After having struggled with anxiety and depression (social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and major depressive disorder) for many years, I wanted to share one realization that has worked more than anything for helping me get rid of my mental health issues. Now, before I go into this further, I do want to point out that whenever you have a suspicion of having a mental health disorder, it is imperative that you make sure you know which mental health disorder(s) you have: this is a necessary first step. I really believe without doing this, people are just walking in the mist and have no understanding of what is going on with them. Therefore, either getting yourself diagnosed or doing a self-diagnosis first is crucial. 

Once you are reasonably sure of exactly which mental health disorder(s) you have, the next thing to realise is that each one of the mental health disorders is actually a specific psychological adaptation, meaning a set of cognitive and behavioural strategies part of our genetics (so developed throughout our evolution) that become activated in certain circumstances. This in and of itself is should be a major realisation: the personality changes that you see in yourself are what would happen to anyone for who this mental health issue becomes activated (and everyone has them in their DNA). For example, if you have generalised anxiety disorder (meaning excessive and uncontrollable worry all the time), one of the personality changes there is that you become chronically irritable: even small stuff can really trigger you or annoy you. Therefore the next necessary step is finding out what the characteristic changes in thinking and behaviour are that come with the mental health disorder and really doing this thoroughly. For example for social anxiety disorder, the most defining characteristic there is fear of negative evaluation from other people. I recommend writing down all the symptoms/characteristics changes associated with a certain mental health disorder somewhere in a notes app on your phone so you have them with you at all times. 

Finally, to make this work in practice you need to develop a 24/7 awareness of what you think, how you feel and what you do. This last step is the most challenging but also extremely key. Without this, you can't see the water around you where you are swimming in, and the water is the said personality changes/ symptoms of a certain mental health disorder. People adjust to their way of thinking, feeling and behaviour and it quickly becomes a new normal for them, they think they are their thoughts, feelings and behaviour, while they are just characteristic changes that are part of a mental health disorder. For many people worrying is just normal, and it becomes their way of living; same with their negative thinking, they think everything they believe is the truth (all the negative beliefs they hold), and do not realise their specific thoughts, actions and feelings (the water) are normal symptoms or byproducts of specific mental health disorders. 

Developing this 24/7- level awareness of what you think, feel and do, and always associating them back with a symptom/personality change with a mental health disorder may sound like a daunting thing, but I think it can go rather easily and smoothly once you make the switch. Also, I really sometimes think to myself how this 24/7 level of awareness is actually completely necessary; If you don't, you will always be vulnerable to unexpected worry of negative thinking taking off without being aware of it. So I really recommend developing an all-time awareness and coupling back to symptoms. 

A note here, this approach of all-time awareness and coupling back immediately is quite different from CBT (and all the variants), the most common and effective therapy for many mental health disorders. For me personally, but other people might work differently, is that fighting with thoughts is on some level always pouring oil on fire... . What works much more effectively is merely the awareness that you are worrying again, and that this is part of the mental health issue you have. So really important is that is about just having awareness, and contrary to what a lot of therapies suggest such as CBT variants;  you don't go into the content of the thought trying to see if it is true or not, or find ways to calm your mind down with a comforting thought. Again that might work for others, but there is a lot of power in just identifying the water that is all around you and seeing that it comes naturally with a mental health disorder and knowing that it is perfectly normal to have these personality changes. 

An important side note is that developing this awareness is a skill in and of itself. Many people with depression have developed such an ability for negative thinking they automatically start thinking negatively about everything, and people with worry worry about everything: they fear about the fear not going away, they have anxiety about their negative thinking, or negative thinking about anxiety, worry about worrying too much, or worrying that nothing will works, .. and what might be even the most tricky thing off all, they have negative thinking, worry and anxiety that is reactive: even if they become aware of a certain worry and they see that it is part of generalised anxiety disorder, they would start to worry about that too in some way (e.g. ok but how does merely identifying it solve the problem,.. ) and so there is this constant reacting with worry and negative thinking-effect that is extremely tricky to catch, but again,.. with all time awareness and taking a step back, looking at your thoughts, behaviour and action, you can also see that that' reactive worry and negative thinking' is also just a form of negative thinking or worry, and part of the characteristics of a mental health disorder. 

That being said, even though I think this capability of 24/7 awareness and coupling back can be very useful, it is by no means in and of itself sufficient for curing you of your mental health disorders, but I wrote it down here because I think for many it could be a helpful treatment component part of other treatment components. And I do recommend that if you have figured out which mental health disorder you have, you look into the other standard treatment components: e.g. for generalised anxiety, we have diet, exercising, mindfulness meditation, progressive muscle relaxation, deep breathing and so on. 

Hope it can be of help to some!