Do You Make This Mistake When Anxious?

Have you ever tried to explain your fears about being anxious to someone and said something like, “I know I’m OK but…?”

On what probably feels like a thousand occasions you’ve said that you’re doing pretty good.

Yet inside you might still be holding on to lingering doubts about whether or not you’re going to survive your next bout of anxiety.

You’ve at times even convinced yourself that you’ll handle the next heart attack scare, panic attack, or uncontrollable eye twitch with a lion’s courage, that is, until it happens again and you start to feel like you’re coming apart at the seams.

I know this happens because it happened to me all the time, for years actually. I’d sit and pray, beg, and plead to just be OK.

It was never enough.

Today, I want to talk to you about your lingering doubt. What it means, why it’s always there, and how you can destroy it.

The Challenge

I’ve learned many lessons over the past decade as an anxiety sufferer.

Chief among those lessons was that I was always in doubt about my health, physical or mental, because I often reached conclusions about my health using my gut and not my head. You probably do the same thing.

That is a mistake we all make when we’re anxious.

We use our feelings to gauge how safe we are. We often assume that if we’re anxious we must also be in danger.

So often we throw logic out the window, or worse yet, we don’t even invite it to the party when we try to cope with our deepest fears. But, of course, this isn’t because we want it to be this way.

The challenge is to break this habit.

The Solution

The way to change this is to first be aware that it’s a problem for you. I think a lot of us would like to think that we”ll be OK if we simply keep telling  ourselves that enough times.

The trick though, is to do that, but in a way that is believable to your anxious brain.

Anxiety hates logic. Because when you rely on logic to reach conclusions anxiety doesn’t have enough power to misdirect you. It simply can’t overcome straight thinking.

So I want to show you how you can trick your brain into doing what you’ve been praying for it to do for a long time.

I don’t want to bore you to tears with a long treatise, so I’ve produced a podcast to lay out the plan.

In this podcast I discuss:

1. Emotional Reasoning
2. Why Emotional Reasoning is so powerful
3. And how you can overcome it

Press play to listen now.

Question: Do you often rely on feelings to know if you’re OK? Comment below.

 

 

 

References:

1. When Head and Heart Do Not Agree: A Theoretical and Clinical Analysis of Rational-Emotional Dissociation (RED) in Cognitive Therapy. Richard Scott. Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy. New York: 2007. Vol. 21, Iss.1; pg. 37, 14.

2. Anxiety Disorders: Why they Persist and How to Treat them. David Clark. Behavior Research and Therapy 37 (1999) S5-S27.