Be constantly curious about how you think and you can teach yourself be your own therapist.

A good therapist will help you understand methods that will make better use of your mental resources.

You already have all the resources to become the perfect person you want to be.  You need to constantly develop and check on those resources so  that your beliefs, automatic responses and attitude do not prevent you from accessing them.

Your beliefs and attitudes about yourself and the world around you can limit you. They can prevent you from taking full advantage of your abilities and skills.

Call it what you want, self-help, coaching or therapy, you can manage your own mental state. Start by doing a mental check of yourself by questioning the motives behind your thoughts and actions.

Thinking happens as images, sounds and feelings. A feeling is simply a warning sign indicating something that needs your immediate attention.

If the hair on the back of your neck suddenly rises when you are going down a dark alley, it is preparing you to take flight should you encounter danger.

If you feel the muscles at the back of your neck tighten, you are feeling stressed. If you imagine people are picking on you, you are feeling paranoid. All of these signs are telling you that you need to check the thoughts you are having.

We tend to turn off our awareness of those signals simply because we need to get on with our lives and do not like to deal with uncomfortable feelings.

Ignoring those feelings for long periods of time can result in anxiety, depression and other mood disorders. Here is how you can begin to help yourself.

Steps to Therapy:

1)  Identify the problem

As with any therapy you first have to acknowledge a problem before you can resolve it. If you don't recognize the problem then you will never start to work on it.

2)  Find out how what you need to do. What actions can you take.

Ask friends for help and support. Talk to your family to see if they have similar problems.

If you want to go it alone, read about your problem. Do Internet research on reliable web sites such themeaningisyou.com. 

3)  Once you have several approaches to resolving the issue, decide on your outcome. What do you want to happen?

Decide on what your goal is. If you lack confidence in public speaking, for example, imagine how you actually would like to feel. See yourself speaking confidently, and with great control over your speaking and emotions. Decide how long you want to work on the problem. You may have to revise your target date once in while, but learning to work with a deadline will act as a motivator.

4)  Constantly monitor your progress. Reward yourself for any progress you make. Say to yourself "Well that was much better than before." Be patient as you train yourself to think about and do things differently.

5)  Be flexible. If you see an approach is not working for you the way you would like it to, try another method.  

Sometimes just by following this rule you learn new and different ways to respond and feel and think in different situations.

Start Now

You will be living with your thoughts and feelings and responding to situations for the rest of your life.

Having the ability to upgrade yourself, upgrade your own programming, your own automatic responses from time to time will be a huge benefit to maintaining a healthy mind.

This is what is meant by adapting those things you can not control.  Some people call this turning a negative into a positive.

You can be your own therapist. You can learn to turn those un wanted behaviors and thoughts into something that is useful to you.