23 May Two great articles about how to better manage anxiety
Anxiety – we all have it; and we’d all like to better manage it.
Anxiety, to a point, is a normal human emotion; so we shouldn’t even try to “get rid” of it.
But anxiety, beyond a certain point, can obviously be highly distressing and so better managing it is undoubtedly a desirable goal for many.
Reducing anxiety is also not just about reducing distress; less anxiety also means more emotional space for positive emotions such as happiness.
So, today I’m happy to share these two interesting and useful articles for your anxiety reducing desires and hopefully also your greater happiness …
First up – how to Unfollow Your Worry via Psychology Today by Terri Bacow
KEY POINTS
- Instead of fighting with your worried thoughts, try a strategy that psychologists call cognitive defusion.
- You can “unfollow” your worry by examining your anxious thoughts from a distance and labeling them “thinking.”
- Unfollow worry using imagery, metaphors, or specific statements, such as “I am having the thought that_____.”
- Giving yourself permission to have worried thoughts without judgment works far better than suppressing them.
You may be spending a lot of time fighting with your worried thoughts or trying to get them to stop. What if, instead, you try another strategy? One particularly effective approach is what psychologists call cognitive defusion. Defusing worry is a tactic in which, instead of actively engaging with your worries, you effectively unfollow them. This involves detaching yourself from your worried thoughts and observing them objectively from a distance.
Defusion is a strategy that asks you to identify your worried thoughts simply as mental activity in your brain. You become an observer of your thoughts rather than a victim of them. This involves mindfully noticing these thoughts without judging or reacting to them.
… keep reading the full & original article HERE
And taking a slightly different approach – How new ‘meta-cognition’ techniques can calm your restless mind via Science Focus by Christian Jarrett
To help relieve anxiety, you’ve probably heard of CBT – that’s Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which involves changing how you think about stuff in order to benefit your feelings and behaviour.
For instance, if you see an upcoming work presentation as a banana skin and you begin catastrophising about all the ways it could go wrong and ruin your life, your CBT therapist might work with you to form a more realistic and less melodramatic interpretation of the challenge, which ought to lower your anxiety levels.
However, there’s now an important new off-shoot of CBT called meta-cognitive therapy.
Where CBT is largely concerned with what you’re thinking, meta-cognitive therapy focuses on what you think about what you’re thinking (hence the word ‘meta’ in its name). It’s not the thoughts themselves, but how your mind responds to them that’s the real focus here.
For instance, when it comes to anxiety, the idea is that by changing what you think about your anxious thoughts, you’ll start to feel calmer.
… keep reading the full & original article HERE