Dr. Maya Shankar

You can just take five minutes and you write down every identity that

that means something to you and that you value in your life, or that means something to other people because, you know, we also can be in service of others and that's a huge source of joy and satisfaction for us.

And if you are in the throes of a change right now, you want to focus on those values and identities that are not threatened by the change.

That's the power of the self-affirmation exercise.

So yes,

I don't currently have a job.

Yes, I don't currently have my significant other because we just broke up.

But wow, here are all these other things that can make me feel stable and secure during this point of transition.

I'm going to share one around rumination because I think what can often happen is that we blame ourselves or we start mentally spiraling around all of the negative exchanges that we've had, all the negative interactions.

Our boss might've been terrible and we just fixate over and over and loop through the same thoughts over and over and over again.

I feel like I have a PhD in rumination, girl.

Okay, I am a professional ruminator.

And so one of my favorite techniques to help stave off some of the rumination, actually, can I share two as part of it?

Of course, yeah, yeah.

Okay, I'll just share two.

There's a couple, there's a couple.

The first is called mental time travel.

Our brains have this remarkable ability to move forward in time and backward in time.

And we can use this to our advantage when we find ourselves in these mental spirals.

So you can travel backward in time to remind yourself of instances where you showed greater resilience in the face of adversity than you previously thought.