We are told there is an epidemic of anxiety affecting young and old alike. Many of the messages we get, tell us life is difficult. Mental health problems abound. There is a diagnosis for every kind of worry or bad feeling. The media, the NHS, some charities and self-help organisations, all tell us it’s not something we can do for ourselves; we need to seek counselling or therapy even if that means being on a waiting list for months. In the background big pharma encourages our doctors to persuade us all our problems can be solved with one of their products. What are we going to do about it? Is there anything we as individuals can do?   

There are several reasons why any of us end up struggling with feeling anxious. It often starts with an episode of feeling very anxious. 

Quite naturally we spend lots of time thinking about it. We worry how bad the feelings might get. We may assume we shouldn’t feel like it; that other people don’t.  

We worry what is happening to us. Am I losing it, going mad, losing control? Do these physical feelings mean there is something wrong? Will I faint, have a heart attack, be unable to do anything? 

We worry what it means about us as a person? Am I different or abnormal, am I weak? What would other people think of me? 

What made me feel like it? Was it something in my past? Have I always been like it? Was it my upbringing, or because I’m like one of my parents? Is there something wrong with my brain? 

Was there a trigger? Was it something about the situation? Whatever it might have been, we feel apprehensive if we have to face the situation again. But we don’t leave it there. What if we have to face, not the same situation, but one that is similar? 

If we think it was something very general about the situation, (we were alone, it was dark, it was crowded, it was noisy, we were stuck and couldn’t escape) our worries spread rapidly. Our explanation makes the problem bigger. We now have lots of situations to worry about.  

So up till now we have been doing a lot of stuff. We have been doing our best to make sense of how we are feeling. But we can see how some of it simply makes us feel worse. So, what is the answer? 

We have been doing our best, but have we been using unhelpful ideas? All of the above rests on the idea that our feelings of anxiety more or less happen to us and are caused by the situations we are in. This is what our culture tells us. Most of what we hear and read encourages us to look at our feelings through a quasi-medical lens. 

We need to take a step back and ask if there’s another way of understanding feeling anxious. Is there a way of thinking about it from a more psychological point of view? 

On my website (thinkingasaction.com) there are four Thinking Tools. These are thought experiments that explore how we think. One of these, Two People on a Plane, looks at how we make ourselves anxious. It shows us that anxiety is something we are doing because of the thinking we are doing. It makes four important points. 

On my website (thinkingasaction.com) there are four Thinking Tools. These are thought experiments that explore how we think. One of these, Two People on a Plane, looks at how we make ourselves anxious. It shows us that anxiety is something we are doing because of the thinking we are doing. It makes four important points. 

1. planes don’t make us anxious. 

.2. it’s the programme of anxious thoughts we run that is the problem. 

3. anyone who runs this programme has to feel anxious because the anxiety is in the thinking they are doing. 

4. when we stop doing this thinking, we can’t feel anxious. 

If you have felt really anxious, you know that point number 4 is true. Every time you have felt really anxious and panicky, at some point you have felt calmer. This is only because you have stopped running that programme of anxious thoughts. You may have put it down to something else, like the fact that you left the situation or took a tablet or did something else you’ve come to believe in and rely on. But behind all these strategies is the fact that you stopped thinking anxiously. You won’t have focused on how important this is because we are all encouraged to think of anxiety as a something that simply happens to us. 

But is anxiety actually something we are doing? This can be difficult to get your head round at first. Where would you start? You could try some of these 20 dos and don’ts. 

1. Nowadays we are encouraged to talk about our feelings. Even in disaster situations when the answer would be obvious to a cabbage, it seems every interviewer can’t help themselves asking, “how did that make you feel?”, I don’t know if this is virtual signalling on their part or a reflection of a general cultural obsession with how we feel. Acknowledging our feelings is clearly important but this constant emphasis on feelings can reinforce the idea that our feelings are caused by the things that challenge us. If we have a friend who is feeling depressed, we want to listen to them and acknowledge their feelings. But hopefully we don’t leave it there. We want to reassure and encourage them to think about things in a different way. If we simply accepted their feelings as if they were fixed and there was nothing they could do, we would fail as a friend.  

