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Thrive with Lucy Wood

The Thrive Programme is an exciting and empowering training programme that teaches people how to tak

28/10/2025

If you’re struggling with anxiety right now, you need to know this: thoughts and emotions are not facts, they’re just information about how you’re currently thinking 🤓

Just because you think something like:
“I’m not safe.”
“I can’t handle this.”
“Something awful is about to happen.”
- doesn’t make it true.

And just because you feel anxious, doesn’t mean something is wrong.
It just means your thinking made your body react as if it was.

You see, your brain doesn’t fact-check your thoughts - it just thinks in accordance with your beliefs.

👉 The emotion is real.
But the story behind it might not be.

Save this post to remind you how to fact-check your thoughts and feelings:

Remember:
💭 thoughts are not facts
😏 emotions don’t reflect the reality
❓ask yourself, where’s the evidence? (‘what if’ thoughts and emotions are not evidence 😜)
🫶 remind yourself, “nothing bad is happening. My body is just reacting to my thoughts.”

You can stop getting tricked by anxiety by stopping seeing it as the truth and starting treating it like data.

✨ Thoughts are just suggestions.
✨ Feelings are just feedback.

You get to decide which ones deserve your belief.

27/10/2025

Every time you avoid something you find hard - a journey, a place, a feeling - you send your brain a powerful message:

“I can’t handle that.”

It feels like safety, but it’s really training your brain to fear it even more next time.

Avoidance doesn’t protect you - it actually tricks you into thinking and believing that you can’t cope.

And the more you repeat it, the stronger that belief becomes.

But you know what? Confidence is learned the exact same way - just in the opposite direction.

Every time you face something rather than avoid it, however small, you update your evidence:

“I can handle it. That was hard but I can do hard things.”

That’s how you grow your confidence - one brave step at a time.

✨ Every moment you avoid, you’re training fear.

🧡 Every moment you act, you’re training freedom.

Which are you training today - fear or freedom?

21/10/2025

🌟 Sam overcomes emetophobia and agoraphobia 🌟

14/10/2025

If you struggle with emetophobia, you will notice you often see things in extremes - things are safe or dangerous, clean or contaminated, fine or about to be sick.

This is called black-and-white thinking (or all-or-nothing thinking). It’s your brain’s attempt to create certainty in a situation that feels uncertain. The problem is that life is grey. Very few things in life work in absolutes.

When your brain is in the habit of black and white thinking, you’ll hear:
• “If I don’t wash my hands, I’ll definitely catch a bug.”
• “If I feel even slightly nauseous, it means I’m going to be sick.”
• “If someone around me has been ill, I can’t go near them - it’s too risky.”

This black-and-white filter affects how you feel and behave:
• It ramps up anxiety, because your brain believes danger is everywhere.
• It leads to rigid safety rules (washing, checking, avoiding) that momentarily reduce fear - but reinforce the idea that you aren’t safe unless you follow them.
• It stops you from learning that most of those ‘middle ground’ situations - where you didn’t wash again, or you felt a bit off but nothing happened - are actually safe.

Shifting out of black-and-white thinking starts with noticing it. Ask yourself, “am I thinking in an all-or-nothing way?”, “what are the levels of grey here?”

Learning to see the greys in life helps calm your nervous system, build trust in your body, and gradually reduce the power emetophobia has over your life 🧡

11/07/2025

Only one session in and already gaining far more insight and understanding into his emetophobia than in the past 30 years 💪

07/07/2025

Want to feel good enough? Start here 👇🏼

When you’re stuck in the habit of never feeling good enough, your brain is really good at pointing out what you haven’t done, what you should have done, or how you didn’t do something perfectly.

And that constant mental nitpicking chips away at your confidence and self-worth.

But here’s the shift:
🔎 Train your brain to notice what you have done.
Every day write a simple ‘done’ list - all the small wins.
✔️ The times you handled feeling anxious today.
✔️ The effort you put in to keeping yourself calm.
✔️ The little things you did to create some enjoyment in your day.

This isn’t just a feel-good exercise - it’s how you start proving to yourself that you are capable, you do have power over your day, you are enough.

Because you don’t build self-worth by waiting to feel perfect. You build it by acknowledging your effort and backing yourself daily.

Have you tried this? Drop a 💬 or 🧡 if you’re going to start your ‘done’ list today.

