Want to Change How You Feel? Change What You Do

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Anxiety and depression each create their own self-talk. Your anxious brain says, Be careful, stay in your comfort zone, look ahead, anticipate the worst; your depression says, You’re trapped, it isn’t going to change, why bother. What they have in common is causing you to be emotionally driven: You do what you do based on how you feel. As a result, you believe you need to feel better before you can do better: When you’re less anxious, you can be more social or confront your sagging relationship; when you’re less depressed, you can get off the couch and apply for a better job. The key, you think, is to change how you feel by unraveling your past that has caused all this, finding the right medication, or simply waiting until you somehow feel better.

While this sometimes makes sense—you may need therapy to give you support and skills or get the proper medication to help you get out of bed or off the couch—often you’re dealing with a chicken-and-egg loop, where what causes what is unclear. By listening to your anxiety—pulling back and not going out—you’re feeding your fear and staying in your comfort zone, making your personal world increasingly smaller and the larger world more dangerous. By not dealing with your relationship, you avoid the anxiety of the confrontation but stay weighed down by the problem contributing to your anxiety. By sitting on the couch and not looking for that better job, your depressing life remains depressing.

Rather than believing that you need to change how you feel to do what you want, perhaps you need to change what you do to change how you feel. This is about creating new experiences and changing your emotions and life through action. Here’s how the new experiences, even in the smallest of ways, can help you feel better.

New experiences give you a new perspective and create new emotions.

If you’ve ever traveled to someplace new, you know that you often return home with a different view of the wider world and sometimes even of yourself. You see your life through a different lens and appreciate what you have, or are more realistic about what you don’t. This arouses new emotions that can help you break out of your default ways of being and feeling.

New experiences can reshape your self-image.

You go on a challenging hike; you attend a party where you don’t know anyone. By stepping outside your comfort zone and surviving, discovering that you are more capable than you imagined; your self-confidence increases. This, in turn, creates positive momentum where you are less afraid of risk. Rather than feeling trapped in a small world, your world expands.

New experiences create opportunities.

You get divorced or start a new job and now have the opportunity to date or learn something new. These opportunities—new people, new tasks—change how you think and feel; they often allow you to heal your past by allowing you to do now what you couldn’t do then.

But you need to take the risks.

Obviously, this is about doing, action: Nothing will change if you don’t go on that hike or go to the party. But it’s clearly also about risk-taking: If you stay put and only do what is comfortable—eating the same meal at McDonald’s in Paris that you would order in the U.S.—the new experiences will never materialize.

So the key is taking those baby steps. Try getting out of bed or off the couch, despite how you feel, because often you feel better once you get moving. Keep your expectations low; your goal is to simply do different, and different is better. Get support if it helps you to get started: Bring a wingman to the party or a companion on the hike.

If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep feeling the same way. Are you ready to change your life by changing what you do?

To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.