200 Don’t Let A nxiety Run Your Life
Seeing the Big Picture with Your
New Sk ills
As you work at incorporating tenets of this book into your
life, there are a few important points to remember. First, it ’s
impossible to fail at using any of the skills or, more broadly, at
addressing your anxiety. If you adopt a truly nonjudgmental
stance toward your present- moment experiences, then your
efforts, regardless of their outcome, are all that matter. In
essence, each time you mindfully practice a skill (or set of
skills), such as working toward confronting your anxiety or
accepting your emotions, you contribute to your overall
ability to live life more fully and f lourish. Another way to
think about this is like investing in a savings account. No
matter how small the amount of money you deposit into
your account, it still contributes to the overall growing
balance and your financial stability. If you happen to go a
week, a month, or even a year without making a deposit, you
can rely on the previous investments you have made to your
account with the understanding that you still have plenty of
opportunities to further contribute. As long as you integrate
mindfulness and emotion regulation skills into your life,
they will become more f luid and automatic ways of f lexibly
responding to your emotions, your internal experiences, and
your external world.
Second, most everything in life is about how you perceive it.
We have talked about this throughout the book, but the
main idea is to develop, through emotion regulation and
mindfulness practices, new frameworks for interpreting
your everyday life. A simple, yet intuitive, example of this is
how you view rain. W hen you learn that there’s rain in the