Wellness Wednesday: {Realistic Beliefs}

Welcome back to Wellness Wednesday! If you haven't read the rest of the series, you can catch up on the posts here:
Wellness Wednesday: {An Introduction}
Wellness Wednesday: {An Introduction pt. 2}
Wellness Wednesday: {The Wheel of Wellness Part 1}
Wellness Wednesday: {The Wheel of Wellness Part 2}
Wellness Wednesday: {Life Task 1: Spirituality}
Wellness Wednesday: {Life Task 2: Self Direction}
Wellness Wednesday: {Sense Of Worth}
Wellness Wednesday: {Sense of Control}

For those of you who have read some of the posts, you might recall that I'm using the idea of the Wheel of Wellness to visually represent wellness for the individual.

Source

Last week I talked about the second subtask of self direction, which was "sense of control". Today we will be moving on to the third subtask: Realistic Beliefs.

Myers & Sweeney define Realistic Beliefs the following way:

Ability to perceive truth/reality accurately (i.e., accurate information processing), lack of unrealistic expectations/wishful thinking.

If you're new to my blog, you may not know that I LOVE talking about cognitive distortions and changing irrational thinking to rational and realistic thinking. This was an area of wellness that I struggled severely with through high school and college, and it took a lot of hard work to start changing this around. There's a lot I could say here about this area of wellness, but I've done a series of posts on this topic that will give you the most information about the topic. Here are the links:

• Basics of the Cognitive Therapies
• REBT & Challenging Your Irrational Beliefs
• Identifying Cognitive Distortions 
• Identifying Cognitive Distortions {Part 2}
• Challenging & Changing Cognitive Distortions 
• What's The Deal With All the Catastrophizing? 
• Stop the Guilt Beatings! 

When we distort our beliefs about ourself and the world, our mental health tends to plummet. When we hold to irrational beliefs, are relationships tend to become strained, and our ability to connect well is diminished. I cannot possibly emphasize how important having realistic and rational beliefs is to our overall health and wellness. The problem- thoughts can be distorted ever so slightly, and we don't realize it. As it distorts further, it becomes difficult to realize, and thus makes it harder to change. The "Challenging & Changing Cognitive Distortions" link will give you many clear steps to help with realistic thinking! 

We each struggle with realistic beliefs at some point. When are your unrealistic beliefs most likely to be triggered? How do you challenge your unrealistic beliefs?