Help - my anxious thoughts will not stop!
Do your anxious thoughts take over and leave you feeling overwhelmed and drained? Follow these four steps to work towards a healthier alliance between you and your anxiety.
Four strategies for helping reduce anxious thoughts are compassion, challenging anxious thoughts, understanding the difference between helpful and unhelpful anxiety, and having a designated ‘worry time.’
1. Compassion
First, think about your anxiety as if you were talking to a friend who has anxiety. If your friend was experiencing anxiety, would you get mad at them? Or would you give them some compassion and see if you can help? The best thing you can do for yourself or others who have anxiety is to offer compassion and understanding before you jump into problem solving or become frustrated.
2. Helpful vs. Unhelpful Thoughts
Next, it can be helpful to start to pay attention to what exactly ARE your anxious thoughts and to take a moment to decide, ‘Is this thought helping me or hurting me?’ Some anxious thoughts can actually be helpful. If you are standing in front of a busy intersection in a busy city, you might start to feel anxious, noticing how fast the cars are driving by, and you may start to worry that you could get injured. This would be an example of a helpful anxious thought. Your brain is helping you be aware of the danger nearby, and that’s an appropriate reaction to a potentially dangerous situation. Try to be gentle on yourself when you are feeling anxiety creep up during situations like this. Think, ‘Is this helpful?’ and if it is, then you can simply acknowledge it, and go about your day!
If you find yourself thinking thoughts that are unhelpful – such as worrying about things that are beyond your control or ruminating on past ‘mistakes’ - those are the thoughts to pay close attention to. You can start by keeping a journal of automatic thoughts that are coming up for you, and logging if they are helpful to think about, or not.
3. Challenging anxious thoughts
You can challenge an unhelpful thought by thinking of another thought to replace it. You can also try talking back to your thoughts! Another example of an unhelpful thought might be something like worrying about your health when you are perfectly healthy, or assuming that other people are judging you when you have no actual knowledge of what they are thinking. You can challenge these thoughts by thinking of something that is just as likely but slightly more helpful, such as ‘I am worried that I may get sick, but that is not helping me right now, so for now I will simply appreciate that I am healthy today.’ Or you can talk back to your thoughts when an unhelpful thought arises by saying something like, ‘No, thanks!’
If you’d like a free anxiety thought log worksheet, visit the Anxiety Specialty Page. At the bottom of the page is a free download for a custom-built thought log with steps to challenge those intrusive, unhelpful thoughts.
4. Designated ‘Worry Time’
Another technique to help with anxious thoughts is to set yourself up with a scheduled ‘worry time’ where you allow yourself to worry about anything you want, but ONLY during your designated worry time. It could be 15 or 30 minutes each day at a time that makes sense for you. Then, for the rest of the day, if an anxious thought comes up, gently remind yourself that it is not your time to worry, and you will allow yourself to think about it when the time is right.
If you found this article helpful and would like professional help working through your anxious thoughts, I’m a Licensed Mental Health Therapist and an Anxiety Specialist. You can contact me by visiting my website at CalmingMindCounseling.com or by email at Corey@CalmingMindCounseling.com.