CFD Psych

Anxiety is what we are feeling when we "what if" about our fears. We say "what if so and so happens?" Our chest tightens up. It  feels like we can't breathe. We enter the fear zone and experience our "what if story" as if it was happening in real time. The imagined worse case, or at least, bad ending feels like it's coming down on us. In response to our fears and worries, we move hurriedly to "get ourselves busy". This way we won't have to think about our living nightmare so much. Our primary anxiety reduction technique is usually to just get busy. We attempt to distract our minds from the anxiety-inducing story. It works in part, but when we aren't busy, the story and the anxiety storm returns. Procrastination works as our secret friend. We can hide behind the long to-do list and never get "caught up". Maybe we can stretch out our busy-ness and avoid our anxiety.

An alternative approach is to get ourselves purposefully unbusy. Regarding our anxiety, we purposefully "bring it on". We allow our self to feel the anxiety. We stare in the face of our"what if" story and imagine the feared outcome.  We feel the pain for a moment, but then we smile. Instead of saying to ourselves "isn't it awful", we flip it around and look for a way to view this as an excellent outcome so long as we can tweak the ending a bit. We allow ourselves to figure out a way where we will be better off, happier or stronger. If we freeze up on justifying our desire for the outcome, we can at least change the ending to the story to something interesting and in our interest. After all, it is "our story" to construct is it not?  As authors of our own narratives, lets realize and accept that our stories simply don't have to end so negatively. As author, add a new wrinkle, a new twist, an unexpected positive result, a nice surprise. Let some good things come our way. Smile. Enter the anxiety, stare it down, change the nightmarish ending to a more pleasant one. Add a sense of humor, refuse to take ourselves so seriously. Realize we have options. Busy-ness may work temporarily, but it may not be the best solution. Best wishes, Stephen S. Elliott, Ph.D., Psychologist