You’re home alone. It’s 11 PM, and you’re in bed. You hear a sound in your garden that you haven’t heard before. Your mind can think, “Oh no, burglars! They probably noticed the courier guy dropping off my new phone and laptop. Heck, it might even BE the courier guy trying to steal it back from me. I knew I couldn’t trust him! What do I do now? Should I call 911?”
I don’t even have to explain how you’ll feel if these are the thoughts you choose to believe.
But if your mind would say instead, “That’s probably a wild animal trying out some yoga poses and failing miserably at it... or the wind... whatever,” you’d feel no fear.
The way you’d feel would be totally different whereas the circumstances (a noise in the yard) would be exactly the same in both cases. The outside world didn’t change. The same (bad) thing had happened! But your reaction to it was different, and consequently, your feelings and emotions will differ as well.
You get to decide how you respond to every event that happens in your life.
Anxiety is a choice.
It took me a long time to acknowledge this. How could it possibly be a choice? I didn’t want the anxiety.
We don’t always choose our initial reaction, but we do choose the reaction to that first layer of anxiety. This is called emotional intelligence. We have the power to make an intelligent choice about the thoughts we use and thus the emotions we feel.
I’ve already mentioned it but want to emphasize it again here. Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman Emperor who lasted two decades as an Emperor (quite a long time when you have that many enemies), wrote in his journal: “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength…. If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
That’s almost twenty centuries ago.
Neurologist and psychiatrist Victor Frankl, the man who not only survived the Nazi death camps but even learned how to have fun while being in the most horrendous place on earth at that time, went on to perfect this.
Let’s look at his most famous quote and attitude again from his book Man’s Search for Meaning, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
If you let your thoughts lead the way, you’re living your life in a reactive state, and you’ll never feel like you are in control.
Easier said than done, of course. I’m sure you have tried to think positive like many gurus always proclaim. But that never works for long or even at all.
So what can you do then when you are minding your own business, and a what-if thought pops up or anything else that makes you anxious?
Step one is to question those negative thoughts.
Counterintuitive questions you can use when you’re anxious
Let’s look at Jenny first, a client of mine. Jenny is a schoolteacher who feared getting stuck in a traffic jam. Thoughts would pop up, giving her claustrophobic anxiety. As she listened to and agreed with her thoughts, her anxiety would get stronger and stronger, eventually giving her a panic attack. She was simply following the vicious cycle model I explained earlier on.
In order to avoid these anxious sensations, Jenny started to take long detours and did everything she could to dodge traffic jams. That, of course, was not a solution. It’s a pure catch-22. The more you run away from anxiety, the more it will find you. In this case, her averting traffic jams was confirming to her body and mind that they were indeed dangerous.
I explained to Jenny that as long as she was giving power and attention to those negative thoughts, as long as she feared them, they would have tremendous authority over her. It took me a while to convince Jenny because at first she didn’t see it that way. “I don’t have a choice, Geert,” she said “That anxiety and those thoughts just come, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Sure,” I explained to her, “and as long as you believe that you are right. On the other hand, when you decide to look at it from another perspective, as hard as that may seem, you’ll get more power.”
“You are still launching the vicious panic attack cycle by thinking the way you currently think, by simply following the anxious thoughts, by considering them as the one and only truth. Next time, try to question them. These thoughts do not originate from an all-knowing oracle that is always right. They are just thoughts. Try to verify their validity by openly questioning them.”
Jenny started to work on this, which was very hard for her at first. Her mind had been automatically going into the anxiety direction for a long time. It was challenging to switch channels. But as she kept repeating to herself, “Is that really true? Am I REALLY in a life-or-death situation by being in this traffic jam? Is certain death as imminent as my thoughts want me to believe?”
At first, her mind came back with, “Yes! I am about to die. This is dangerous!” Then Jenny countered with, “Is that really, really true?” This could go on for a while, until one thought finally popped into her head, “No, that’s not true. It’s not that bad. There is no imminent danger.”
This thought surprised Jenny, as she later explained to me. It was the first positive idea that allowed her to question her other anxious thoughts more easily. She now knew her thoughts were not always valid. One minute they tried to convince her she had to get out of there, the next they confirmed it was not that bad. Hmm...
Jenny learned how to overcome her anxiety and panic attacks together with the other techniques in this book. Her anxious thoughts were simply warning her for things that would probably never happen, and yet she had been considering them as the only possible outcome for years.
As you’ve seen, by continuously questioning those negative thoughts she had prior, she started to create a new pathway in her thinking that became more and more automated.
