The Path from Anxiety to Peace of Mind
Are you often overcome by feelings of anxiety? Anxiety is not an automatic response. Just because something threatening is in your way, it doesn’t mean that you will get instantly anxious. It is your thoughts about events that makes you anxious. Thoughts that typically trigger anxiety are “I am being threatened or overwhelmed”, “I am unsafe”, or “something bad is going to happen”. If you are exposed to an event or person that is deemed dangerous, your thoughts trigger the fight or flight response in the body and you feel anxious. The fight or flight response is an important component of anxiety. While anxious thoughts may trigger a response, one might already have a high level of physiological arousal, which in turn fuels your anxious thoughts and further stimulates your physiological arousal, which in turn provokes anxious thoughts, and so on. For example, you may have an exam coming up and be feeling tension about this and then someone almost drives into you with their vehicle. Already tense, your anxiety spins out of control. One way to intervene in this cycle is to practice deep relaxation techniques to lower your overall sympathetic nervous system. This teaches the body how to relax rather than overreact to tension and worry.
In addition to relaxation techniques, it is helpful to work with anxiety generating beliefs. This is because the root of anxious thinking is the belief that things are done to you: “She is making me anxious”…”that place scares me”. However, it is important to understand that nothing is done to you; things just happen in the world. You experience an event (A), this leads to negative thoughts (B), and this leads to anxiety resulting from the thoughts (C). So A does not cause C, rather B causes C. It is therefore the negative thoughts or what we tell ourselves in response to any particular situation that mainly determines our feelings of anxiety. Often these thoughts are so fleeting that we hardly notice them and therefore we call them “automatic thoughts”. This anxious thinking sounds like the truth but is often very irrational.
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Anxiety is often generated by “what if” thinking. You may ask yourself “What if I can’t cope?” or “What if I am alone and there is no one to help me?”. Those with this style of thinking are often be vigilant for signs of trouble and they have a tendency to imagine the worst possible outcome, a characteristic of extreme thinking that we often call “catastrophizing”. This style of thinking often involves overestimating the amount of danger in the environment which only increases anxiety. This often leads to avoidance of anxiety provoking situations and because the person then never gets a chance to see if they could cope in the situation, the anxiety often worsens with avoidance.
Many people have been telling themselves anxious negative self-talk for a long time and it can be difficult to give up. One way of reducing the strength of these thoughts is to counter them with realistic statements by challenging them with a more rational and objective perspective. One way of doing this is to ask yourself questions that evaluate the validity of what you are telling yourself. For example, you could ask yourself “What is the evidence that this thoughts is true?”. If you look at the facts of the situation you will often find the evidence is not very convincing. It is also often helpful to ask yourself “What are the odds of this really happening?” as well as “What’s the worst thing that could happen”. If you can imagine the worst thing that could happen you can then ask yourself what is so bad about this and how you would cope if this outcome happened. Often, you will find that you can cope with an outcome and that it may not necessarily overwhelm you.
Once you have had a chance to challenge your anxious thinking, you will be ready to counter it with realistic, affirming statements. This involves keeping realistic statements in the present, for example saying “This may be scary but I can tolerate this anxiety as I know it will pass”. Beginning your realistic statements with “I am learning to…” or “I can…” is affirming and can counter anxiety. It is important to keep the realistic statements in the first person, for example, using “I” statements. Saying to yourself “I can handle this” is more powerful than saying “This situation is not as scary as I thought it would be”.
Making a list of all your fears and then developing realistic self-statements to each of these can be helpful. It is recommended that you write down your realistic statements and post them in conspicuous places. Reading through them daily will help you integrate them into your consciousness, in particular, reading through them when you feel anxiety rising. Often realistic self-statements will need to be specific to the particular form of anxiety.
There are many different forms of anxiety ranging from generalized anxiety, phobias and panic attacks to social anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder. Not surprisingly, there are also a variety of treatments for these different expressions of anxiety, self-talk being only one component. There are many benefits to challenging anxiety-producing self-talk. Learning to use realistic counter-statements not only decreases anxiety but can lead to an increased sense of control over moods and improved self-esteem. Research has shown that these techniques, as part of a broader therapy called cognitive behavioral therapy, are more efficacious in the long term compared to other treatments such as medication.
Dr. Abigail Draper
Clinical Psychologist
Please call us at (403) 452-6262 to discuss your questions about or interest in individual therapy we offer.
