Kimberly T > Recent Status Updates

Anticipatory anxiety is the what-if before the what-if. It causes you to project into the future in an attempt to prepare yourself for the next unwanted thought. You hope they do not come, and you are upset when they do. The result is that you keep oriented toward the future, pay very little attention to the present, and keep your body and mind sensitized.

When you deliberately invite these thoughts, you do not give them the power to waylay your life.

5A's:
1. attitude of acceptance
2. Assign accurate assessment
3. Active allowance of awareness and affect
4. Avoid avoidances - always attempt approach
5. Action: advance activities anyways

Fearful feelings go from "they are so uncomfortable that I find them intolerable" to "they are uncomfortable but tolerable." The goal is to feel that you can tolerate the anxiety better as opposed to eliminating it completely. It is your inability to tolerate unwanted intrusive thoughts that keeps them going. Getting over your fears is allowing yourself to experience them.

Inhibitory learning: New pathways are created in the brain that compete with the old, fearful response. A non fearful response becomes the default response with enough practice and you are no longer afraid.

Emotional processing: Any exposure that activates anxiety brings the false fear structures into play, and they change as a result of seeing that nothing dangerous (as opposed to frightening) really happens. Keep in contact with the triggering thoughts until your anxiety goes away or at least calms down. This allows your brain to get used to the thought and habituate to it.

Unwanted intrusive thoughts do not deserve the dignity of a response.

Each intrusion seems to indicate an emergency and you need to do something about it immediately, but this is false alarm. If there is something unclear or uncertain, there is an urgent desire to clear it up now. The most helpful response to the feeling of urgency is to slow down, float above the fray, and practice letting time pass.

The fight for certainty is a major factor in keeping your unwanted intrusive thoughts so intense. Where else do you demand absolute certainty? Nowhere else. The problem is that these thoughts FEEL so threatening. Anxious thinking takes over and the thought seems to have a high probability of occurring, but it is just a thought.

Remember that any thought that produces a repeated feeling of urgency is a sign of anxiety. A feeling of urgency is discomfort, not danger. It comes automatically with thoughts but is not a signal for action. Counting down until you feel better propels you into the future, increases your discomfort, and makes you fight the thought harder. Slow down. Let it be. You are dealing with discomfort, not danger.

Wise Mind: As far as I'm concerned, I could sit with these thoughts all day. My discomfort has nothing to do with being in any danger. These are just thoughts.

Don't allow yourself to explore the ideas or content of your thoughts. Don't try to come up with a plan or solve any problem - the thought is not a problem. Accept and allow means you actively allow thoughts to be there, not wishing they were gone, because it allows you to grasp the thoughts are unimportant. Thoughts are just thoughts. False Comfort always drives Worried Voice. Withdraw attention and participation.

Remember whenever you experience the effects of anxious thinking, having 99% certainty isn't enough. There is no risk that feels reasonable. You are looking for total and complete certainty. This fuels your Worried Voice and makes it harder for you to label your thought as an intrusive one. You focus on the content of your thought than the false alarm. Labeling allows you to allow uncertainty in life.

RJAFTP: Recognize, Just thoughts, Accept and allow, Float and feel, let Time Pass, Proceed

1. Learn the proper attitude to adopt each time an unwanted intrusive thought pops up. (it's acceptance)
2. Retrain your brain so your newly learned attitudes become your default reaction.

The worst part of every intrusive thought is not the thought itself, but your internal commentary that follows. Reducing the commentary will reduce your distress.

Passive techniques reinforce the fact that the thoughts do not constitute a danger, do not need to be fought, have no special significance, and will go away on their own once they are left alone. Instead of battling, you can try to intentionally go toward uncertainty and distress. When you do not recoil from your thoughts, they lose their power.

Trying to control the thoughts is entirely the wrong attitude. It ignores the fact that the thoughts are meaningless and harmless and DON'T require controlling. It suggests urgency, importance, and danger, when none exists.

Reassurance involves entanglement by encouraging you to argue with the thoughts as if they were valuable or worthy of attention. It ends up with escalating efforts because it only works temporarily, and your mind comes back for more and better arguments = paradoxical effort. "yes, but what if?" eventually the reassurance fails. If you make searching for it a habit, the reassurance continues the cycle.

Your thoughts trigger your alarm response and so the thoughts FEEL like they are correct. But come back to knowing that feelings/thoughts aren't facts and remember that anxiety is bluffing you once again. When emotional impact is added to a neutral thought, it becomes much easier to become entangled with it.

Entanglement with a thought means you have created an inner dialogue about the content running through your mind...answering back or arguing with an intrusion is what keeps it going. Getting involved makes the intrusive thoughts stronger and more insistent.

It does not work to try to force your body to relax, to feel a particular emotion, or to force your mind to not have specific thoughts.

Anxious thinking makes any uncertainty feel threatening. It also makes thoughts FEEL threatening. But neither thoughts or feelings are facts.

Anxious thinking requires an absolute guarantee that a disastrous experience you think about WON'T occur. You feel driven to ask for reassurances of safety, and you try to avoid the situations that trigger the feeling. Anxious thinking CANNOT get that guarantee. No matter how much you tell yourself to think of something else, they come right back.

Anxious thinking state = very vulnerable to unwanted intrusive thoughts. Thought action fusion = no difference between thinking about something and it actually happening. Thoughts actually feel predictive. It makes it seem like thinking something = doing it.

Things like social rejection, worries about health or finances, the mere hint of disapproval from a boss can become conditioned triggers that set off the alarm response. The trigger is an unsettling reminder of past unwanted thoughts; this state of mind is called anxious thinking. Anxious thinking comes directly from the hyper alert state of the brain.

Fear Diminishing Cycle: Wise Mind realizes the amygdala is just doing its job, that the thought is only a thought, and that the alarm is likely a false positive, needing only time to pass until it stops. Wise Mind remembers that first fear is automatic and second fear is something you can change. Feeling anxious is not the same as being in danger.

Fear increasing cycle: As long as Worried Voice asks "what if something bad is happening" question, your amygdala continues to produce whooshes of fear. False Comfort tries by minimizing, pretending, explaining away, calming, and making a plan just in case. But this confirms for Worried Voice that the alarm was legitimate and needs to be dealt with. Then Worried Voice raises what-ifs again. False Comfort resists, etc

1. First fear is unstoppable because it comes before your conscious will has a chance to intervene. Willpower has nothing to do with it because it is triggered before willpower can intervene.
2. First fear goes away quickly when you realize you are in no danger.

People with unwanted intrusive thoughts have an amygdala that has learned to become afraid and sound the alarm of certain thoughts. Conditioned learning = fear responses become a habit of the brain to thoughts that you have no objective reason to be afraid of.