That muscle became stronger and stronger. Questioning these thoughts had exposed how faulty and misleading her original anxious thoughts often were. They were just playing a mind game!
This is a hard and an important first step. I’ve personally helped hundreds of people to make the switch and seen thousands do it through the audio program I have on my website. So you can do this too, no matter what your negative thoughts are about.
Thinking in a non-anxious way is like picking up the heavy weights in the gym you cannot lift yet. How do you get to a point where you can lift them up with relative ease? You start with lighter weights, you train, and you allow the muscle to grow and become stronger.
That’s what you’ll need to do with your mind as well. Train it, and it will become stronger!
As a first step, I would like to ask you to question your own negative thoughts whenever you have them. Whenever something scares you and gives you the anxiety you’re trying to leave behind, analyze what you had just been thinking. Observe what your mind comes up with.
What was the first domino? What thought led you to having the anxiety? What thought triggered it?
Please realize it will have been a thought. It’s not the location, the thing you saw, the sensation you felt, or the people you’re with that gave you the anxiety. It will have been a thought that you had as a reaction to what happened. What was your thought? Write it down as soon as you can afterward.
When you have good anxiety, like the anxiety you’ll feel when you see a tarantula bathing itself in your bathtub, it will be caused by an instinctive reaction led by your amygdala, the part of your brain that instantly decides whether something is a threat or not.
With bad anxiety, it will most often be a thought that starts with, “Oh no, what if?” or “What will people think if?” or “What’s this symptom I’m feeling?” etc.
Jenny did not have fears because of the traffic jam she was in. The traffic jam was never at fault; it represented no real danger. It was the thought that popped up and said, “I c
an’t get away now. I’m stuck, so what if...” that caused everything in her case.
For the next couple of days I would like you to look for your trigger thoughts. What are they? What makes the first domino drop?
It often goes like this:
You see something > thought and anxiety trigger > anxiety
You feel something > thought and anxiety trigger > anxiety
You see someone > thought and anxiety trigger > anxiety
I admit there are exceptions to this rule. It can happen that you’ve had a serious bout of anxiety in a certain location and being in the same or a similar place gives you the initial feeling of anxiety. That’s because your mind remembered how seemingly life threatening your previous experience was and wants you to avoid it.
Every time we panic like a maniac or act like a bloodthirsty tiger has just started to lick our legs, our brain remembers the exact setting this horrendous event took place in. It will do everything it can to have you avoid it the next time.
Thinking about it will be enough to launch all of the symptoms. But even then, they are still thoughts that will raise the anxiety level and potentially start the vicious cycle.
For the next couple of days, please write down your trigger thoughts. The ones you’ve had right before the anxiety rose significantly.
As soon as you have pinpointed your trigger thoughts, question them. Ask questions like “Is it really that bad?” and “Is this really that life threatening that I have to respond as if I’m surrounded by hungry tigers who have been fed a vegan diet for months?” and “Am I really in trouble?” and “Do I really have a problem, right now, in this present moment?”
Question their validity. Question whether the anxiety system that had been launched was really needed to come to a solution. It wasn’t if you weren’t in any real, imminent, physical danger.
Questioning negative thoughts takes away their power, as you’ll start to discover.
But this is only the beginning of what we can do, so here is another technique.
Choosing what thoughts to weigh in on
Imagine a flood of thoughts passing through your head, like a little river of ideas and concepts you think of. If you don’t pay attention to a thought, it will just pass and be gone. If, on the other hand, you do place importance on a thought, you take it aside and will feel its full power (positive or negative).
What thoughts are you currently taking aside?
Let me give you an example. Here is a set of thoughts that could pass through your head at any given time:
“I wonder what the weather will be like tomorrow. The movie I saw yesterday was great. Shouldn’t forget to pick up my dry cleaning after work. Do I still have some bananas at home? I’d like to make a milkshake. What will I cook for dinner tonight? Something light, I have an important meeting tomorrow. Did Rachel text me back yet about that birthday gift we’re buying for Monica?”
In this example, you simply let the train of thoughts pass and nothing happens to your emotions. There is no anxiety.
What you could have done instead was put more importance on a certain thought and launch the anxiety cycle. Here’s an example:
“... Do I still have some bananas at home? I want to make a milkshake. What will I cook for dinner tonight? Something light, I have an important meeting tomorrow. Oh no! That meeting is tomorrow already? What if I don’t sleep well? What if I start to tremble as I hand out the slides and my colleagues see it? And I hope the traffic won’t be too bad. Last time I drove, I felt bad. Oh and I’ll probably start to sweat during that meeting, God. I forgot to wash that one shirt I have that hides the waterfalls my armpits turn on whenever I’m presenting. Oh no, it’s going to be a disaster. And my boss may even fire me when my next review comes by, just like he did with Casey.”
