When an individual has severe or intense anxiety, there are some common patterns that many people do not recognize until it is brought to their attention in cognitive behavioral therapy. (CBT)
We start off by getting specific as opposed to generalizing. What does this mean?
Let’s start off with the specific definition of anxiety:
Negative thoughts you fully believe to be true but are not. These negative thoughts create fear(s) at an extreme level like being chased down a dark alley at night being chased by a 3-headed monster and you running for your life, so you won’t be attacked and eaten. And these thought processes are always accompanied by magical thinking much like…if I do this or that it will make me feel better or make the anxiety go down or away. However, if you are trying to magically think how to get away from something you believe to be true but it is not, nothing will work because it’s not true. But your heighted emotions and trying to solve what you are fearing doesn’t work, so you overthink and overthink which is mentally exhausting and never solves the problem and in fact raises your anxiety level.
How often do you use the words: always and never for example? When you tell yourself something like “I always… or he/she never,” you lock your thinking into an all or nothing perspective way of thinking, which is also called black and white thinking, where there are no shades of gray…and when this is done repeatedly, you only remember when you are right never when you are wrong. This goes right along with catastrophizing…or thinking the worst-case scenario which almost never occurs but creates extreme fears and very elevated emotions.
A common catastrophic thought might be something “I am or was devastated.” In the moment it may reactively seem to be true but if you were truly devastated it would be life changing. There are hundreds of examples of catastrophic thinking or thoughts that later that same day or a day or two later you recognized those thoughts were not true and you start thinking through your reaction in a more reflective way.
Another process that frequently is tied to anxiety is fortune telling…predicting the future…this may be by creating “if…then” scenarios as well as catastrophic results. No one in the history of humans has been able to accurately predict the future.
The last question to leave you with in this brief summary is the question:
What is the most common behavior associated with anxiety?
To be continued….
