When we are caught in a vortex of anxious thoughts, it might be difficult to see our way out. Even meditation practices can seem more difficult than usual in these cases. The momentum of thoughts can be so strong that we become entangled in what we are thinking and find it hard to see the bigger picture.
So how can we find a way out?
It can help to remind ourselves that a thought is only a thought. It’s like having a novel in our hands. The book is definitely real, but its content isn’t – it’s just a story. Our thoughts work in the same way. Their existence is obviously real, since we are having them, but their content isn’t.
One way to see this is that reality happens outside of thought. A thought is just a commentary, a superimposition on what’s happening (see the Wisdom 2.0 video “Who Are You Without Your Story?” with Byron Katie and Soren Gordhamer). However, instead of always being conscious of this, we tend to forget and live our life through our concepts alone.
Imagine reading someone’s long commentary about a gripping TV series, instead of actually watching it first-hand, and decide that this series is really boring… This is often how we live our lives. The voice in our head is the commentary. But if we believe the voice in our head, we cannot view reality as it is.
Luckily, psychology offers several tools to help us work with anxious thoughts. The worksheet above offers one technique: first estimate the real odds of what you worry might happen, then formulate a coping plan. It was adapted from practices created by psychologists Michelle Craske and David Barlow in their book Mastery of Your Anxiety and Worry. As the worksheet summarizes their view, when we are anxious we tend to overestimate the probability of something bad happening and underestimate our ability to cope with it.
The worksheet also advises not to vividly imagine the feared event, and to stop if you become very fearful or uncomfortable. This worksheet and the practices on this page complement professional care and are not a substitute for it. If anxiety is affecting your daily life, a doctor or licensed mental health professional can help.
More on Overcoming Anxious Thoughts
If you find it difficult to endure the onslaught of negative thoughts and want to change them, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is one approach worth knowing about.
CBT’s aim is to help us recognize our cognitive distortions – i.e., to see what distorted ways of thinking we are inadvertently adding to reality in our mental commentary. Once this is seen, the idea goes, we realize that our thoughts are a superimposition on what’s actually happening, and they may lose some of their power to control us.
In his “The Feeling Good Handbook”, Dr. David Burns lists 10 types of twisted thinking to look out for:
- Jumping to conclusions
- Overgeneralization
- Mental filter
- Discounting the positive
- All-or-nothing thinking
- Magnification
- Emotional reasoning
- Shoulds and musts
- Labelling
- Personalization and blame
He also offers several ways to untwist our thoughts and regain lucidity. For a detailed explanation of distorted thinking and how to answer back to it, see Tim LeBon’s CBT overview.
Many people find these techniques useful for working with anxious thoughts and for seeing that their content is not necessarily real. By living life through thoughts, what we are doing is simply looking at it through a colored window.
