The experience of anxiety can be crippling, trapping us in immobilizing thought processes. Here is a great process for starting to manage your thoughts rather than having your thoughts manage you.
Once you have worked on the ability to externalize your anxiety you can start to identify and implement strategies that will contain and ideally reduce your experience of anxiety. These strategies tackle the thought, behaviors and bodily reactions associated with feeling anxious.
Let’s look at one technique focused on managing your anxious thinking – thought replacement.
A key way to assist yourself in coping with anxiety is to help yourself control the thoughts relating to difficult events. You can start to monitor patterns and trends of thought that may be contributing to your anxiety. This means helping yourself to identify the thoughts that accompany feeling anxious.
These thought patterns can then be monitored and modified as outlined below:
1. When feeling anxious identify the thoughts that accompany these circumstances.
2. Deepen your knowledge of these thoughts and associated negative deeply held beliefs. Inaccurate thoughts are characterized by over generalized blanket statements, catastrophic thinking and strong negative statements using language such as “always”, “should”, “must” or “never” (e.g. I am going to die, I am a failure, I will never succeed ).
3. Become aware of the impact this thought has on your feelings, body and behavior.
4. Ask yourself is the thought useful? Is it accurate in the current situation? Is it overly generalized and rigid? Ask yourself is this thought True, False or do you simply not know whether it is true or false.
5. Replace these kinds of overgeneralized, catastrophic, negative thoughts with situation specific, realistically positive self-talk that reflects openness to alternative scenarios. You want to state the truth of the situation for yourself (e.g. I will survive, I can succeed).
You may initially find yourself using this technique following as opposed to during a highly challenging situation. As you become more familiar with your own internal dialogue, you will become more and more able to control negative thoughts in the height of anxiety generating experiences.
All techniques for managing anxiety require practice and may need to be initially rehearsed outside of the anxiety provoking experience and may require additional support such as the help of a support partner or therapist. Feeling anxious becomes an automatic way of responding and changing that response through awareness and modifying thoughts and bodily responses requires persistence and practice. The longer you persist at these strategies the more success you will experience and feeling anxious will become something you are more able to contain and manage.
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