Dr. Wolfe: I suppose that's possible. But again, what were your feelings, your emotional reaction to what she said? Were you anxious, even angry, or upset?
Jim: Well, I couldn't believe she could accuse me of that.
Dr. Wolfe: I wonder if we should take some time to help you get in touch with your feelings?
Perhaps Jim is extremely anxious and worried that his wife will leave him, or he may be angry with her. Maybe her stinging criticism hurt him. Whatever the feeling, both Jim and Dr. Wolfe could find out plenty from knowing what emotion accompanies his upset.
This example shows that people may not always know how to describe what they're feeling. If you don't always know what you're feeling, that's okay. We realize that some people are aware of their feelings and know all too well when they're feeling the slightest amount of anxiety or worry. If you're one of those, feel free to skip or skim the rest of this section.
If you need to become more aware of your feelings, you can start immediately. Take some time right now to assess your mood. First, notice your breathing. Is it rapid and shallow or slow and deep? Check your posture. Are you relaxed or is some part of your body in an uncomfortable position. Notice all your physical sensations. Tune in to sensations of tension, queasiness, tightness, dizziness, or heaviness. No matter what you find, just sit with the sensations a while. Then ask yourself what feeling captures the essence of those sensations. Of course, at this moment, you may not have any strong feelings. If so, your breathing is rhythmic and your posture relaxed. Even if that's the case, notice what it feels like to be calm. At other times, notice your stronger sensations.
Feeling words describe your physical and mental reaction to events.
The following vocabulary list describes anxious feelings. The next time you can't find the right words to describe how you feel, one of these words may get you started.
Afraid
Agitated
Anxious
Apprehensive
Disturbed
Dread
Fearful
Frightened
Insecure
Intimidated
Jittery
Nervous
Obsessed
Out of it
Panicked
Scared
Self-conscious
Shaky
Tense
Terrified
Timid
Uneasy
Uptight
Worried
We're sure that we've missed a few dozen possibilities on the word list, and maybe you have a favorite way to describe your anxiety. That's fine. What we encourage you to do is to start paying attention to your feelings and bodily sensations. You may want to look over this list a number of times and ask yourself whether you've felt any of these emotions recently. Try not to make judgments about your feelings. They may be trying to tell you something.
Bad feelings only cause problems when you feel bad chronically and repeatedly in the absence of a clear threat. Anxiety and fear also have a positive function: They alert your mind and body to danger and prepare you to respond (see Chapter 3 for more on the fight-or-flight concept). For example, if King Kong knocks on your door, adrenaline floods your body and mobilizes you to either fight or run like your life depends on it, because it does! That's good for situations like that. But if you feel like King Kong is knocking on your door on a regular basis and he's not even in the neighborhood, your anxious feelings cause you more harm than good.
Whether or not King Kong is knocking at your door, identifying anxious, fearful, or worried feelings can help you deal with them far more effectively than avoiding them. When you know what's going on, you can focus on what to do about your predicament more easily than you can when you're sitting in the dark.
Getting in touch with your thoughts
Just as some people don't have much idea about what they're feeling, others have trouble knowing what they're thinking when they're anxious, worried, or stressed. Because thoughts have a powerful influence on feelings, psychologists like to ask their clients what they were thinking when they started to feel upset. Sometimes, clients describe feelings rather than thoughts. For example, Dr. Baker had the following dialogue with Susan, a client who had severe anxiety:
Dr. Baker: So when your supervisor reprimanded you, you said you felt panicked. What thoughts went through your mind?
Susan: Well, I just felt horrible. I couldn't stand it.
Dr. Baker: I know; it must have felt really awful. But I'm curious about what thoughts went through your mind. What did you say to yourself about your supervisor's comments?
Susan: I felt my heart pounding in my chest. I don't think I really had any thoughts actually.
Dr. Baker: That's possible. Sometimes our thoughts escape us for a while. But I wonder, if you think about it now, what did those comments mean to you? What did you think would happen?
Susan: I'm shaking right now just thinking about it.
As this example illustrates, people don't always know what's going on in their heads when they feel anxious. Sometimes you may not have clear, identifiable thoughts when you feel worried or stressed. That's perfectly normal.
