Hello everyone,
Welcome to my new blog post.
Firstly, I do hope that you all as valued followers of It’s just a feeling, are currently as well as you can be within your own journeys with anxious symptoms.
I am hoping that within this blog post, I am able to show you a simple strategy that you are able to apply and practice during times of unhelpful catastrophic future fear thinking which if left, debilitates your present moments and takes aware your ownership of your present moments.
I guess the prompt for writing this blog now is because I am aware that to cope with anxious symptoms is hard enough, but anxiety comes in layers. By this I mean that I am mindful of any additional things/issues that add layers to fears that make it harder to deal with. (Just because the weight of the worries gets heavier). I am fairly sure that factors in the world currently, the cost of the living crisis, war etc will affect the capacity within all people to deal with fear and to keep perspective, as would any additional layers applicable to you and your situation. I want to help with this where I can.
Relating back to my own experience, I can clearly remember that when I suffered acute and debilitating anxiety, I seemed to lose my capability to keep myself regulated and to just be in the present moment. Instead, the hypervigilance that I felt ensured that my mind and physical symptoms felt outside of my own control, and I spent a great deal of time focusing only on how awful and hard my future may be now I felt anxious all the time.
My days consisted of wondering how much of my future felt to be going to ruins due to this ‘thing’ that was happening to me. I remember becoming preoccupied with a vision of my future that reflected my fears and this gave my anxieties all of my present moments and left me just filled with fear and dread.
I can understand why, and I am sure that those who have also felt these feelings can resonate with me. Simply, I was really scared. Really, really, scared. There was a lot at stake that this feeling threatened to take away from me. I truly felt I would lose my job, my family or at the very least be completely to blame when they suffered hardship ‘because of me and my feelings’. (The latter caused me to feel heavy with guilt and shame)
I remember being super critical of myself, and really felt the stigma of being anxious when no one around me seemed to understand what was happening to me.
The only way that I could see anything being ok again was for me to somehow resolve this feeling in some way. This became my dilemma. I decided I could not allow myself to feel the fear just in case it overwhelmed me or if feeling it meant that all of the bad things (my catastrophic fears) may happen. (This was not true of course, but it feels so real at the time).
In a nutshell, I was either not present because of my worries about where all of this may lead, or not present because I was fixated on both fixing and avoiding this feeling.
This is exactly what anxiety is made up of, suppressed feelings with a huge side serving of doubt. It is hard to be with or release suppressed feelings when you are super scared of them and with the doubt in my own ability to handle this, doubt about where this may lead and doubt whether I would continue to cope and get ‘better’ only made the cycle I was stuck in feel much worse.
The sayings:
‘if you can’t trust the process you will try to control it’ or
‘what you cannot trust you will control’
are very true, especially in relation to how anxious feelings are responded to. Anxiety takes away the belief that we will be ok or that we can handle it and creates doubt in the ability we have to feel it and not be overwhelmed by it. Speaking for myself at the time, there really was too much at stake and it was way too big a risk to allow the feeling to just be, a risk I quickly became unwilling to take at any cost. Even if that meant I would remain like I was presently. (This is where hopelessness and fear of the future set in)
Over time, during my own process of acute anxiety, I started stand back and to try and view the process of anxiety from an observational viewpoint, rather than automatically reverting to falling into the feeling. I started to realise that catastrophic ‘future’ thinking was a part of what makes up the anxious process. Essentially this is because we love and care and people, jobs and things have value to us, we ourselves have value to us- we want to be around for everything we love, and we truly believe that feeling anxious threatens to take all of us and what we love away. This is scary. We don’t want to live with the belief that we could lose anything, of course we don’t. I began to see that a part of feeling anxious was to catastrophise the future just as itchy spots make up a part of having chicken pox and so I developed a simple self-strategy to help me to manage my thinking during times of intense fear.
It is very simple, and I would like to share it with you all.
Ok, so while you are hypervigilant, catastrophic future thinking is difficult to turn off in fact , due to the way the brain works, it is almost impossible.
Hypervigilance takes time to calm down. You cannot just switch it off, but you CAN decide to work with it and to learn that you can create better habitual behaviours that intercept the cycle and in time become an automatic bodily response. This process takes work, there has to be a decision somewhere within you to commit to changing things for yourself. (Honestly, this commitment to taking some degree of responsibility for your own recovery is so important)
All I want you to do is to notice when you are forward thinking and to consciously bring yourself to what ‘is’ right now. This is a simple process and easy to do.
Let me give you an example narrative using just a situation where it may be easy to forward think. Let’s assume that you are taking a long academic course, a degree or similar and if you think forward a number of years to the final certificate right now, the work involved in getting there seems overwhelming and creates anxiety, you don’t feel you can ever get there, and the work load over the years seems enormous.
- Notice you are forward thinking and it is beginning to disable and overwhelm the present- this is not ok, partly because it begins to cause fear and disables you in the present and partly because I believe it is your right to own and experience your present moment not your anxieties decision to take that away from you.
- Say to yourself – ‘I notice that I am forward thinking, I want to take my moment back and ground myself, my experience belongs to me’
- Acknowledge your thoughts and feelings as ok- ‘ I can see that I am feeling fearful, I don’t like this, I’m scared, I don’t want to feel this. But here is where I am, and I accept that I am able to work within this moment with the fear. I don’t have to like or want it, but this is where I am. Thank you mind, I can see what you are doing to try to protect me, but it is not helping me right now (working with fear is fundamental in anxiety recovery- how do you learn to manage fear if you never allow yourself to work with it?).
- Say to yourself ‘It’s time to slow it down, to come back to where I am now’ – I want you to picture yourself slowing and to picture your mind heading back to join your physical body in your present moment
- Now, I would like you to talk presently to ground yourself in the present, I want the way in which you talk to yourself here to notice where you are now and to show yourself what is within your control now. ‘I don’t need to see the end certificate yet, I don’t know if I will get there as that is impossible to see right now, but what I can do is to concentrate on this assignment/module that I am doing now.
This brings you back and focuses on where you are and what you are able to manage presently. Each time you feel yourself going too far forwards, notice what you are feeling and what you are telling yourself, but bring yourself back to now using the above steps.
This is a technique I adapted to help myself during my own experience of anxiety, It does take practice, but what I have found is that now, all these years later, it happens automatically. In recovery and long-term management, this is what we are looking for.
I hope this goes some way to supporting you within your own anxiety experiences, and I will be back editing my blog very soon.
Till then,
Take care,Michelle x