Do you see what happened here? At first you had a simple stream of thoughts and you didn’t pay any additional attention to one thought in particular. They just passed by without changing your emotions. The first train of thoughts had no power over you since you didn’t give them any power.
In the second example, however, you took one thought apart and gave it power. This exact thought is the first bad domino that starts a flood of negative thoughts, leading to the catastrophe of a job loss. Not long after you start to weigh in on this thought, more mind games come into play.
If you suffer from any form of anxiety, this probably sounds familiar. The first domino is the most important one. That’s the moment you’ll have to start using the techniques I’m explaining now, like questioning the validity of that negative thought.
Here are some examples of questions that will direct your mind away from anxiety in this particular example:
“Really? Am I REALLY going to lose my job if I don’t sleep well tonight? Do I really need to worry that much about this? Is it worth it that I get all of this anxiety and that my day today will be ruined because of that meeting tomorrow? Even if it’s an important one? Will I die as a result of having a bad meeting tomorrow? Will the sun stop coming up in the morning?”
Questioning a negative thought works well. Using humor works even better in some cases.
Humor
Anxiety and humor are opposites. If you get chased by a real-life tiger, it will be impossible to laugh or have fun in any way. So having fun, when you’re anxious, communicates a very strong message to your entire anxiety system, “NO, I’m not being chased by a real tiger. This is a false alarm.”
Let’s get back to our previous example with the passing thought stream. What if you would respond like this:
“... something light, I have an important meeting tomorrow. Oh no! That meeting is tomorrow already. Yep, it is... And I could now start to freak out like the neurotic Ross from the TV sitcom Friends, but that won’t help. Besides, I’m so ridiculous. I tend to panic about the little things as if I’m being chased by tigers all the time.” With this kind of reasoning, you’re exposing that negative thought for what it is: FEAR (false evidence appearing real).
When I had my light-headedness I would for instance think, “Other people need to drink alcohol to feel dizzy like this. I can just switch it on without booze! Cool.”
This sounds childish, but the anxious thought stream you would normally be having will be as well anyway.
Even a silly, “Right, here I go again. If freaking out over nothing ever becomes an Olympic sport, I’m sure I could win a medal!”
It really doesn’t matter what you think or choose, as long as you take away the power of that first domino. Laugh with it or do the opposite of what your body expects.
Do the opposite: “Bring it on! I want to cuddle!”
This creates a small short-circuit in your brain that will say, “Wait what?” That’s often all you need to create an opening and get the necessary altitude to realize it’s just a false alarm.
As explained, it is crucial not to fear the fear. This technique will help you do that. But it is designed to do even more.
First, we need to remember that when the anxiety system launches and we’re not in real, actual, imminent danger, it is misfiring. Anxiety serves no other purpose than helping you when you’re in an imminent life-or-death situation.
You may know rationally that there is no danger, but you will oftentimes find that the body doesn’t follow right away. That’s because your amygdala and other systems are still convinced there is a threat. A real one.
What we’ll need to do here is create a disconnect in your mind. One of the many ways to do this is to firmly state, “Sure, whatever. BRING IT ON! Come on, I’m ready to cuddle!”
That’s the last thing your body and the famous alarm system will be expecting.
Let’s take a step back and look at an example. Kelly is sitting in a hot meeting room with musty air, surrounded by slick, straight-faced colleagues with ties and one even with a bow tie. As it’s almost her time to speak, she gets a whole range of bodily sensations that make her want to run out and never retu
rn. That, evidently, wouldn’t be good for her career. And the thought of that makes her anxiety even worse! She feels trapped and breaks out in a sweat.
Kelly’s usual reaction would be to try and manage this anxiety as much as she could and, if needed, excuse herself and run off to the restrooms.
This time, however, she does the opposite. Here’s her thought train: “My gosh, I’m sweating like a pig. I’m sure my colleagues can see it. What if... Hold it! Stop. You know what, bring it on! I don’t care. Show me what you’ve got, make it worse, make me feel bad, make it as bad as it can get. I’m ready, bring it on! Turn me into a sweaty pig! I want to find out if all of the bad consequences I keep imagining will really happen or not. I’m ready. I’m done fighting, so bring it on!”
Badass Ways to End Anxiety & Stop Panic Attacks! Page 7