Dealing With Anxiety: Thinking Your Way Out Of It

One of the most acknowledged ways of dealing with anxiety is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT.

I recently did an interview with Lindsey Victoria from A Life Well-Balanced. We spoke about simple and natural ways for you to cope with anxiety.

 

Here are the links to the resources we talked about in the video:

 

Here is another resource that gives you very specific ways to use this technique to change your thoughts, thus reduce the out of control feelings that you have.

For those readers who desire specific and detailed ways to change thinking, I recommend this site.

I like to think of this model, which is highly acclaimed, and about which numerous books and courses have been written, in a really simple way.

Most simply put: “What could I say to myself to make myself feel better about this?”

Interestingly, a developmentally disabled individual who suffers from severe anxiety, and even had a traumatic past, told me how he had already coped, over most of his life, with anxiety.

He put it this way: “Most of the time, I have figured how to talk myself out of it”…

So that is it, in a nutshell.

Anxious people tend to worry and to “awfulize” everything. Maybe it is a learned behavior, such as how a mother worries constantly about every possible thing, for herself, and for her children, how things will be in the future, what they or she might die from.

One highly simple strategy to stop this “awfulizing” habit, would be to wear a rubber band on the wrist. When thinking starts to become habitually negative and creates worsening of awful feelings, then one would snap the rubber band, and remind oneself to replace the negative thought with a positive one.

So, how to come up with the more positive thought?

I challenge that negative thought and possibly decide where it came from in my past – often from a significant figure in my life. Then, I reframe that thought and choose a better way to look at it, and then implement it in my life.

It is my opinion that I do this instinctively as a therapist and that this is the essence of helping my client to create change.