If we or our friend see our feelings as fixed, we are more likely to worry as I described earlier. It is then harder to be aware of the thoughts that lie behind how we feel.  

It’s true feelings do seem to just arise in us. However, they are nature’s way of telling us that something is important to us. But this importance is ours. We have cared and thought something matters to us.  

Don’t focus just on how you feel. Instead start asking questions about what you are thinking to make something matter.   

2. Start working at the idea that feeling anxious is always something we’re doing in the here-and-now moment. See your thinking as important and how it changes your feelings. Look for small examples at first. These will probably be situations when you don’t feel very anxious. When you’re feeling a bit anxious ask yourself what you’re predicting will go wrong? How much are you making it matter? 

3. Don’t blame ‘bad’ events and places for how you feel. Think about the history of your anxious feelings. You may have had to deal with all sorts of difficulties in the past. If you have it’s easy to see how you could’ve felt anxious at the time. It’s good if other people recognise the difficulties we’ve faced, but don’t blame things in the past for making you feel anxious now. ‘Bad’ events can easily draw us into anxious thoughts that become habits, but it’s how we’re thinking now that matters. Be kind to yourself and write down any anxious habits and how they came about after the difficulties you faced. But remember there’s a nowness to feeling anxious. 

4. Take some time to think about how your thinking has ebbed and flowed over time. You’ll find that there have been many times when you haven’t been anxious at all. Don’t put this down to some event or circumstance or just luck. This was because of how you were thinking at the time. It’s helpful if we think of ourselves as someone who gets anxious now and then, rather than as an anxious person or a person with anxiety. These words matter. They make a difference. 

5. Make a list of any situations you get anxious about. Check to see if you have been justifying or explaining away your anxiety because of some feature of the situation. This is what we tend to do, but blaming the situation just creates a problem. Try to identify how you’re thinking about the situation. Noticing the detail is important. With practice you will get better at recognising what your thoughts are, and how they contain your anxious feelings. These thoughts are the driver of your feelings. 

6. Keep reminding yourself that thoughts are ‘just thoughts’. They are guesses about how things might be, not how they are. Many start with “What if….” Keep a list of ‘what ifs’ you tend to use. 

7. Try to let anxious thoughts just pass. The power of a thought comes from how seriously we take it. It matters how we react to them. The stronger our belief and the longer we hold a thought, the more intense and long-lasting our feelings will be. See which thoughts you tend to take seriously and how long you spend on them. Don’t react to them. Don’t believe them. Don’t take them seriously. Don’t dwell on them or try to work out if they might be true.  Gently challenge them. Let them go. Notice as you make progress the time you spend on them gets less.  

8. Thoughts come in bundles. One thought leads to another. The more detailed and complex your bundle the more patient you will have to be to untangle it. 

9. Most of our anxiety is apprehension. It flows from how we anticipate things long before they happen. The longer we are apprehensive and the more detail we go into the more anxious we will feel and the more we are priming ourselves to be anxious on the actual day. When you notice yourself doing this try to put it to one side. Let the thoughts go. Try to tell yourself nothing is happening yet. Don’t get drawn into the detail. There’s no point getting yourself at it days or even weeks before. Try to put off thinking about it for as long as you can. Many of the things we worry about turn out quite differently. We can even end up enjoying them if we let ourselves. 

10. Accept that some of your anxious thoughts may have become habits. The value of habits is that they allow us to do things on autopilot. They are useful servants, but they can be cruel masters. Anxious thoughts that have become habits might be harder to recognise but they are still ‘just thoughts’. Make a list of them and choose the ones you think you’d like to tackle first. 

