ANXIETY
Learn to choose your thoughts carefully and consciously, and take a more positive and productive path, writes Dr Kirren Schnack
How often do you have an anxious thought that transports you to the absolute worst possible outcome? The tendency to assume something catastrophic will happen in the future is known as worst-case-scenario thinking, and this particular type of thinking is remarkably prevalent in anxiety disorders. Worst-case-scenario thinking possesses the extraordinary ability to transform a simple headache into a brain tumour; cancelled plans into personal rejection; or a routine flight into a catastrophic crash. It seems that your mind is inclined to persuade you that the absolute worst outcome is not only possible but highly probable.
Your mind’s ability to imagine vividly is so powerful that, simply by thinking things that haven’t happened, you can feel as if they’re happening right now. This ability to imagine the worst has an adaptive advantage for our survival, but we rarely need to use this function nowadays. It’s when you experience this level of disturbance in your thoughts constantly that you can easily feel overwhelmed. We’re all capable of imagining all sorts of scary, weird, wonderful and exciting things. But because an anxious brain is biased in favour of fear, it readily grabs onto things that fit with that – usually doom and catastrophe.
When you envision these terrible situations, it’s more than likely that you’ll experience an emotional reaction proportionate to that imagined scenario. If you imagine something catastrophic, your emotions are going to be very intense. People often view these emotionally intense responses as a further sign that something bad will happen. Here, you fall into predicting the future based on an imagined catastrophe, while coupling that catastrophe with intense emotions. In reality, your thoughts and your feelings have no predictive effect on the outcome of any such future event.
The beliefs you hold about the future have a big impact on your wellbeing. If you keep telling yourself that your future is full of doom, you won’t feel good at all. It is much better to hold a more balanced view of the future – it doesn’t even have to be overly optimistic, just more realistic: ‘Life has its ups and downs. There are good times ahead, and there may be some challenges too.’
Anxiety is like a GPS that only gives you directions to the worst-case scenarios. If you keep listening to this GPS, blindly following it, you’ll end up at a place you don’t want to be at. To get to somewhere different, you have to change the input into the GPS. You have to choose a different route. A GPS can only take you where you tell it to go, just like your thoughts can on
