Unlocking Your Potential
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دکتر ترانه موذنی
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From Worry to Wellness: 5 proven Steps to Soothe Your Anxiety and Take Back Control
Surely everyone knows what it means to be worried and anxious? What does it mean to be terrified and afraid? Most of the time, anxiety is just a temporary restlessness, but at times it can paralyze you and negatively affect your social and occupational functioning. But it is better to know that you can bring your anxiety under your control and change its level. In the following, I will introduce you to effective ways to treat anxiety.
Powerful, drug-free treatment methods for eliminating various anxiety disorders, such as chronic worry, shyness, anxiety of speaking in public, anxiety of participating in exams, and panic attacks, have fortunately found significant abundance and are currently widely used.
The goal of new psychotherapy methods is not to reduce the amount of discomfort or alleviate it, but to improve the cognitive system of the sick person. A person with generalized anxiety always feels restless and insecure. He certainly likes to wake up in the morning free from fear and terror and eager to face the day ahead. He wants to whisper to himself how wonderful it will be to be alive and live. But constant anxiety prevents him from enjoying life.
Anxiety manifests itself in various ways.
Chronic Worry: You are constantly worried about your family, health, career, and financial affairs. Your heart is constantly churning. You feel that something bad is going to happen. But you cannot exactly say why this bad thing is going to happen to you? Or what will be its quality. You only experience a kind of chronic worry and anxiety without specifying its source all the time.
Phobias: You may be terrified of needles, blood, being at heights, riding in an elevator, driving, traveling by plane, getting stuck in closed places and experience a deep fear.
Performance Anxiety: You may experience severe, unusual anxiety whenever you have to take an exam or perform on stage or participate in a sports competition, and as a result, you will not reach your desired goal, which you have been willing to achieve after a long time of trying.
Anxiety of Speaking in Public: Whenever you have to speak in front of an audience, you become extremely stressed, your voice trembles visibly, and everyone realizes how anxious you are. Your mind will not function effectively; you tell yourself that everyone will look at me with contempt and realize that I am a completely incompetent person. Of course, there are solutions for treating stress as well.
Shyness and Bashfulness: You feel shy and somewhat insecure about being in a crowd. You tell yourself that everyone is in a happy mood, everyone is at peace, but I have no interesting things to say, everyone will realize how clumsy I am.
Panic Attacks: You suddenly become terrified. You do not know what has happened that you are in this state. During each attack, you feel that your head is spinning, your heart is beating fast, your fingers are shaking, you are sweating cold. You feel that you are losing your life. You may tell yourself that I have had a heart attack, I cannot breathe properly, what will happen if I suffocate?
Constant Worry about Appearance: You feel that your appearance always has a serious problem, while friends and relatives assure you that there is nothing wrong with you. You may think that you have an ugly nose or your body is not in the shape it should be. You spend considerable time and money visiting various plastic surgeons and undergoing various surgeries.
Worrying about your health
You regularly go from one doctor to another and complain about pain, discomfort, fatigue, and feelings of dizziness or other symptoms. However, the doctor constantly reassures you that you have no problem and that you should not worry. You feel relieved for a few days, but it is not long before you become unsure of your health again.
If you are caught up in any of these kinds of anxieties, I have a question for you: How important and valuable is it to you to learn the right way to overcome these problems? Achieving practical treatment may seem impossible to you, especially if you have been suffering from anxiety and depression for many years. But I have no doubt that without taking anti-anxiety medications or long-term psychoanalysis, you can largely overcome these anxiety problems with the strategies presented in this article.
The Role of Metacognition in Anxiety Treatment
Thoughts are not important, but how you respond to thoughts is. Everyone may experience negative and intrusive thoughts and sometimes get used to the presence of these negative thoughts. But why do not all people suffer from anxiety, depression, or chronic emotional suffering? An important question is why some people can control their thoughts with adaptive strategies or ignore them, and some people are unsuccessful in this and suffer from persistent and chronic distress. Metacognitive beliefs play a fundamental role in healthy and unhealthy mind control. In addition, anxiety treatment is based on the principle that in determining and controlling emotions, not only the content of a person’s thoughts is important, but also how to deal with thoughts is important.
Thinking can be likened to the activity of a large orchestra group in which many musicians and musical instruments play a role. To play a melodious song, we need music notes and an orchestra conductor. Metacognition is the orchestra conductor.
Metacognition can be defined as knowledge about knowledge. Metacognition is responsible for reviewing, controlling, and evaluating the processes and products of consciousness. This is because we have learned to flexibly deal with the negative patterns of our minds (i.e., thoughts and beliefs). The metacognitive approach is based on the principle that people experience emotional distress due to specific metacognitive beliefs they have. Metacognitive beliefs cause people to react in a specific pattern to their inner experiences. These reactions perpetuate troublesome emotions and the persistence of negative patterns. In fact, these specific patterns of reaction to inner experiences can be called the cognitive-attentional syndrome, such as worry, rumination, inflexible attention, and self-regulatory coping strategies or behaviors.