The challenge is to find out what the stressful event means to you. That will tell you what your thoughts are. Consider the prior example. Susan may have felt panicked because she feared losing her job, or she may have thought the supervisor's criticism meant that she was incompetent. The boss's reprimand may have also triggered memories of her abusive father. Knowing what thoughts stand behind the feelings can help both Dr. Baker and Susan plan the next step.
Tapping your triggers
You may not always know what's going on in your mind when you feel anxious. To figure it out, you need to first identify the situation that preceded your upset. Zero in on what had just transpired moments before your troublesome feelings. Perhaps you
Opened your mail and found that your credit card balance had skyrocketed
Heard someone say something that bothered you
Read the deficiency notice from your child's school
Wondered why your partner was so late coming home
Got on the scales and saw a number you didn't like
Noticed that your chest felt tight and your heart was racing for no clear reason
On the other hand, sometimes the anxiety-triggering event hasn't even happened yet. You may be just sitting around and wham — an avalanche of anxiety crashes through. Other people wake up at 4 a.m. with worries marching through their minds. What's the trigger then? Well, it can be an image or a fear of all sorts of future events. See the following examples of anxiety-triggering thoughts and images:
I'll never have enough money for retirement.
Did I turn off the stove before I left the house?
We'll never finish writing this book on time!
No one is going to like my speech tomorrow.
What if I get laid off next week?
What if my partner leaves me?
When you get upset or anxious, take a moment to reflect. Ask yourself what event just occurred or what thoughts or images floated into your mind just before you noticed the anxiety. Bingo! You'll see what triggered your anxious feelings. After you see how to snare your anxious thoughts in the next section, we show you how to put thoughts and feelings all together.
Snaring your anxious thoughts
If you know your feelings and the triggers for those feelings, you're ready to become a thought detective. Thoughts powerfully influence emotions. An event may serve as the trigger, but it isn't what directly leads to your anxiety. It's the meaning that the event holds for you, and your thoughts reflect that meaning.
For example, suppose your spouse is 45 minutes late coming home from work. You may think anxious thoughts:
Maybe she's had an accident.
She's probably having an affair.
Or you may have different thoughts that don't cause so much anxiety:
I love having time
alone with the kids.
I like having time alone to work on house projects.
Traffic must be really bad tonight.
Some thoughts create anxiety; others feel good; and still others don't stir up much feeling at all. Capturing your thoughts and seeing how they trigger anxiety and connect to your feelings is important. If you're not sure what thoughts are in your head when you're anxious, you can do something to find them.
First, focus on the anxiety trigger — the event or image that seemed to set things off. Think about it for a while; don't rush it. Then ask yourself some questions about the trigger. The following list of what we call minding-your-mind questions can help you identify your thoughts or the meaning that the event holds for you:
Specifically, what about this event do I find upsetting?
What's the worst that could happen?
How might this event affect my life?
How might this affect the way that others see me?
Does this remind me of anything in my past that bothered me?
What would my parents say about this event?
How might this affect the way that I see myself?
Andrew's story illustrates how the questions about a triggering event can help clarify the nature of how one's thoughts influence feelings.
Andrew loves his work. He manages computer systems and designs Web pages for small businesses in his community. Andrew believes in hands-on service and often visits his clients just to see whether things are running smoothly. One Friday, Andrew pulls up to one of the law firm offices he's working for and sees three police cars parked by the front door. Andrew's heart races, and he perspires profusely at the mere sight of police. He feels terrified, but doesn't know for sure what he's thinking.
In order to capture what's going on in his head, he answers a few of the minding-your-mind questions:
Specifically, what about this event do I find upsetting?
Something violent may be going on. I've always been afraid of violence.
How might this event affect my life?
I could get killed.
How might this affect the way that others see me?
Other people will think I'm a foolish coward.
How might this affect the way I see myself?
Like the coward I've always thought I was.
Andrew merely saw three police cars in front of a law office. Can you see where his mind took this event? Although workplace violence does occur, many other interpretations of this event are actually more likely. Nevertheless, Andrew needs to know what thoughts are running through his head when he feels anxious if he's going to be able to change how he responds to events like these.
