Anxiety Stress and Panic Attacks

Disputing Your Irrational Anxious Thoughts

There can be few greater simple pleasures than spending half an hour or so reading at night before going to sleep. Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve loved reading detective stories, with anything containing Sherlock Holmes always being a favourite (in fact, I seem to recall that I based my English GCSE exam story composition upon a Sherlock Holmes story I’d been reading beforehand!). Agatha Christie’s Poirot is another favourite, and I love anything in the British Library Crime Classics collection. 

In these stories there’s no need for excessive violence, there are no computers or mobile phones or DNA to call upon, and it’s all based upon deduction and reasoning to bring the plot to a successful conclusion. Perhaps it was this love of the logic and rational thinking and reasoning that led me to study my law degree (or maybe it was watching LA Law on TV, if you’re old enough to remember that one!).

Poirot calls upon his ‘little grey cells’ to evaluate, analyse and solve cases, and there’s perhaps no detective more famous that Sherlock Holmes for rational thinking and calling upon the facts (although he never actually says ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ in any of the Conan Doyle stories).  

And so I was delighted and excited recently when I found out that my daughter’s English class were studying Victorian Crime and Detective Stories, and particularly Sherlock Holmes’ stories. I’d have loved that at her age, and even now I would happily go and sit at the back of the class so I could listen in! Ah here, I thought, was a shared thing that my daughter and I would be able to discuss and dissect with a shared passion for old detective fiction. Only it turned out she wasn’t that bothered about the stories, so that was the end of that! 

So why am I talking about these great-thinking detectives here today? It’s because very often, inside our own minds, our thinking gets distorted, generalised, embellished, catastrophised and we suffer from all sorts of thinking errors and biases. We can jump to conclusions, give meaning to things, make assumptions about what other people are thinking, make erroneous predictions, catastrophise and imagine and create all sorts of worst-case scenarios. Emotions like anxiety can lead to these kinds of negative and irrational thoughts, and the thoughts (which may or may not be accurate) can create emotions like anxiety.  

If you struggle with anxiety then you will be familiar with the overthinking, worst-case scenarios and ‘what if’ thoughts. Your anxiety can latch onto a train of thought and before you know it, it has been amplified and magnified inside your head and your anxious feelings increase.  An initial thought can move down that rabbit hole of thinking that moves further and further away from the current situation, and where things get worse and worse in your mind. 

So there is certainly benefit in bringing thoughts back to the present, and to the facts, rather than letting emotions like anxiety, stress, fear and worry take over. To take control over our thinking and feel better in ourselves, perhaps we all need to think a bit more like Sherlock in these moments when he said, “whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things” (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign Of Four).