Anxiety can significantly affect habits by intensifying certain behaviors, disrupting routines, and fostering avoidance patterns. When anxiety becomes chronic or overwhelming, it often leads to habits that are designed to alleviate immediate discomfort but may not be sustainable or beneficial in the long term. Anxiety impacts both the formation of positive habits and the reinforcement of negative ones, creating cycles that can be difficult to break.

Depression can have a profound impact on habits, both by disrupting positive routines and reinforcing negative behaviors. The condition affects motivation, energy levels, concentration, and emotional regulation, which in turn can make it difficult to maintain healthy habits or to break harmful ones. Depression often creates a cycle where poor habits exacerbate the symptoms, leading to further emotional and physical decline.

To live well with biological and psychological sensitivities that make you vulnerable to anxiety and depression, you have to change how you respond to your symptoms. Where you used to respond with avoidance, self-criticism, fear, you must learn to respond with courage, curiosity, and compassion. The mind is too mysterious to know it completely, but living by these values will reduce your suffering.

I want to teach you to observe and understand your emotional patterns, so that you can see it for what it is when it occurs and get out of it yourself. You learn a way of relating to yourself that doesn’t prevent emotion from occurring, but alleviates the suffering you have about the experience of painful emotion over time. Because it is an entirely different way of thinking about your mind, it will take some time for you to practice enough and work out the details enough to be out in front of the pattern on a regular basis.

What this means for the treatment of emotional disorders is that we have to work together to intentionally create circumstances that trigger your emotion with an attitude of curiosity and compassion, so that we can observe what’s happening and figure out the stuck points. We need to give you the opportunity and practice feeling something uncomfortable, deciding whether it is a threat, and then proceeding with confidence in your decision. We want you to expose yourself to emotion to learn how to love yourself, not to make it go away.

What this means for the treatment of emotional disorders is that we have to work together to intentionally create circumstances that trigger your emotion with an attitude of curiosity and compassion, so that we can observe what’s happening and figure out the stuck points. We need to give you the opportunity and practice feeling something uncomfortable, deciding whether it is a threat, and then proceeding with confidence in your decision. We want you to expose yourself to emotion to learn how to love yourself, not to make it go away.

You didn’t choose the brain you were born with, but how you respond to it is your responsibility. A bio-psychosocial model understands the limitations of each type of interventions as well as respecting and celebrating how different interventions can build upon one another. Regulated brain chemistry, psychological flexibility, and strong social support are all necessary components of emotional wellbeing.