Anxiety: Facts and Imagination

When it comes to anxiety, there is often the clash between facts and your imagination.

Your anxiety will have you conjure up all sorts of possibilities about things that could go wrong and how bad that would make you feel if it were to happen. Very often clients will tell me that they know what they are thinking is irrational or unlikely to happen in the catastrophic way they are thinking. Yet that doesn’t stop the unpleasant cycle of anxious thoughts and feelings from going around and around inside your head and body.

You feel anxious and that drives your mind to seek the threat. After all, to your mind if you are feeling that anxious then there must be something to be worried about. Your imagination will flow into all sorts of scenarios about what might happen in the future. There may be one specific thing that you are thinking the worst about. Or you may find that your anxiety can flow from one thing to the next with a sense of restlessness and dread.

As humans we are generally pretty rubbish at predicting the future and what will happen. I mean, just look back at science shows from thirty years ago who were predicting robots in every home and flying cars. We tend to lose sight of all the times we have worried that something bad was going to happen, only for things to turn out ok. We are only ever just taking a guess at how things will turn out.

Take the dentist for example. Who hasn’t stressed a bit before some upcoming treatment, only to leave thinking how it wasn’t as bad as expected. Or maybe you have a speech coming up and worry about freezing, or you worry about standing at an upcoming social occasion with no one wanting to talk with you. And despite these things generally going ok when they actually take place, the next time they come around, the same worry, anxiety and dread kicks back in. It’s like our brains don’t update and we forget that we are often mistaken in our predictions.

You feel anxious and imagine the worst. You scare yourself inside your own imagination. Your brain frantically responds to all of these perceived threats that go around inside your own head. Anxious thoughts lead to anxious feelings that leads to more anxious thoughts. The cycle continues to fuel itself again and again.

Yet it is very possible to break the pattern of anxiety, to start thinking more clearly and logically and so to feel calmer and more in control.

 

Fact or Made Up?

We know that if you are thinking about the future then you are using your imagination. However much your anxiety may try to kid you otherwise, it is your imagination, or guesswork if you like, that fills your mind with dreaded scenarios. I’ve written before about how, if you are going to think the worst, you can change it from a ‘what if’ thought to an ‘if then’ thought.

Rather than thinking about what could happen and how catastrophic that would be for you, change it to thinking that if that happens (because it very well may not turn out like your anxiety has been thinking) then you are going to do things to stop, mitigate or alleviate it. Whether you ever need them or not, add the solutions in to your future thinking. This closes the thought and stops your mind just searching through perceived threat after perceived threat with no way out. Close off those open ended anxious thoughts.

Recently, a client with anxiety was telling me how, when there is an actual emergency, she is able to calmly handle it and work through it. Yet the rest of the time, on things that aren’t emergencies, she feels anxious and avoids things. I hear this a lot from people with anxiety. And it makes sense. When faced with an actual emergency, you can focus on an actual thing. Any adrenaline and anxiety in your body gets used as you get on with actually doing things.

In contrast, the problem with anxiety is that there isn’t anything you can actually do. You are stuck in your imagined world of perceptions and possibility. Aside from avoidance (which continues the anxiety), you just have to wait and you don’t know how things are going to turn out. It’s a sort of waiting game for something that you dread happening but that may not happen and isn’t happening now. That creates the uncertainty for your anxious brain to search through possible threats that would be seemingly distastrous for you. And so your imagination runs on and you continue to feel anxious.

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The Vicious Cycle of Anxiety

When it comes to anxiety, you need to clear between when you are thinking about actual facts, and when it is just your creative imagination making things up (and there are a lot of worst case scenarios that you could potentially make up).

And so, when my imagination runs away into what might happen in the future, I ask myself whether what I am thinking is fact or am I just making it up. If it is fact then there will be something I can point out or show to evidence this. And if it is fact, then I can choose how to respond or how to manage that thing. However, with anxiety, you will be making things up. Often anxious thoughts are based on nothing other than you thought it. So undermine it by reminding yourself you are making it up.

You then have a choice. You can carry on making things up and feeling bad if you want to. Or maybe you’ll decide to wait and see what actually happens or to make up something else in your head instead (something that doesn’t make you feel bad).

When you were a child you would have made up many, many things. You would pretend, be creative and maybe even create whole reams of stories, characters and worlds in your life. That was all play and not too serious. As adults, we continue to make things up in our heads about what might happen and that uncertainty makes us anxious. The subject matter may be things we consider to be serious and important. Yet you are still making things up and scaring yourself inside your own head.

When there is any actual thing to deal with or something actually happens then you will deal with it. In the absence of anything actually going on right now, be very clear about whether you are thinking clearly, logically and in facts, or are you just habitually perceiving things in a negative way and creating all sorts of scenarios that you just don’t need to.

Anxiety lives inside your head. And that’s a good thing because that means you certainly can do something about what you are currently doing. It may take some time and persistence and you may need some help (did I mention hypnotherapy works well for anxiety?!), but you can overcome your anxiety.

You can take back control over how you think and feel so that you undermine your anxiety by thinking in facts rather than imagination.

To your health and happiness, 

Dan Regan

Anxiety Hypnotherapist in Ely & Newmarket

 

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