Overcome Anxiety By Occupying Your Brain

A problematic aspect of anxiety is how one initial anxious thought can soon spiral into a whole string of worst case scenarios. An anxious thought gains momentum inside your head and soon you are absorbed with negative outcomes and consequences. And the more time you spend thinking anxiously, the more those anxious feelings increase. This then feeds and powers even more anxious thinking as your mind scans for all the potential threats and dangers that may await you.

Very quickly you can feel very bad, filled with dread and all you can focus upon is the anxiety running away inside your mind. Anxious thoughts lead to anxious feelings and anxious feelings lead to more anxious thoughts. Very quickly your anxiety can engulf you and dominate your mind.

Anything that can break, or even just interrupt, this spiral is going to be very helpful as part of how you manage and seek to overcome your anxiety.

The other day I was watching a repeat episode of the old TV series Outnumbered. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a couple trying to raise their three children and all the trials, tribulations and chaos that can come with trying to manage work and family life. It is pretty funny and even more so when you can point at the TV and tell your teenage daughter how she used to do some similar things to the young children in the show (like endlessly delaying bedtime and trying to get out of eating vegetables!).

During one dinner table scene, to try and distract the kids who are getting restless, the mother starts a game of fortunately/unfortunately. As far as I can work out the first person starts a sentence with ‘fortunately’ and describes something good in a made up story and the next person starts their sentence with ‘unfortunately’ and describes something problematic linked to what has been said previously (e.g. Fortunately there was a chair for me to sit down on, unfortunately the chair was actually a monster from outer space who started chasing me etc).

This was one way of occupying children that I hadn’t come across before or used with my kids when they were younger. And it reminded me of the value of having effective ways of occupying your mind as part of overcoming anxiety.

Occupying Your Mind

Anything that can prevent, interrupt or stop that anxiety spiral gaining momentum in your head is going to be helpful. This is especially the case as you often logically know most of the things that you are imagining, and that are filling you with dread, may not even happen at all or at least may not happen in the way your anxious brain is imagining them happening. How many times have we all thought the worst only to subsequently discover that things didn’t turn out that way and that everything was actually ok?

If you are able to get your mind and focus engaged in a different thinking activity then some of the anxious momentum begins to wane. Rather than anxious thoughts and anxious feelings getting all the time, space and focus inside your head, whilst ever negatively escalating and becoming more habitual, you change the focus. There are any number of things you can engage your thinking upon that are more neutral or positive in some way than running the same old wanted anxiety cycle over and over.

You could think of occupying your brain on something else as a form of mental distraction. And I know some people scoff at distraction as an overcoming anxiety strategy. Sure it may not solve everything but at least you are the one who is now taking control over what is going on in your mind and developing the ability to change your focus to something else when you choose (rather than just being at the mercy of anxiety and having to always go with it).

I like to think that if you move your focus onto something else and away from anxiety then you are the one in charge of your thinking. Anxiety grows through focus and so it makes sense to be able to change your focus. You know most of the anxious things you were imagining were made up in your imagination so you don’t want to just keep making up things that make you feel bad. It’s like changing the TV channel inside your head. If you are watching something on TV that you don’t want to watch and then you change the channel to something you do want to watch, and you then become engaged in that, then you aren’t thinking about what you are no longer watching.

This isn’t just suppressing the anxious thoughts even if we put aside how very often they are irrational and illogical anyway (so there is no need to be thinking about them). Besides, there is no evidence that suppressing negative thoughts exacerbates them or brings them back stronger at another time as I covered in an earlier article: Suppressing Negative Thoughts To Improve Mental Health

Overcoming Anxiety

So what sort of things can you do to occupy your mind and to help you overcome anxiety?

These are some of the things that my clients have used to help with managing their thinking so they can overcome anxiety:

• Use numbers. Numbers are great because they are both logical and neutral. They just are what they are with no room for perception or imagination. One of my favourites to interrupt unwanted thoughts and to occupy my mind involves counting backwards from three hundred in units of three. Or, if you are out and about then look around for the number one somewhere (e.g. a number plate or on the side of the van). Once you’ve spotted it, look for the number two somewhere and so on. This forces your attention outside of your own head and onto the things actually around you right now (rather than being inside your own head imagining future scenarios).
• Describe ten sounds to yourself that you can hear around you right now. Again, this forces your attention and focus outside of your head. The first few are often easy but it gets progressively harder to isolate another different sound each time beyond those first few obvious ones. If all your attention is on trying to pick out that elusive ninth individual sound that you haven’t already listed then your thinking brain is kept busy.
• Use the alphabet. If you have kids then you’ve probably used this one before, I know I’ve called upon it many a time on long journeys to keep the kids busy and to stop the repeated asking of whether we are there yet. Pick a category (with the kids it’s usually countries, animals or food but it can be anything) and then think of one beginning with A, then one beginning with B and so on through to Z. Then restart and come up with a different one for each letter or, if you are with others both of you come up with a different one for each letter (I always have to go last in our car so I have to think of something beginning with the letter we are on, keep that repeating in my head and come up with another one if someone else says it before they get to me).  On a recent long run I used Beatles songs as my category to distract my mind from the fact I still had so far left to go to the finish line.
• Get busy. Instead of unproductive anxious thinking, get busy on a task that keeps you occupied. We all have those boxes that need sorting or paperwork to do so get occupied (anxiety loves it when you aren’t occupied because it will fill your head with all sorts of things). I’ve known many clients who find that they feel better for doing puzzles like crosswords or sudoku because it occupies their thinking for a while.
• Use external stimulus. When it is quiet and you aren’t occupied (like when driving or last thing at night), you can start thinking about things and the whole cycle gets going. And so, in those quieter moments add an external stimulus in. When driving have some feel good music on and sing loudly. At night you can use my relaxation hypnosis audio or an audio book. The external input from these sources occupies some of your attention and so the thoughts in your head can’t just take over because at least some of your focus is divided elsewhere.

The more time and space that anxiety can grasp inside your mind, the more those thoughts and feelings can take over. Your mind fills with all sorts of anxious worst case scenarios. Everything seems rife with threats and disaster. And those anxious feelings take hold and fuel even more unwanted thinking.

Part of the solution to overcoming anxiety, and sometimes the only thing you will need to cut off some thoughts before they get going, involves deliberately occupying your mind on other things.

Often you can start anxious overthinking and just keep going with it, adding to the worst case scenario, and giving it more time, focus and belief in your head. Yet there will always be times when you are so busy that those anxious thoughts and feelings fade a bit and have less of a grip upon you. When you are mentally occupied your thinking is directed elsewhere. If you are quick, from practice and preparation, you can sometimes cut things off right away. The rest of the time at least your attention gets more helpfully divided. As you occupy your brain you start to overcome anxiety by taking back control over your thinking and what goes on inside of your mind. And developing the capability to orchestrate and direct your own thinking is definitely a part of feeling and being more and more calm, relaxed, confident and in control.

To your health and happiness, 

Dan Regan

Award Winning Hypnotherapy for Anxiety Ely & Newmarket

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