01 Sep How To Stop Feeling Anxious And Live A Happy Life – 3 Expert Tips
It’s OK not to be OK all the time.
And it’s certainly OK to feel anxious at times – anxiety is, after all, a perfectly normal and healthy emotion.
But sometimes anxiety and distress can be too much and too overwhelming.
At these times there are things we can do to gain more control and to feel happier …
via Eric Barker
Some days everything seems to be outside your comfort zone. A bit of anxiety is part of the modern world. Worry about that presentation at work, worry about the kids at home, worry about what’s on the news… worry, worry worry.
Worst-case scenarios ping pong around in the echo chamber of your skull. Your brain is like a close friend who keeps trying to kill you. You can try to think your way out of this but, if you’re an anxious person, well, thinking probably hasn’t worked out all that well for you. You want to repeatedly jab at the Flight Attendant Call Button of Life – help, please.
Maybe you think McGruff the Crime Dog couldn’t solve this one. But there is a solution…
Back in the 1950’s, the great Albert Ellis created Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) which helped spawn Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), along with a slew of other acronyms. Plain and simple, most studies show these to be the most effective anxiety treatments available.
And far from being complex, the basics of REBT are exceedingly simple to grasp. (Amazingly, you could even cover the fundamentals in one blog post.)
Albert Ellis’ book is “How To Control Your Anxiety Before It Controls You.”
Let’s get to it…
Easy as ABCDE
We often mistakenly believe that problems cause bad feelings. That adversity (A) leads to consequences (C). Someone sticks a gun in your face and you get scared. A = C.
But what if you realize it’s just a water gun? You’re not scared anymore. Nothing about the situation changed. Only your beliefs. So we need to adjust our formula and stick a B in there:
Adversity + Beliefs = Consequences.
It’s not the adversity that causes your feelings; it’s your beliefs about the adversity. Do you think they’re life threatening or trivial? Likely or unlikely? Public speaking, job interviews, heights, spiders – it’s not the thing itself, it’s our beliefs about them. And often our beliefs are irrational, making no concessions to common sense.
Simply put: change the irrational beliefs to rational ones and you usually change your feelings for the better.
Whenever you feel anxious, play a little game: Find the irrational belief. It can be tricky at first because you probably take them for granted. But they usually come in the form of absolutistic musts, shoulds, oughts, and other demands:
- “I must do well.” (Irrational. You’ve screwed up plenty in the past and you’re not dead. You don’t even remember most of those mistakes that were “intolerable” at the time.)
- “Others must treat me well.” (Irrational. They don’t have to. And you’ll almost certainly be fine if they don’t.)
- “Things must work out the way I want them to.” (Irrational. Sorry, the universe has once failed to recognize you as God-Emperor of all existence.)
All of these beliefs are impossible to guarantee and irrational. And you can live a good life without any of them. But they undergird many of our concerns and they’re what drives us nuts.
That’s ABC. But don’t worry, there’s another letter. And a solution…
“D” is for dispute. Dispute those irrational beliefs.
“If I don’t perform well during this presentation my career will be over.”
Is that likely? Is that the most common result? How many times have you seen that happen? (Hyperbole is the worst thing in the universe.) It’s irrational.
“If I get in the ocean, I could be eaten by a shark!” Really? There are a lot more people eating sharks today than there are sharks eating people.
Question the rationality of your underlying beliefs. This isn’t blind optimism; it’s playing the odds. If someone else was doing public speaking, what result would you bet $1000 on as being most likely? “They’ll probably do fine, and if they screw up, it’s not a big deal. That’s what I’d bet a grand on.”
Okay, next letter…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE