45. Anxious Thoughts Debunked: Part 1

Anxiety can come from so many different sources. Sometimes it’s as basic as experiencing a biological need, such as hunger, tiredness, thirst, or restlessness. If this is where your anxiety is coming from, the solution is simple: Get something to eat, drink some water, go to sleep, do something fun or relaxing, or get outside and move. Sometimes, we neglect these basic human needs in our pressure to go, go, go and be productive all the time. Because you are a human, not a machine, sometimes you simply need to pause, rest, nourish, or move your body in order to feel better.

But of course, anxiety can and often does run deeper than this. If you’ve taken care of your biological needs and are still struggling, then it may be time to check out our thoughts and the impact they’re having on us.

The first thing to understand is the relationship between our thoughts, emotions, and actions. There’s something called the cognitive triangle, which is a diagram of these three concepts (Thoughts, Emotions, Actions) each making up a point in a triangle, with arrows pointing in both directions connecting each of them to one another. To understand how this diagram works, we’ll walk through a few examples.

Situation 1: You find out your co-workers are going to lunch and didn’t invite you.

Your thoughts: Did I do something wrong? Do they not like me?

Your emotions: Embarrassed, ashamed, rejected

Your actions: Avoid the co-workers out of shame, or fawn over them and try to win their affection so they’ll invite you next time

With our next example, we’ll start with an emotion instead:

Situation 2: You’re invited to a gathering at someone’s house. You’ve been looking forward to it, but once you get there you find yourself feeling insecure. You’re not sure why - it just happened.

Your emotions: Insecure, embarrassed

Your thoughts: What’s wrong with me? Why am I so anxious? This is so stupid. I’m so stupid. I can’t get it together.

Your actions: Withdraw socially, disconnect from conversations, possibly leave early, possibly avoid future social interactions due to not wanting to repeat the same embarrassment

Your emotions: Feel even more insecure the next time you’re in a social situation

With the next example, we’ll start with an action:

Situation 3: Someone cuts you off in traffic after you’ve had an exhausting day and can’t wait to get home.

Your action: Lay on the horn, flip them the bird, cuss them out

Your thought: What an asshole. People are the worst.

Your emotion: Anger, irritability

Your action: When you get home, you are short with your family; they become angry and are short back.

Your thought: Everyone is just out to get me today. I can’t catch a break.

Your emotion: Resentment, more anger, more irritability

With all of these examples, we can continue to follow the cognitive triangle around and around as many times as our thoughts, actions, and emotions continue to build on and impact one another. Thoughts can lead to actions, which can lead to emotions; emotions can lead to actions which can lead to thoughts; actions can lead to thoughts which can lead to emotions. All can lead to all others; there’s no rule for how our minds, bodies, and emotions work together.

An individual’s thoughts, feelings, and actions can also be heavily influenced by the ways their individual nervous system responds to stressful situations by way of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. We’ll get into the specifics of this more in another post, because I think this can be so fascinating.

So, how do we begin to interrupt the cycle of negative thoughts, emotions, and actions building on one another? We’ll walk through this next.

Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck were pioneers in the theoretical approach of counseling called “cognitive behavioral therapy” (CBT). Not to be confused with CBD. Essentially, CBT is all about understanding how our thoughts, emotions, and actions impact one another and giving ourselves the power to be in the driver’s seat of them, rather than our automatic and often unconscious thoughts, emotions, and actions driving us.

We often assume that a situation causes us to feel or behave a certain way. The theory behind CBT is that it’s not the situation that causes us to feel or behave this way, but it’s what we think about the situation. For example:

“My daughter moved out of state and doesn’t call me that often. This makes me sad.”

In CBT, we say that your daughter’s actions aren’t what make you sad; but it’s your belief about this that causes you to be sad:

“My daughter moved out of state and doesn’t call me that often. I believe I am not that important to her, and that causes me to feel sad.”

The next step is to recognize that you are having this belief and ask yourself if this belief is true. Then, you can replace unhelpful and often untrue beliefs with ones that are more helpful:

“My daughter moved out of state and doesn’t call me that often. I miss her and wish she would make more of an effort, but I don’t know exactly what’s going on in her life or why she doesn’t call me. I can make the effort to call her and ask her about her life so I can better understand.”

To begin practicing the process of disputing these unhelpful and often untrue thoughts, we can use a method called “ABCDE” (difficult to remember, I know):

A: The activating event

B: Our belief about A

C: The consequence(s)

D: Disputing thought

E: Effect of the disputing thought

Example 1:

Activating event: I applied for a promotion at work, but it was given to my co-worker instead of me.

Belief: My boss must favor my co-worker over me. That’s not fair. I deserved it way more.

Consequence: I feel bitter and resentful towards my boss and co-worker. I start behaving standoffishly towards them both. I don’t care as much anymore about doing a good job.

Disputing thought: Maybe my boss doesn’t favor my co-worker. Maybe she is more qualified than I am for it, or maybe my boss had another opportunity in mind for me.

Effect of the disputing thought: I feel disappointed, but I am willing to accept the outcome and move on. I congratulate my co-worker, I keep doing my work to the best of my ability, and I talk to my boss about future opportunities.

Example 2:

Activating event: I asked my significant other to help me with something in the house, but they didn’t do it.

Belief about event: They are so selfish. I can’t rely on them for anything. If they really loved me they would do what I asked.

Consequence: I feel hurt and lash out at my significant other. We get in a fight and say hurtful things to each other OR I don’t say anything but act out in passive aggressive ways toward my partner.

Disputing thought: Maybe they didn’t understand what I asked them to do, or maybe I had unrealistic expectations that they would do it a certain way without me fully explaining my expectations.

Effect: Understanding of my significant other’s perspective, and next time I will fully explain what I am asking them to do and make sure we are on the same page.

It’s important to know that this ABCDE method has limitations. It doesn’t work for every situation. Sometimes, there are issues that run deeper than a disputing thought can fix. For example, if you and your significant other have frequent arguments about lots of issues besides household tasks, it’s likely that this argument could bring up a lot of other wounds, and simply disputing your thought may not be very effective. However, what this method can do is help you better identify which issues can be more easily resolved by increasing your awareness and adjusting your thoughts, and which ones will take more ongoing work. This can at least help resolve some challenges so you can have more energy for deeper issues.

A second limitation, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, is that sometimes the issue is more about your physiological needs than your cognitive ones. If you are hungry, angry, tired, or lonely (HALT), you will likely not be in a great place to rationally restructure your thoughts. This is when you would be wiser to HALT, take care of the physical need, and come back to it when you’re feeling better. Sometimes, taking care of a physical need alone makes everything better.

A third limitation is that this model is not sufficient to resolve the deeper traumas and ingrained beliefs that are being triggered by a situation. For example, if you are passed over for a promotion at work and have a deeply ingrained belief that you are a loser, simply disputing your thoughts may not be enough. However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still use this model. It takes a lot of time, practice, and intentionally to restructure those deeply ingrained core beliefs, but every little bit can be helpful. Every time you interrupt the flow of an unhelpful thought and replace it with something more helpful, you begin to re-wire those neural pathways. Over time, the power of those unhelpful thoughts will weaken more and more, and the truer, helpful thoughts will strengthen. You have to stick with it and keep practicing, but the thought will change over time.

In the next few posts, we’ll talk about three different types of thoughts, cognitive distortions, and core beliefs. These can be really fun to identify and become aware of. I hope you’ll keep reading!