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.