Free therapy tool: Is anxiety always a bad thing? How to cut through anxious thoughts in seconds

Photo by Tonik on Unsplash

Anxiety is one of the most prevalent and damaging mental health issues impacting our society today. I have spent my career working with those suffering from anxiety on various levels of the spectrum of suffering, and all humans experience anxiety to some degree.

Typical anxiety happens to us all, and in the modern world, we usually experience it to some degree every single day in small doses. Sometimes we suffer from longer circumstance-induced bouts of anxiety, and some of us seem to have anxiety written in our genes - it’s the model with which we came to understand the world, and it underpins how we react to the things we find in it.

The human brain is extraordinary

It never ceases to amaze me how human brains find new ways, methods, and behaviours to manifest anxious feelings, and it can be extraordinarily distressing to those who suffer from it when the symptoms begin to become debilitating. This post is not for those who are suffering from the “anxiety impacts my whole day” variety of struggles. For those people, self-managed interventions are, in my experience, more difficult to make work, and I would wholeheartedly suggest seeking and speaking to someone who can offer you direct support and guidance in how to work with your debilitating anxious feelings and behaviours. It doesn’t have to be like this, and there is absolutely no shame in seeking help for it.

For those who feel like their anxious thoughts are more frequent, but perhaps annoying or frustrating, I would like to offer a quick therapy tool that I use with those who are presenting mild anxiety symptoms. It’s a logical question that we use to analyse the thoughts that we are having and make a judgment on how useful it is. An example is:

The situation and the tool

I’m late for a dentist appointment and I’ve just got in my car to realise that I have no fuel. I will definitely need to refill before I get to the clinic, and that will no doubt add extra lateness to my arrival time. My anxiety kicks in, and my heart rate increases. My hands become sweaty, and I get hot. I’m having a physical reaction in the moment to my panic that I’m going to be late for my appointment and maybe admonished or ignored by the dentist. I hate to be late; I find it crushingly embarrassing. What will they think of me? My dad always scolded me for my lateness, and I haven’t changed at all...

Time for analysis, not self-judgement

We look at the circumstances to see if the situation allows for any wiggle room or change in outcome. If I cannot change the outcome - i.e., I’m going to be late no matter what and there’s nothing I can do about it, then we have to accept that these thoughts are “pointless ruminations”. This means that the thoughts and consequent feelings of this event have no impact on the outcome and only serve to encourage us to spiral further into distressing or unpleasant feelings.

It’s at this point we can acknoweldge the thought directly with something like “thanks brain, I can see this is something that I can’t change and I’m going to have to stop ruminating and concentrate on calling ahead to the clinic to let them know I’ll be late, or just getting there as soon as I can, and stop this thought cycle before it takes up any more of my time and peace”.

This allows us to stop spending any further time descending into unnecessary stress and rumination on the perceived consequences. What is the point of spending time grieving something that we can’t do anything about? If something is unchangeable, then perhaps we can permit ourselves to move into pragmatism and cut off the shame spiral before it gets worse.

Adapt, improvise, and overcome

However, what if our analysis concludes that there is something we could do about the situation?

What if I realise my car has no fuel and I’ll be really late if I refill it before getting to the dental clinic, but if I quickly order an Uber or minicab straight there, then I can forget my fuel gauge. Plus, since I will no longer need to find parking, I won’t be as late as I feared and will ultimately be able to keep my appointment.

This kind of response recategorises the initial thought as “useful worry”. It’s the kind of stress that kicks us into the “adapt, improvise, and overcome”* part of our brain. This is the kind of stress that drives us to be extra early for a train, or to make sure we have our passport for our flight, or, as recently happenned to me, have the ability to think quickly and book an alternative form of transport out of a city when trains are cancelled and suddenly hundreds of stranded passengers are looking for a way home (thanks Bla Bla Car!).

If you can sit with your anxiety in the moment, analyse it and reframe it as “pointless rumination” or “useful worry” then you might be able to transform your relationship with your sometimes anxious brain and bring back online the parts of it which allow you to flow through the world and its eventual ups and downs with a little more ease and peace.

Questions to ask yourself

• Is there anything that I can do about this?
• Will continuing to think about this only serve to make me feel worse about the situation?
• If I can do something, will it affect the outcome in a way that makes the situation better?
• Is this worry useful? Is it helping me to be on time or prepared for an event?
• Are these thoughts ruminating? Am I going over the same thing repeatedly without resolution?
• Can I thank my brain for trying to protect me, but push back against the “pointless rumination” and move on to something else? (an activity, a distraction, a task)
• Can I thank my brain for converting the stress of a situation into actionable steps and use the feelings as “useful worry”?

What next

These are some of the ways I encourage my clients to challenge the data that their brain presents them with. Of course, these are innocuous examples, and I hope that your own anxieties are manageable and work with this kind of tool; however, as I said before, if they do not, and you cannot manage them alone, then do not be afraid to talk about them with someone, a friend, a therapist, or a trusted third party. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, and there are many ways to work with these difficult feelings; it can just feel really hard to do so from the confines of our own thoughts.

Book a free 30-minute introductory session to talk about these feelings with me, a BACP-accredited counsellor and talking therapist, here.







* Unexpected thanks to Bear Grylls for this phrase!