Not Being Able To Cope

It’s also common thinking that the prospects of change, doing something different or taking ourselves out of our comfort zones is just an action that sets us up for a fall. I used to think simple tasks such as posting a letter or going to the shops was out of my reach. Thoughts revolving around negative outcomes like not being able to cope and fearing panic attacks often act as a stumbling block when actually getting out and establishing a new routine. Stop trying to work it out because, quite frankly, there isn’t anything to work out! You know what anxiety is, where it has come from and what happens within your body when anxiety and panic strikes. You need to snap out of the routine that only promotes anxiety and irrational thinking and start a new one. It is a scary prospect but it doesn’t take long for your positive actions to dampen the severity of your scary thoughts. Now you may be questioning why and how this would help at all. Rebecca has been suffering with generalised anxiety and panic disorder for around 3 years. She finds it very difficult to leave the house and as a result of this lost her job a year ago. She lives on her own and hasn’t the confidence to get back in touch with her friends, or establish new relationships due to fear of leaving the house and struggling with severe social anxiety. She wishes she could feel like she ’used to’, or a time where like how she felt before the anxiety started. Almost every day she wakes up hoping to feel normal again, but is immediately disappointed when she finds that she still feels the same and that there are still odd things happening to her body.

Lost Inside Of Myself

Her first thought when she wakes up is Do I feel ok today?. When she doesn’t feel the way she wants to she starts to panic. She panics because yet again everything doesn’t feel normal and that she feels like she’s living with an incurable, psychological condition. The panic then defines her world around her and sways any decisions and motivation that may have existed with the freshness of waking up from sleep. Her thoughts then turn on herself. She begins to body scan. Why have I still got this headache?, this pain is still here, something is seriously wrong with me, I feel like I’m going insane! she often thinks. I’ll work this out! It’ll be something deep and complex but once I’ve found the answer I’ll be ok again! Rebecca proceeds to pace around her house and exhaust herself. Every day she waits for the feelings to pass, or for that miracle thought to enter her head. Sometimes, when she feels ok, she reasons with herself that the anxiety has passed. This is until the symptoms of anxiety crop up again. Her chest flutters, she feels lightheaded, her breathing changes and her mind is flooded with undesirable thoughts.

Stress Is The Worst Thing

She’s back to square one. What’s wrong with me? It’s obvious from this scenario that Rebecca has been confined to her own negative thought patterns and has fallen victim to abiding by her own sense of irrationality. Rebecca is constantly anxious and has found herself stuck in the loop of peaking anxiety. She thinks that simply by waiting and trying to think her way out of it she will eventually get to where she wants. She has been suffering for 3 years. Instead of waking up and thinking Am I ok today?, she needs to think, Ok well I’ve had anxiety and these symptoms for a while now. I accept this and I’m going to do something productive today regardless of how I feel’. We need to realise that our bodies take time to recover from the symptoms anxiety can produce. Pains, aches, derealisation, an imbalance of adrenaline and all of the other symptoms can take a while to subside, but they will subside given the chance. So for now just ignore them. Rebecca needs to ignore how she feels because she knows she has anxiety and a plethora of things wrong with her. With that out of the way, we can now begin to change our behavioural habits.

To Keep Your Balance, You Must Keep Moving

Positive rationalisation tells us that the outside is no more of a danger than sitting inside. Goals that challenge our fears, such as going outside, begins the process of rewiring the default thought process of our brains. The more we rely on emotional crutches, such as the walls of our homes, then the more we’ll end up back at the beginning. The more we keep our minds occupied on tasks, hobbies, fun activities and socialising, then the less we keep our minds on bad thought patterns, such as dwelling on the anxiety or working out our problems. Believe me this works. Set yourself a goal no matter how simple it may seem. If you find it a scary and difficult task then I suggest you bravely undertake it. For me it was doing the simple things like catching the bus to work, going to the supermarket or going for a short walk. You’ll find that nothing bad happens despite your feelings telling you otherwise. You have to ignore your gut on this one and rely on willpower. There’s no use sitting in thinking away your problems. The anxiety umbrella, we can put all of our excessive and irrational worries to one side and concentrate on dealing with it as one manageable problem. Excessive worry is just anxiety. It’s a normal part of the human thinking process to contemplate different types of outcomes to any given situation. In Rationality and Worst Case Scenarios we covered several types of irrational conclusions that our mind can lead us to when we’re in a state of anxiety. What we have learned is that anxiety causes us to distort our thinking to the point where we simply focus on the frightening possibilities and less on the harmless, more likely outcomes.