Four words to my past self: part 3

You're still here! Yay! Thank you for coming back!

Well, you already know by now that I have an anxiety disorder and that I want to share with you all the strategies I've learned to use to feel good most of the time despite all the crazy. You also know why words like should, must, and ought can hurt you, and have banished them totally from your vocabulary. (Only joking. It took me literally the best part of a year to stop using them - if you've even managed to think about it a little since reading the last post, you're doing better than I did at first.)

So, the second unhelpful thinking style. Here it comes...

Emotional reasoning

It goes like this:

I feel awful. My stomach is tied into a knot and I feel sick and I can't breathe... Something must be REALLY WRONG!

You feel emotionally (and possibly physically) terrible, so you assume there must be a good reason for why you feel like that. So you start searching through your mind for reasons why you might feel terrible, and pretty soon you come up with something. That goes something like this:

I feel really anxious. Why is that? I thought everything was fine. But it can't be fine because I feel so terrible. What is wrong? Maybe it's because my dog might be sick/I haven't done enough work/my relationship is actually a disaster waiting to happen/there's going to be an apocalypse. Yes, it must be that.

But here's the truth: if you are an anxious person, sometimes your brain will make you feel terrible for absolutely no reason. You will just feel shaky and anxious and sick and not be able to eat and all those other horrible things, and there won't actually be anything wrong. I don't know why. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me will comment on this post and tell me. But I do know that if you feel really anxious and you don't know why, the worst thing you can do is assume there is actually a reason and try to find it.

So what can you do instead of trying to work out why you feel bad? What can you do instead of engaging in emotional reasoning? Well, you can distract yourself. Go for a run, listen to some music, watch a sitcom. Give your brain a break, and give your body a chance to calm down. Your thoughts are providing fuel for your body's anxious symptoms. If you deprive your anxiety disorder of that fuel, it will burn itself out and the feelings will go away.

tldr: just because you feel bad, doesn't mean there's actually anything wrong. Distract yourself with something else and try not to dwell on how you're feeling, and you'll soon feel better.