caught in the comparison game. Stop comparing yourself to others. The truth is that we don’t know anybody’s whole story. We only know what we see, and looks can be deceiving.  Even if their life is what it appears to be, comparisons prohibit us from moving forward with our goals. The reason for this is we are expending energy focusing on others instead of on ourselves, reaching our goals, and bettering our life.
  1. Focus on being grateful for all you have. Pay attention to everything, even things you consider to be the “small” things. By focusing on what you have, your energy and mind will stay positively opposed to being angry and resentful. In turn, this will make it easier for you to keep moving forward toward your goals!
  1. Focus on all you have accomplished so far. Doing so will enable you to stay on track toward your goals. It will help your mindset, and it will have you saying if I accomplished X, Y, and Z there is absolutely no reason I WILL NOT achieve my present goals.
  1. Focus on your talents and gifts that you bring to the world. We all have a purpose for being here. Concentrate on that, not on your faults and mistakes you feel you have made in the past. Focusing on your perceived mistakes will stop any progress on your goals because you will not feel worthy of reaching them. Remember, there are no mistakes in life, only lessons. Every experience we have is meant to teach us something!
  1. When you are faced with a situation that makes you anxious or depressed, focus on even the smallest step you can take and have control over to start turning that situation around. Focusing on what you can do about a situation (even a baby step!) will be empowering, and raise your mood.

When we have a medical diagnosis, there will always be things about it that are out of our control.  It is important to focus on what we can do to help ourselves and make our situations better.  This will be empowering and automatically lift our mood. It also will allow us to continue to function better throughout the day and keep moving closer to our goals.