Chapter 9

Recognizing and Challenging Anxious Thought Loops

Getting caught in negative thought loops can be become one of the greatest barriers to coping with and resolving stressful situations. Anxiety can build on itself. The deeper you go into the anxious thoughts, the more negative your perception of the situation becomes. Your brain may even start to add in negative beliefs of events. This is referred to as “distorted thinking”. For example, you may start with an anxious thought about leaving the coffee pot on, and find yourself replaying the morning’s events over and over again in your mind and with each replay of the morning, the memory of the red light on the machine still being on, becomes more and more convincing until you start to become certain that the pot is still on. You may decide to leave work to go home and check or spend the day worried and distracted.

Or perhaps you made a presentation for work and you feel like some pieces didn’t go as well as you had hoped, and then find yourself laying in bed all night, thinking that you have you’ve lost everyone’s respect, that your job is on the line, and even telling yourself, “whatever made you think you could do this?”

Anxious thoughts may influence our perception

• We can see things as worse than they actually are.
• They limit our ability to see options.
• We read into things that may not be there

Recognize the thoughts!

Below are some examples of common forms of distorted thinking:

• Filtering: Taking the negative details and magnify them while filtering out all positive aspects of a situation.
• Catastrophizing: Overestimating the chances of disaster, automatically going to the worst case scenario
• Polarized Thinking: Thinking in black and white terms (e.g., things are right or wrong, good or bad). A tendency to view things at the extremes with no middle ground. This is also referred to as “All or nothing thinking”
• Mind reading: Making assumptions about other people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors without checking the evidence. Inferring based on assumptions
• Shoulds: Operating by rigid rules and not allowing for flexibility. Using “should”, “ought”, or “must” statements that set up unrealistic expectations of yourself and others

We can limit ourselves based on negative beliefs

Part of what makes it hard to break away from these thoughts is that we may have gotten messages through our childhood reinforcing negative beliefs about ourselves and our abilities. This includes times we were told we couldn’t accomplish something, that we were going to fail or we weren’t good enough.

The messages we received, about limitations remain powerful well into our adulthood. Whether they came from parents and family, our experiences at school, or even from society at large. These messages get internalized and become part of our self-narrative. While some limitations are real, others are like the rope holding the elephants in place.

Challenge Them!

There are a variety of techniques that have been discovered to help disrupt these negative thought processes. Some work better in certain situations and for certain personality types. I suggest giving them all a try and seeing which is the best fit.

Noticing and Naming:

Through increased mindfulness, we are able to better recognize when we are getting stuck in these anxious thought loops and often just by naming, saying things like “this is my anxiety talking” or “yep, I’m an anxious person” can decrease their intensity and give us enough distance from the thoughts that we no longer feel as overwhelmed. The “leaves on a stream” technique from chapter 2 can be helpful as well. It some instances, it might even help the actually visualize placing the anxious thoughts on individual leaves and, in your mind, watch them float off.

Shutting it Down:

“Thought Stopping” is another technique which has been found to be helpful. This involves halting the thought loop, by simply telling yourself to “stop”. Some have even suggested using a rubber band around your wrist as a thought stopping trigger. Whenever you find yourself having these anxious thoughts, you gently snap the elastic.

Putting it away:

It can help to mentally put the worrying thoughts away, by telling yourself something to the effect of, “I can worry about this later.” Sometimes it can be hard to do this because we are afraid that if we stop thinking about the stressor or worry, we will forget to do something about it, or get caught unprepared when the concern comes up again. We believe that keeping the anxious thought in the front of our mind is the only way to make sure it gets resolved. This is where developing a way to put the worry away, which includes a reminder to come back to it, can be important.

One technique that may sound a little silly, but really works for a lot of people (especially when anxiety thought loops are impacting sleep) is to write down the things you are worried about, place that list in your shoe and say “I’ll deal with you again tomorrow”. You may find you sleep a little easier knowing that your worries won’t be lost. and, often, looking at the list again in the morning with a fresh set of eyes makes it seem a little less overwhelming.

R.A.I.N. meditation

This is a more extensive mindfulness technique, which utilizes Noticing and Naming as well as some of the other techniques we have discussed in previous chapters. It can take a little longer but can be worth it if you are feeling really stuck. There are four steps to this meditation.

• R: Recognize what is going on
• A: Allow for your worried thoughts to be as they are
• I: Investigate with kindness and self compassion
• N: Non-Identification/ Non-attachment. Understand that your thoughts and feelings don’t define you

See appendix for guided meditation

Make it a Habit

Think about your distorted thinking

• Pay attention to your negative thoughts throughout the day.
• Take time to write them down.
• Its often easier to start with the feeling and once you’ve identified what you’re feeling, then notice what thoughts are running through your mind as you experience those emo-tions or physical sensations.
• Are you filtering, catastrophizing, polarizing, mindreading, being rigid or all of the above?

Try out some strategies

When you become aware of an anxious thought, pick one of the 4 strategies described to chal-lenge them and try to apply it. Take a moment to note how well it worked.