When you work with the minding-your-mind questions, use your imagination. Brainstorm, and take your time. Even though Andrew's example doesn't answer all the questions, you may find it useful to do so.
Tracking Your Thoughts, Triggers, and Feelings
Monitoring your thoughts, feelings, and whatever triggers your anxiety paves the way for change. This simple strategy helps you focus on your personal pattern of stress and worry. The very act of paying attention brings your thinking process to light. This clarification helps you gain a new perspective.
Try using a thought-therapy chart like the one in Table 5-1 to connect your thoughts, feelings, and anxiety triggers. When you monitor the triggers, include the day, time, place, people involved, and what was going on. When you record your anxious thoughts, use the minding-your-mind questions in the "Snaring your anxious thoughts" section earlier in this chapter. Finally, write down your anxious feelings and physical sensations, and rate the severity of those feelings. Use 1 to represent almost no anxiety at all and 100 to indicate the most severe anxiety imaginable (sort of like how you might feel if 100 rattlesnakes suddenly appeared slithering around your bedroom!).
To show you how to use the chart, we've filled it in with Andrew's notes that he took for a few days after starting therapy for his anxiety about violence.
You can use this simple technique to monitor your anxious feelings, thoughts, and triggers. Simply design your own thought-therapy chart using the headings of Table 5-1. Keep track, and look for patterns. Sometimes, just becoming more aware of your feelings, thoughts, and triggers can reduce your anxiety.
If recording your thoughts, feelings, and triggers makes you more anxious, that's okay. It's common. Many other techniques in this book should help, especially the ones for challenging your thoughts in this chapter. But if the techniques in this book don't help you, consider seeking professional help.
Although monitoring may produce useful insights that reduce your anxiety a bit, you, like most people, may need a little more assistance. The next section shows you how to tackle your anxious thoughts and make them manageable.
Tackling Your Thoughts: Thought Therapy
When you've snared what your anxious thoughts are on paper, you're ready for the next steps. In fact, we have three simple strategies for tackling your anxious thoughts:
Going to thought court: Taking your thoughts to court and sifting through the evidence.
Rethinking risk: Recalculating the odds of your anxious thoughts coming true — most people overestimate the odds.
Imagining worst-case scenarios: Reexamining your ability to cope — if, in fact, the worst does occur. Most folks underestimate their coping resources.
Tracking anxious thoughts and events is an important step in arresting anxiety. But thought therapy takes those arrested thoughts, books them, takes them to trial, and throws them into jail. We show you how in the following sections.
Weighing the evidence: Thought court
The thoughts that lead to your anxious feelings have most likely been around a long time. Most people consider their thoughts to be true. They don't question them. You may be surprised to discover that many of your thoughts don't hold up under scrutiny. If you carefully gather and weigh the evidence, you just may find that your thoughts rest on a foundation of sand.
Keep in mind that gathering evidence when you're feeling really anxious isn't always easy to do. At those times, it's hard to consider that your thoughts may be inaccurate. When that's the case, you're better off waiting until you calm down before hunting for the evidence. At other times, you may be able to find evidence right away if your anxiety isn't too out of control.
You can evaluate the validity of your thoughts by first jotting down an anxiety-arousing thought that you take from the thought-therapy chart that we describe how to create in the earlier section "Tracking Your Thoughts, Triggers, and Feelings." Then, collect evidence that either supports the likelihood of your thought being true or disputes the likelihood of your anxious thought being true. Use the following questions to come up with disputing evidence:
Have I had thoughts like these at other times in my life? Have my dire predictions come true?
Do I have experiences that would contradict my thoughts in any way?
Is this situation really as awful as I'm making it out to be?
A year from now, how much concern will I have with this issue?
Am I thinking this will happen just because I'm feeling anxious and worried? Am I basing my conclusion mostly on my feelings or on the true evidence?
Am I assuming something without any solid evidence for my negative thought?
Feelings are always valid in the sense that you feel what you feel, but they're not evidence for supporting anxious thoughts. For example, if you feel extremely anxious about taking a test, the anxiety is not evidence of how you will perform.
Overcoming Anxiety For Dummies, 2nd Edtion Page 10