Does Distraction Work For Anxiety?

Recently I was talking with a client about this subject; does distraction work for anxiety?

Anxiety thrives when there is time and space for thinking. And because you feel anxious you have probably started avoiding things or feeling too low and exhausted to keep busy. You are less occupied and have more time to think. The more time you have to think, the worse you feel and the less you feel able to do. It becomes a negative cycle that chokes the enjoyment and motivation from your life. You spend more and more time thinking and the anxiety just moves from one thing to the next. All the while your feel worse and worse with tension, agitation, poor appetite and disturbed sleeping.

It’s like a river of thinking with a strong current that pulls you from one catastrophic thought to the next. Very soon your anxiety can quash anything positive and you feel helpless to deal with your own thoughts and feelings.

The human mind has a negativity bias anyway so when you feel anxious this just accelerates. Everything is tinged with worry, doubt, overthinking and dread. Even things you’ve done many, many times before now seem like a massive challenge that you struggle to face.

Now, of course, there are several facets to a successful plan for tackling anxiety. You need to learn how to interrupt, direct, disrupt and move on your own thoughts rather than being at the mercy of whatever happens to come into your thinking and awareness. You need to be able to bring anxiety down when it starts high and be able to cut if off early and quickly if it starts to grow and rise.

I’ve written many times before about the scientific support and research that shows that hypnotherapy is effective for treating anxiety so I’m not going to repeat that here. I’ve also covered the use of exercise, relaxation, gratitude, nature, music and a whole range of other things that have been demonstrated to contribute to reducing anxiety.

Does Distraction Work for Anxiety?

And so we can also consider, does distraction work for anxiety?

Distraction is often dismissed as a tool for tackling anxiety. It is often referred to as ‘just distraction’ if you get on with something else instead of what you may have been doing in the midst of your anxious thoughts and feelings. However, whilst not the only thing you would want to do because therapy is imperative too, distraction can be part of your range of strategies and techniques for interrupting some of the anxious thoughts and creating some clearer mental space for recovery.

We should keep in mind that thoughts, whether helpful or otherwise, grow through focus, belief and attention. The more you invest these things into any thought, the stronger the associations and linked feelings become. This is how anxiety takes hold inside your mind. You imagine a catastrophe or worse case scenario. You then invest time, energy and focus into thinking about it more and more. You make it real and vivid in your mind and start to dread all the consequences of this thing happening in the future. You feel more and more physical feelings of anxiety and that gives even more focus, belief and attention to this feared thing inside your mind.

It becomes a cycle of focus and imagination that takes over more and more of your thinking and the space in your mind.

Putting aside how most of the things you imagine and worry about never actually happen in the way you were dreading. And putting aside how they are often irrational and that there are many other things that could also possibly happen from this point onwards. But what about distraction?

If you are feeling calm and thinking about something but then deliberately turn your thinking to some other thing, is that distraction? And if you are calmly doing something but then remember you need to do something else and so leave what you are doing and go and do that remembered thing, is that distraction? I don’t think we would call it distraction, we would just call it thinking something else or doing something else.

So when you are thinking of an anxious catastrophic thought and you change it to something more calm and positive, you could call that distraction – or you could call it doing something else. And the more often you put your focus and attention into something else, the calmer you can feel and the more time you get away from the anxiety. Anxiety loves times and space so you occupy your mind by getting busy. This busyness may be applying strategies for directing what gets time and space inside your head, or it could be getting busy on something that takes your thinking and actions elsewhere for a while.

With distraction (or busyness, or occupying your mind) you start to interrupt the pattern of anxiety to create some space for change and for more long lasting anxiety relief. You start to influence your own thoughts and feelings whilst you also engage in other anxiety therapy (and hypnotherapy, of course, has been shown to be effective in the treatment of anxiety).

All these aspects and approaches to your thoughts, feelings and behaviours start to come together to work mutually beneficially. Rather than your anxiety being in charge, you start to change the pattern and you start to feel more and more calm, confident and in control. And then you’ll be too busy living your life to even think about whether you are distracting yourself from something else.

To your health and happiness, 

Dan Regan

Award Winning Hypnotherapy for Anxiety Ely & Newmarket

There’s a bit more on this topic here: Overcome Anxiety By Occupying Your Brain

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