Do not use the words stressed or overwhelmed, because when you say “stressed” or “overwhelmed,” you don’t know you’re actually anxious. Those words aren’t going to help you heal your brain circuits for fear. If anything, they just keep the nervousness reverberating within your brain and your body. For decades, people have lumped anxiety, nervousness, and panic together under the blanket term stress. I’m so stressed! You’re so stressed! I’m worried! I’m nervous! There’s so much stress at work! So, then, we have stress-reduction exercises. You sit in a position, you breathe, you say, “I’m reducing my stress.” Then you go back to work, and you get panic-stricken, only to return to the pose of “I’m breathing and releasing my stress.” Only to go back into the workplace and get panic-stricken again! Then you go home, and you worry about work. Back to the relaxing space.

Are we unstressed yet? No, we’re not! Because we haven’t named the emotion, the fear or anxiety, so we can respond to it effectively, and then release it. As Dr. Phil says, “If you can’t name it, you can’t fix it.” So if you say, “I’m nervous,” you can then look around and say, “Why am I nervous?”

And then you’ll get a thought pattern. Oh, it’s because I think “I’m gonna fail.” And that’s in your frontal lobe. You then get to look around the fear network to see where the emotion and thought is coming from, and only then can you learn to change the thought so that you can release the feeling and move on.

After you’ve gotten rid of words from your vocabulary like stress and overwhelmed, look into discontinuing the use of the terms out of sorts and overcome. While you’re at it, eliminate nervous breakdown too. After a three-year psychiatry residency, I still don’t know what a nervous breakdown is.

Now that we’ve gotten rid of words that make it hard to identify the emotion fear—let’s work on thought patterns that help us all marinate in nervousness and worry. Eliminate the word should. Woulda, coulda, shoulda are self-blame words that are embedded in your frontal lobe that make you worried and tense. As if you didn’t feel disempowered enough, criticized enough, there you are saying, “Well, you know, I should have done this.” Not only are they criticizing you; you’re criticizing you too.

As Louise says, “Should is a word that makes us prisoners.” And, as a result, that thought in your frontal lobe just makes you more fearful. Louise says to change the “should” into “could.” I like that. Cognitive behavioral therapy would like that. Why? Because should tells you what you did wrong in the past. Could is something that you can look forward to changing. It’s more empowering. And so, now is your opportunity to perform a radical “worry-word-ectomy” on all the vocabulary that’s disempowering, self-criticizing, and paralyzing you from moving forward and changing.

Excerpted from Heal Your Mind: Your Prescription for Wholeness through Medicine, Affirmations, and Intuitionby Mona Lisa Schulz, M.D., Ph.D., with Louise Hay.

Dr. Mona Lisa Schulz is an internationally renowned expert in Medical Intuition and Mind-Body Medicine. She has authored and co-authored books published in 23 languages, including All Is Wellwith Louise Hay. She is also the author of The Intuitive Advisor, The New Feminine Brain, and Awakening Intuition. She holds an M.D., Board Certification in Psychiatry, and Ph.D. in Brain Science. She lives between Yarmouth, Maine, and Franklin, Tennessee, with her four cats and assorted wildlife.

Louise Hay, author of the international bestseller You Can Heal Your Life, is a metaphysical teacher and lecturer with more than 50 million books in print worldwide. For over 45 years, she has been helping people discover and implement their full potential for personal growth and self-healing.