How
to Overcome Anxiety
No.
1 - How you think affects the way you feel.
It’s fairly common to find that many people
associate how they feel is affected by what happens to them. For example, if
you have someone at work, such as your boss, who is rude to you, you may decide
that they make you cross. In
addition, you may also think that because of this behaviour you are made to behave differently than you
would otherwise do, for example, you might shun the person, not speak to them,
get in a bad mood.
Coaching can help put a different
perspective on this and help you to understand your thinking or beliefs are
positioned somewhere between what has happened to you (the event) and the resultant feelings
and behaviour. In summary, what we think, believe and the meaning we give
an event affects our emotions and the ultimate behavioural responses (our
actions).
Looking at the above example again,
coaching can help you realize that the rude work colleague actually does not
have a responsibility for making you
cross and for your behaviour of not talking to them. In effect, what you are
telling yourself is that your work colleague is being deliberately rude to just
you individually, thereby giving a meaning to their behaviour that makes yourself cross and
non-communicative.
Taking all this into account, you will
realize that your emotional and behavioural responses are influenced by the
meaning you give to each event. If you think about how a positive event makes
you feel, i.e. happy and excited, this becomes much clearer. On the other hand,
a negative event or situation can lead to feelings or thoughts of sadness or
even anxiety. Thinking negatively about negative events is quite often
unhelpful, not useful, unbalanced and not realistic and may leave you with disturbed feelings. In coaching terms,
‘disturbed feelings’ can mean that your negative response is not helping you to
come to terms with the negative event.
During coaching, it is the job of the coach
is to help you to identify thoughts, beliefs and meanings that you may have
attached to negative events that have left you feeling disturbed. Just imagine
how you would feel if you replace negative meanings with more helpful and realistic meanings to events that have
or could have happened to you, wouldn’t you experience less negative and
disturbing emotional and behavioural thoughts and feelings.
For example, if you boss was rude to you,
you might think that he was just having a bad day, or was under a lot of
pressure or had a row with his partner that morning rather than thinking that
his rudeness was specifically directed at you.
Thinking and feeling also heavily influence
how you behave or act. If you are feeling anxious you are likely to avoid
certain situations and people that may make you uncomfortable. This behaves
causes problems in many ways, such as:
- Avoidance behaviours,
such as avoiding certain situations that you
feel may be a source of danger or alarming, such as going to a party or a
large meeting, deny you the opportunity to face your fears and defeat
them.
- Self-destructive
behaviours, such as drinking, smoking and
eating too much, or worse still, using drugs to dispel the feelings of
anxiety, can end up leading to physical damage to your wellbeing.
- Isolating behaviours,
such as staying away from parties or meetings
and/or cocooning yourself in the perceived comfort of your home, will add
to your feelings of being alone and possibly make you feel depressed.
You may recognize some of these behaviours
and remember occasions when they have happened to you. You may also have
recalled your thoughts and the way they can make you feel anxious and affect
what you do and how you felt. Conversely, you might not have noticed them at
all, which is partly due to your thoughts, of which there are many different
kinds, and partly because you have no reason for articulating them into words.
Usually, expressing your thoughts can actually make things worse and create an
anxious reaction and, after all, you are not likely to tell people how foolish
you appeared to be.
However, it is essential that you know
about the different thinking patterns in order that you may be able to analyse
them when they occur. Thoughts can appear as perceptions, ideas, certain
attitudes, images, memories, reactions, beliefs, value judgements or even
assumptions. All of these emulate what is going on in your mind in contrasting
ways and they can all be responsible for perpetuating
the vicious cycles that keep you feeling anxious. What is worse is that
this is true even when you are not fully alert to their presence either
cognitively or when you try to put them into words.
Your thinking may have come from your
formative years, i.e. when you were younger and impressionable, and may be
affecting how you think today and to some extent become semi-formed ideas which you are unable to translate into words.
This is particularly true when you think about yourself and your memories of
events that have happened to you in the past, such as being rejected by a
potential date, or being bullied at school or the subject of ridicule or
criticism.
For example, the youngest child in a family
will admit to still feeling a baby or a child when they talk to their parents
or siblings. This may also manifest itself into feelings of inferiority and insignificance when
faced with senior colleagues at work. The interesting thing here is that even
though these events are happening in the present and are based on past events,
the person who has these thoughts may not be immediately aware of them.
Anxious people commonly expect to be judged
and this expectation creates an attitude
that shapes the way you think about things rather than having just a thought.
Many people report that negative beliefs about oneself, such as inferior,
worthless, unacceptable or unsuitable often generate feelings of low confidence
(‘I’ll never be any good at that’). This affirms a lack of belief in yourself
and, in addition, incorrectly places others above you on the social ladder,
i.e. they are more confident than me, they always get things right or they are
successful. People also report that they believe ‘others’ are always judging
them, watching out for their weaknesses, and analyzing their every move.
If this is what you have come to believe
then you have developed a set of rules for how you think and behave and you
generally will operate within these self-induced boundaries. For example, if
you make a mistake people will never forgive you, they might reject you or
severely criticize you. Ultimately, these rules for thinking isolate you and
exacerbate your anxious feelings and perpetuate the cycle of negative thinking
without ever having the opportunity to confront your fears and break free.
Next Chapter: How to Spot Errors in Your Thinking.
This special report was written by
Steve Scott, accredited life, business and executive coach, of Stepping
Stones Coaching and Chatting-Scott Partnership LLP. You may reproduce this
report as long as it is in full and includes this resource box. ©
|
|