17/06/2025

This 2-word shift builds confidence fast

What if… = anxiety
Even if… = confidence

“What if it all goes wrong?”
That’s anxiety talking. Fear. Doubt. Your mind misinterpreting discomfort for danger. It keeps you stuck, scared, and second-guessing.

But here’s your power move:
“Even if it all goes wrong, I’ll cope”
“Even if I feel anxious, I’ll get through it like I always have”
“Even if it’s uncomfortable, I’m still in control”

Stop letting fear run the show. You don’t need perfect conditions - you just need to trust that you can handle it. 💥

13/06/2025

Anxious on a daily basis? You’re not broken - you’re just stuck in a cycle… 🔄

Anxiety is far more predictable and understandable than you may think.

It feels like it hits from nowhere but the truth is it’s part of a cycle of thinking.

At its roots, anxiety is driven by beliefs like, “I can’t cope” and “I can’t handle…”. It’s fuelled by daily thinking that keeps those beliefs alive. Your imagination gets involved too - picturing worst-case scenarios and convincing you you’re in danger.

You unknowingly create the very symptoms you fear through your thinking. The worry. The scanning. The ‘what-if’ thoughts - all trigger physical sensations. Then you interpret those sensations as something bad or unsafe, and the cycle intensifies.

You’re not broken or weak or stuck this way forever. It’s just your brain trying to protect you and once you see the the pattern clearly, you can learn to stop feeding it. You can challenge the belief, interrupt the loop and teach your mind and body that you are safe - you’ve always been safe - even if/when you feel anxious. You can learn to feel powerful, in control and able to cope 🧡

04/06/2024

What limiting beliefs are holding you back? making you play small? making you doubt yourself?

You can change them. And if you'd like some help and guidance, give me a shout.

03/06/2024

“I can’t...”
“I can’t cope...”
“I can’t handle...”

Did you know that if you say these things you’re actually making it harder to feel able to handle challenging situations?

You see, it’s not the situation itself - it’s the uncomfortable feelings you create about it. Everyone creates anxiety, fear, sadness - they are normal human emotions. But what you tell yourself about these feelings and how well (or not) you respond to them, depends on your “discomfort-tolerance” - a concept developed by psychologist Albert Ellis, which essentially means how you think, feel and respond ‘to’ these emotions.

If you don’t feel able to handle your emotions, you’re likely to want to stick to your comfort zone and may find yourself saying things like “I can’t bear...” or “I can’t handle...”. Which, if you think about it, aren’t actually true. You’ve handled every single situation you have had to handle so far - even the ones you thought you couldn’t!

It’s ok not to like discomfort - you may have a preference 𝒏𝒐𝒕 to have to tolerate it - but you 𝒄𝒂𝒏 handle it. The more you tell yourself you can handle it and the better you get at tolerating uncomfortable feelings, the less anxiety, fear, worry you will create.

How do you build coping skills (discomfort tolerance)?

Get out there and build it. Make a list of situations you typically avoid and start with the easiest. You will feel uncomfortable - but that’s the point, right? - it isn’t about the party or standing in the longest queue - it’s about learning to tolerate and manage the uncomfortable thoughts and feelings that you create.

The more you feel able to tolerate uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, the less they’ll bother you 🧡

22/05/2024

I’ve had three messages like this this week - three different clients with three very different situations they are navigating, but my response to them all was largely the same.

Bookmark this post for when you might need to read it 📌

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+447976534331

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https://www.thriveprogramme.org/lucy-wood/

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Learn to Thrive with Lucy

The Thrive Programme is mental health training that teaches people the skills and resources to fully overcome mental health issues and learn to thrive. Based on over 30 years’ clinical experience treating thousands of people around the world, and is thoroughly research-backed and evidence-based. Quite simply, it teaches you how to completely re-wire how you think, feel and behave.

Thriving people have a skillset that makes them more robust, resilient and confident...they feel powerful and more in control of their lives...they are less prone to stress, anxiety and depression. Thriving people find it easier to resist social pressures, take more responsibility for their physical and mental health and live a more positive and active life.

The programme is simple, accessible and affordable for all ages aged 8 upwards. It takes around 6-8 weeks to complete and contains everything you need to overcome your mental health symptom and learn to thrive.