This is a talk about anxiety and helping you find better strategies how to deal with anxiety.
I am a cognitive behavioural therapist and I deal with this anxiety kind of issues every day.
So all anxiety is future-based anticipatory thinking.
For example,
What if my job interview goes wrong?
I'll get rejected.
I'll never get a decent job.
Firstly,
Let's look at this statement.
What if my job interview goes wrong?
What kind of statement is it?
It's based on a prediction that has not considered any facts.
So let's look at the next statement.
I'll get rejected.
What if I never find another job?
Another decent job.
So do you know that this is for sure that you will be rejected?
Is there any other possibilities?
Is it possible that you might get some negative feedback but also there will be some positive feedback?
So consider alternative balanced way of thinking about statement rather than blindly believing the thoughts that pop up to your head.
During the day we have about 60 to 70 thousand thoughts a day popping up into our minds.
So the mind selectively pays attention to particular thoughts.
We call those kind of thoughts negative automatic thoughts,
NETs in short.
So depending on the circumstance and the situation,
Negative automatic thoughts they pop up.
And those kind of thoughts affect the way we feel,
What we do and the symptoms we experience.
So in this way the pattern is created.
Your thoughts affect your emotions,
Your emotions affect your behaviors,
Your behaviors affect your symptoms you experience.
In order to break this maintenance cycle we can change the thought pattern.
We can change,
We can think of alternative thoughts.
And also we can change the behavior.
Probably the most easiest way of change the maintenance cycle is to change the behavior.
But the most useful is challenging your thought processes.
Recognizing when this thought pops up and asking yourself questions like what else can this mean?
Can I have an alternative view on this?
So when the thoughts pop up we have different choices of how we can respond to these negative thoughts.
Firstly we can ignore them,
We can suppress them,
We can push them away or we can challenge them.
So each of these choices have consequences.
So for example if you try to suppress a thought that will be relevant to pushing down the beach ball under the sea.
Every time you try to push it down the beach ball keeps popping back up into the surface.
So the same with the thoughts,
The more you try to suppress it the more difficult it becomes and the more frequent it keeps popping back up.
So challenging the thoughts,
Asking questions,
Not immediately jumping to conclusions.
So asking yourself is what I'm thinking an opinion or a fact?
If it's a fact you can be more solution focused and look for.
.
.
So being problem solved,
Looking for solutions,
Looking for different choices and answers to the thought that you're having if it's a fact.
And also inquiring and asking yourself what else can this mean?
How else can I see this?
What if I thought of it this way?
What are the facts of this being true or not true?
So if it's a hypothetical statement then you can also do something about it.
So if you're thinking and worrying about 1am in the morning and if it's a hypothetical situation how useful would that be for you to sit and worry and ponder and ruminate and ask yourself going over and over the same thing and trying to find an answer.
So possibly the answer to that isn't going to be very useful.
So postpone that worry until tomorrow and you can postpone it by making specific times like worry time.
Let's say you can decide that between 10am and 11am you're going to sit and worry about the situation.
You may come up with some solutions to your hypothetical thought,
You may not.
But what you're doing is postponing that worry until the next time and then you're creating healthy habits for yourself where you can actually go to bed,
Go to sleep.
So main important tip out of this talk is whenever the thought pops up don't just blindly believe a thought,
Question it.
Send some inquiry to your statements.
Ask yourself what else can this mean?
Am I considering everything here,
All the facts around this statement that I'm thinking?
So I hope this has been helpful and I hope you have some strategies now on how you can deal with your future anxiety problems.
