Don’t Believe Everything You Think: Battling Anxiety

If you’ve ever experienced anxiety, you know that it’s not always logical. It can come on hard & fast, sometimes without warning. Anxiety is typically manifested through a trifecta of physical, emotional, and mental symptoms. The same avenues (body, emotions, mind) where anxiety shows up can also be used to battle anxiety: use your body to calm anxiety, change your emotions, or challenge your thoughts. Bad news - our thoughts, emotions, and body are all quite interwoven, one fueling the other. Good news - changing one piece can often improve the whole cycle.

One of the most effective ways to reduce anxiety is to use your mind to catch & replace unhelpful thinking. The thoughts that accompany (and fuel) anxiety are distorted, but have juuust enough truth that they sound compelling. If you’ve ever experienced heightened anxiety, you know how quickly anxious thoughts can spiral. Here’s the trick...don’t believe everything you think.

Anxious thoughts are usually driven by a few unhelpful thinking styles. We all utilize these unhelpful thinking styles or cognitive distortions from time to time. Here are the five most common distorted thoughts that I see fuel anxiety:

Black & White Thinking: All or nothing thinking, hard to access anything in between. 
If I don’t get an A, I may as well have failed.

Catastrophizing: Jumping to the worst case scenario
My mom isn’t picking up her phone...she must have gotten in a car accident.

Mental Filter: Only paying attention to some evidence and excluding other evidence.
Zooming in on that once piece of constructive criticism from your job review, but forgetting all the praise.

Jumping to Conclusions: Assuming we know what others are thinking or writing the end of the story before it happens
I know this weekend is going to go terribly!

Emotional Reasoning : Believing because you feel a certain way, it must be true.
I feel uncomfortable, I must be unsafe.

Which of these thought patterns resonate with you?

If you’re feeling anxious and need help sorting through your unhelpful thinking styles, feel free to reach out.