Metacognitive therapy is based on the principle that metacognitive beliefs play a key role in the way cognition works and how conscious experiences are created in relation to oneself and the world around us. Metacognitive beliefs cause attention to be drawn and initiate a conscious process. In addition, metacognitive beliefs have a special effect on the type of strategies we choose to regulate our thoughts and feelings, and the evaluation of these strategies is also the responsibility of these metacognitive beliefs. In fact, metacognition has an undeniable effect on the content of our thoughts and beliefs and will be the fundamental cause of our emotions and conscious experiences (natural or unnatural).
5 Steps to Treat Anxiety
Step 1: The Upsetting Event
Don’t neglect the miracle of writing. On a piece of paper that you have set aside for your daily report, write a brief description of the moment you feel uncomfortable. The event you are referring to should be quite specific and particular. Include a specific time and place. It could be any moment when you are not in a good mood or are experiencing terror or anxiety.
- What time of day was it?
- Where was I?
- What happened?
- Who was present?
One of the major mistakes people make at this stage is that they try to examine the issue in their mind. Mental examinations never help you. In fact, you are going around in a closed circle because your negative thoughts and feelings always seem dominant and convincing. If you write down your thoughts and feelings on paper, your task becomes much easier, after which you can deal with them one by one. This advice may seem quite logical, but many people ignore it and, unfortunately, prefer to talk about their issues.
Of course, when you feel uncomfortable, we all need a listening and empathetic ear, but if you want to change your life, you have to go to that special, uncomfortable moment. The key to all your discomfort is exactly at that minute and related to that specific moment. This method is different from traditional psychotherapy methods. In traditional methods, the patient talks regularly, and the psychotherapist actively listens to him. According to the therapeutic principles of various types of traditional psychotherapy, if you talk about your feelings and go back to the past enough, a fundamental change will eventually occur in you, whereas in new treatment methods, there is no belief in merely talking about events without writing them down.
Step 2: Identifying and Recording Feelings
After you have described the upsetting event, in the next column, express all your feelings, including restlessness, insecurity, anger, rage, inner turmoil, feeling of failure, embarrassment, feeling of inferiority, loneliness, despair, etc., and assign a score to each based on zero percent (not at all) to 100 percent (very much). Write the scores in the appropriate column. Finding negative feelings and giving them a score is very important because feelings are the external manifestation and outward expression of our thoughts. By doing this, you can better identify your negative thoughts in the third stage.
Step 3: Identifying and Recording Negative Thoughts
Record the negative thoughts you experience in a state of anxiety and discomfort. Ask yourself, “What do I say to myself when I feel hopeless and desperate? What message do I give myself when I feel terrified?” Record your thoughts in the “Thoughts” column of your daily report sheet and, according to the level and intensity of belief you have in them, assign a score from zero percent to one hundred percent to each.
Regarding negative thoughts, pay attention to the following points:
- Use complete sentences and do not write your thoughts in summary or headline form.
- Record each negative thought statement in only one sentence and do not write cases to explain it.
- Avoid writing phrases in the form of a question, for example, do not write “Why am I always anxious and worried?”
- Be careful not to describe your feelings in the “Negative Thoughts” column. This column is only for recording your thoughts. For example, do not write “I am worried about my exam” or “I am currently feeling terrified.” You should record your feelings in the “Recording Feelings” column of your daily sheet. If you include your feelings in the “Negative Thoughts” column, you will encounter a problem because you will not be able to identify and then prove the incorrectness of your negative thoughts, which are the basis for negative feelings in you.
Step 4: Identifying and Recording Cognitive Errors
Enter the errors of each negative thought in the “Cognitive Errors” column. I have previously explained the meanings and concepts related to cognitive errors in full in the article “Types of Cognitive Errors.” Usually, for each negative and incompatible thought that somehow causes our negative feelings and performance, there are several cognitive errors. Note that when you enter the errors in your daily sheet, you can use abbreviations to save time.
Step 5: Recording Positive Thoughts
Try, after identifying your cognitive errors and with the help of alternative positive thoughts, to prove the incorrectness of negative thoughts. Ask yourself, “Can I think about these mindsets in a positive and responsible way?”
Pay attention to the necessary and sufficient conditions for changing feelings. The necessary condition is that positive thoughts must be one hundred percent correct, and the sufficient condition is that positive thoughts must prove the inefficiency of the negative thought.
Step 5 is difficult. If you could easily show the error of negative thoughts, you might not need to read this article. If you, too, at the beginning of the work, cannot have the necessary efficiency, it is for two reasons: either you have not correctly chosen the alternative positive thoughts, or you cannot prove the incorrectness of your negative thoughts. But do not worry, in the following and with practice, you can prove the incorrectness of your negative thoughts and complete your daily report and thought registration table more completely.