11. Overcoming anxious feelings is a lot to do with becoming more aware of the connection between our thoughts and how we feel as a result. Notice as you become more aware of anxious thoughts and recognise them as ‘just thoughts’ you won’t feel as anxious. Whenever you manage to do this congratulate yourself. Remind yourself how you did it and celebrate it. You probably did this many times in the past but then forgot what you did and so didn’t build on it. 

12. We have got used to calling some thoughts intrusive thoughts. This is a problem we need to change. Calling them ‘intrusive’ tags them as unwanted and bad. This means we are already one step towards being anxious about them. It also makes it sound as if they ‘happen’ to us and are not us thinking. Our thoughts are not just sensible and logical. Thinking is much more creative, and dynamic than this. It’s also very fast and semi-automatic. It can feel as if a thought comes ‘out of the blue’. But if there is a thought in our head it can only be us thinking it.  

Don’t just watch your anxious thoughts. Watch all of them. Get used to the idea that you think all sorts of stuff. Be intrigued and fascinated by it. You are far more creative and interesting than you probably realise.  

13. Don’t try and do everything at once. There’s no need to rush. Its best to be patient. Celebrate each small step of improved self-awareness. Celebrate each time you let thoughts go. Celebrate each time you delay worrying about an upcoming event.  

Problems are like onions best pealed slowly from the outside. 

14. Once you start to make progress and feel better don’t expect you’ll never feel anxious again. Feeling anxious is useful and inevitable. It is after all only us being concerned with how things will be for us and those we care about. None of us know what is round the corner. We don’t need to know either but as long as we have skin in the game, we will be concerned how things will turn out. The only way to never feel anxious is not to care.  

If you’ve been struggling with feeling anxious you may have become tuned in to how it feels. You may have sensitised yourself and even become anxious about being anxious. All of us feel anxious at times. What we want to achieve is not being too anxious. Learn to tolerate ordinary feelings of anxiety.  

15. See each time you feel more anxious than you want to be, not as a disaster, but as an opportunity to learn how you do it. Don’t let yourself make big conclusions such as, “I’m back to square one”, “I’ll never be better”, “it’s no use, nothing works”. These are thoughts with a lot of emotion in them. If we go down that path, we are encouraging ourselves to give up.   

16. After being anxious in a situation it is often only later when we have calmed down that you will be able to see what you were thinking. This is important work to do. It makes you more aware of what you did so that next time you can be on the lookout for those unwanted thoughts. 
    
    

17. Remember the Tortoise and the Hare. Eat your elephant one chunk at a time. The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Not that your journey will necessarily be that long. Once you really understand that anxiety is something you are doing (without wanting or meaning to) rather than something that happens to you, it can transform how you think and do things. Even so, it is usually best to be patient and plod. Keep building your awareness. Practice, practice, practice.  

18. If like me it’s a struggle to remember what you were doing a week ago, it’s helpful to keep some notes to remind yourself how you’re doing and how far you’ve come. Then of course you have to remember to look back at the notes. 

19. Remember there’s not many of us who don’t get a bit too anxious sometimes. If you have a partner, tell them what you’re planning to do and keep telling them how you’re doing.  Or find a trusted friend or colleague. Take a chance. Support each other and swap stories of how you’re doing. You can help yourself and each other. 

20. What is number 20? If you’ve got this far there’s a good chance you think I have left something out. Each of us sees the world in our own way. We emphasise different points. Let me know by email what else should have been included. charlesmerrett@hotmail.com 

There are other useful pages and posts about anxiety on my website.  

The Speeding Car shows us that we feel anxious when we predict something that we really don’t want. Two things that only we can do in the privacy of our own thoughts. 

The Decorated Room explains that there are always many ways of looking at any situation. The view we take is made up of what we focus on, how we judge it and how much we make it matter. 

High Anxiety 

Beware the forces of diagnostic inflation 

Don’t panic – It’s only anxiety.