Jewel was in her early 20s when she was cast in her first movie, Ride with the Devil. Her anxiety went into overdrive, she says, as she struggled with the pervasive thought, “I don’t know what I’m doing!” Her normal practices helped, but not enough, and the selfhelp prescription of affirmations just didn’t ring true. “I don’t really like affirmations because they’re not always accurate,” she says. So she created what she calls Antidote Thoughts, a practice she still uses today.
She’d start with the opposite thought, in this case, “I do know what I’m doing,” and, using her body as a barometer, try it on for size. She could feel that this thought wasn’t true. “So I experimented with other antidote thoughts,” she says, “and when I said, ‘I’m…
