Do you Feed the Anxious Wolf?

It is easy to get ourselves tangled in our evaluations and judgements of just about everything we experience. Some of the most effective advertising strategies target you to buy their products by selling the positives yet we seem hard wired to see the negative. Getting into the habit of fuelling negative evaluations amplifies suffering and the urge to do whatever you can to avoid the experience.

Let’s test out just how easy it is to turn a neutral situation into a mess of stress and unnecessary pressure. Take for example your mum is coming to visit. Your first thought is “I can’t deal with her today”.  Next second you feel a fear guilt response to this thought. Once your thought is attached to having an emotion, it amplifies its attention in your brain.

If you’ve been working on trying to think more positive, your next response will be to try and shut it down. Perhaps you scold yourself for being so harsh about your mother visiting. You remind yourself that she means well or was helpful with the kids last time she visited. These attempts to push the thought away, actually dial up its intensity. It may seem counter intuitive but we must welcome the thought in. Treat it like a guest. Offer it a seat on the couch to sit without judgement. You’ll feel the urge to want to do something about it. Challenge it, make sense of it or re frame it.

Instead pause and breathe.

It may help to say to yourself “I am letting you be”. By doing this you are treating the thought like a piece of information. This technique is not a quick fix, it takes practise to retrain your mind not to label every triggering thought as somehow negative. We have years of conditioning to undo.

Now focus on doing something else and let the thought sit in the background. Over time it will get smaller until the point it passes. When we are calm, it allows space for new thoughts to come in such as “it will be okay” or “the kids will enjoy her company”.