Stop Anxious Thinking

One of the best ways to prevent anxiety is to avoid anxious thinking.

The first step is to learn to recognize your anxious thoughts, so you can stop them as soon as possible. Once your heart rate is racing, you start pacing around or tapping your foot, and your thoughts turn to potential disasters, uncertain outcomes, and obsessions over the worst things that can happen. Then, you are in full-on anxiety mode and you need to cut off the problem at the source as soon as possible.

In order to prevent that, you have to develop a routine that helps you fight these thoughts before they are fully formed.

READ: Preventing Anxiety

The second step is to avoid "all or nothing" thinking. This type of thinking happens when you tell yourself that if something does not go perfectly, then you are a complete failure and nothing will ever go right again.

To avoid this kind of thinking, just consider the many possible scenarios that can happen.

The third step is to avoid overgeneralization. Overgeneralizing happens when you draw from one negative experience and think that it has to dictate the rest of your life. Instead, you have to remind yourself that you are drawing from a small set of data and that one bad date or one bad experience will have little impact on your entire life.

In fact, you have to tell yourself that you will have plenty of opportunities for something in your life in the future.

The fourth step is to avoid catastrophizing. Catastrophizing means thinking that the worst possible thing in any situation will happen. In order to avoid it, it is recommended to write down all the possible outcomes of varying degrees of positive or negative consequences, and realize that it is likely that the worst thing will not ever happen.

Therefore, one has to combat catastrophizing by expecting the best possible thing to happen instead of the worst.

The fifth step is to avoid focusing on the negative. This happens when one focuses on the negative aspects of a situation instead of the positive.

You can avoid doing that if you make a list of all the positive things of the situation and you will see that the positive aspects will likely outweigh the negative.

The sixth step is to avoid personalization. Personalization is when you take a situation out of your control and blame it on yourself. However, blaming yourself for everything that goes wrong in the world will only increase your anxiety.

To avoid it, you have to think of the actual case of the problem. You can make a list of all the things that could have contributed to the situation. Therefore, you will realize it has nothing to do with you.

The seventh step is to know what you can and you cannot control. This is the key to prevent anxiety. One excellent is to write a list of all the things that are worrying you and mark the ones that you can and can't control.

Tell yourself that you are not helping anyone, not yourself, not anyone around you, by wasting your time worrying about things you cannot fix.

And the final step is to challenge your anxious thoughts. When you have recognized your anxious thoughts, ask yourself some of the following questions:

• How likely is it that the thing I am worried about will actually happen?
• If the chances of the thing happening are low, what are some more probable outcomes?
• What evidence do I have that any of this is true?
• How is it helping me to worry about this thing? How is it hurting me?
• What would I say to my best friend if she was worrying about the same thing?

This article is based on this source.