3 Tips for Managing Anxious Thoughts

When you are in a place or undertaking an activity that creates anxiety for you and you feel anxious, this is often your brain registering something that might be seen as a potential risk. In effect it is predicting a worst possible scenario for you, a danger or risk to your safety or at least an unpleasant uncomfortable event for you to experience. It triggers activity in your mind that flush chemical signals through your body – that creates a stress response and a readying for your body to act immediately and ‘bingo!’ you have an anxiety attack.

Here are 3 simple tips to help bring yourself back to a calmer more manageable level, be able to think more clearly and create more choice for yourself.

Firstly, there will be a drive to just run, get out of the situation, and away from the perceived discomfort. This is the brain stress response that triggers your fight or flight mechanism. It is a result of our deepest, earliest instinctive responses for survival and protection. However, although the trigger might feel like the event is causing it, in reality, it is the brain’s response not the event that is causing the distress. If you do run, or avoid the situation, all that will happen is you will create an association in your mind with that place or event and that level of anxiety. It will be recounted each time you revisit that event or place in future and will replay like a video in your mind creating similar anxiety each time.

A better strategy would be to be brave enough to try to stay in that place or activity, even though it may feel uncomfortable to begin with and to allow those feelings to naturally subside. Understand that you can cope with anxious thoughts and be safe. And that they will start to subside as you see there is no real danger. Just knowing this can help take back some control.

The Caveat!

Obviously if you’re in a ‘dangerous place or have personal physical threat’ that is a different matter – personal security isn’t a memory or created through your thoughts. But for the most part the danger lies within our heads not our environment, and we are assuming and predicting something bad will happen. Mostly it is far less likely than we anticipate.

By using your breathe you can actually calm your own nervous system down by breathing slowly and purposefully.

Begin by breathing in and with your belly rather than your chest. Breathe in for 4 seconds, then hold your breath for 1 -2 seconds and then breath out slowly for 8 seconds. Hold your breath for 1-2 seconds and start again. Do this at least 4 times. More if you like. This process takes just one minute and within that minute you focus on breathing, on your belly, and on your counting. And you will feel so much calmer after that. And you can literally do this anytime anywhere you feel anxious or stressful thoughts starting to take over.

Why is this so effective? Because it triggers a key system in your body, the parasympathetic system. This is the part of your body that acts like the brake on your car when it’s running too fast. You are actively applying the brake yourself in a controlled way, to bring your body to a more manageable speed.

In that moment of anxiety your thoughts are being triggered by memories of past events and scenarios and predictions of what might happen in the future. Your ‘inner critical voice’ has a positive intention for you, in that it is working hard to protect you from harm, it just doesn’t feel like it at the time. It functions based on experiences you had as a younger ‘you’. But in your current adult life they are unhelpful and working in a counterproductive, maladaptive way. These thoughts may have been protecting and helpful in childhood but are not necessary now as an adult. These thoughts are what are creating the anxiety within you.

So, write down the negative thought you are experiencing. Acknowledge what the thought is saying to you and then respond to yourself about it in a curious, challenging and lighter way.

For example:

Really is that so……well OK thanks for that, but actually, …..THEN CHALLENGE THAT THOUGHT

So, For example: You have a talk to do in front of a group and you are panicking

Negative thought ……I’ll forget my introduction and dry up.

Positive response – Yes… it’s possible that might happen …ok…thanks for looking out for me, but honestly I’ve got this. I’ve practiced it and I have my notes just in case. Many people use notes and that’s OK.

Using these 3 tips in conjunction will offer you a strategy to cope, to calm and to reclaim your personal power.

‘We create anxious thoughts within ourselves and that’s great to know because that also means if we can create them, we can erase and reframe them just as well’. Caroline Knight!