The driving factor in almost all cases of general anxiety is anxious thinking. There cannot be much of a chance of eradicating this root of your anxiety without addressing the invasive thoughts you are dealing with.
If you experience anxiety or
panic attacks on a frequent basis you may be dealing with negative, unwanted
thoughts that are working their way into your mind. These thoughts can range
from worries about loved ones, your health or fears of things that really make
no sense but they continue to linger in your mind.
Many times these unwelcome
thoughts stem from a previous experience and sometimes they are just odd,
leaving you worried as to why these thoughts are happening. In every case you
become upset by the anxiety they are causing you which amplifies your distress
and worry.
What is interesting is that
the intrusive thoughts themselves are not causing your distress; it is how you
respond to them. How you react to your thoughts will enable how they can have
power or influence over you. To have a better understanding of how your
unwanted thoughts materialize, we can lay out a picture of how it transpires.
Following is an example to help illustrate the point.
Let’s say you are standing
outside and there are all these thoughts just floating around you. Some of
these thoughts are yours and there are some that come from other sources. Now
when you focus on a particular thought as it floats by it seems to move closer
to you. All the other thoughts just pass on by.
When you closely examine a
particular thought you realize that it connects to other similar thoughts. When
you realize this you then jump from one thought to the next, these thoughts
could be about anything.
Suddenly you notice one
thought in front of you that is frightening. You can call this thought fear A.
Fear A could be bad health, anxiety attacks or anything. You cannot avoid
looking at this thought and as you focus on it more it moves even closer to
you. The more you look at it the more fear you have because you do not like
what you see.
You begin to notice that the first frightening thought is
somehow connected to more worrying thoughts that you also start examining
closely. The more you try to push back the thoughts the more it seems to stay
with you. You even try to focus on pleasant thoughts but you continuously keep
coming back to the frightful thought again. It’s like an endless cycle that
will not end.
The expression “thoughts
sticking like glue” come to mind. Reacting with emotion to the thoughts make
them glued to you all the more, and the more you worry over them the more they
become instilled in you over time.
The troublesome thought and
its associated connections are there when you wake up in the morning and when
you go to bed at night. It becomes stuck in your psyche because of your
emotional reaction to it.
It is how these thoughts are
judged by you that determines how much of an impact they have on your life.
Thoughts need to be fed by attention and what they really crave is a strong
emotional reaction to make them stick to you. These thoughts stay with you
first by the attention you give them and are held in place by the emotional
reactions you have with them.
To solve this problem you
must have a change of attitude. You need to change the way you react to those
intrusive thoughts as they creep into your mind. Changing your attitude will
help stop the emotional reactions you have to those frightening thoughts. When
you have the emotional reactions reduced, the invasive thoughts will start to
go away.
Previously you probably
tried to get rid of those thoughts by trying to free yourself from them. The
idea however is to not try to be free of them, rather try to have a new
attitude toward them as they pass through your thought process. You can never
have full control of what goes through your mind, but you can control the way
you will react to what is there. So that is the difference between not getting
caught up in fearful thinking and getting entangled in it.
The scary thoughts you have
are yours, not from some unknown force. You can either empower them or dismiss
them. When a thought you would rather not have sneaks up on you, your reaction
may be to tense up inside and tell yourself you don’t want that thought now.
Trying to push those thoughts out of your mind can cause the thoughts to be
more stuck in your mind.
When you keep saying to your
mind to stop thinking of the intrusive thought, what happens is that it seems
to get worse. As long as you keep fighting it your mind will keep going right
back to it. It is like your mind has a radar system that keeps picking up those
thoughts that have a high level of emotion attached to them.
What you must do to not
react to them is learn how to remove the fear factor that is attached to the
thought. Next accept and have comfort with whatever comes to mind. Avoid
pushing those anxious thoughts out of your way.
You might feel like you will
always react fearfully to intrusive thoughts because you are an anxious person
by nature. But having continual and obsessive anxious feeling is a behavioural
habit and like any habit it can be broken.