what does NOT help your anxiety issue
2024.12.27
Hello, this is Tatsuya Arakawa, a licensed mental health therapist (LMFT).
As a therapist specializing in anxiety issues, I have seen so many people engaging in what does not help anxiety issues. In this blog, I would like to list what does not help your anxiety and explain why.
- Trying to think positively
This is the number 1 strategy a lot of people attempt without success. Why? Because what they are trying to do is to suppress negative feelings including anxieties. This can be temporally solution because you feel “better” momentarily.
However, we, humans, are not designed to have ability to control what we think. For instance, if I ask you not to think sushi, you did think about sushi now while you are reading it. Right?
Thoughts are designed to flow. They are supposed to come and go. Yet, if we try not to think about what we do not want to think about, what ended up happening is unwanted thoughts stay in your head (just like you try not to think about sushi!); they will continue to be there and continue to bother you.
- Denial of anxiety
Very similar to suppressing negative feelings, denying anxiety is a common way to deal with unwanted thought that makes you anxious. Just like number 1, it is a temporally fix. By trying not to think about anything that makes you feel anxious, it works momentarily. However, by the time you move on to do something else, the anxiety is there welcoming you to suffer more. Because you do not want it again, you might try to deny it. This vicious cycle can lead to severe mental health issue such as Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Depression.
Have you ever met people who claim that they are always positive and do not think about negative? Well, they tend to use this tactic. They seem positive outside, yet they master not thinking about negative things so much that they are not ever aware that they think about something negative and suffer from negative feelings.
- Disputing anxiety
Anxiety usually goes like the following: “what if….” “If I……” It almost always involves with “IF.” Anxiety is a thought about the future. Unfortunately, we do not have any ways to foresee our future. Therefore, disputing your anxiety in your head is a never-ending process because we just cannot find out what will happen in the future. But when we dispute, what we really want is solid proof that things will turn out to be what we want. However, again, we do not know that. Therefore, this is very similar to “trying to think positively” and you are trapping yourself into the vicious cycle of anxiety because a minute you thought you “win” over anxiety, your brain is whispering you to something else that makes you feel anxious. You get my point.
- Looking for confirmation
Those who try to “fight” anxiety tends to use this strategy; they want to make sure that unwanted future will not come to them. For instance, if they are worried about not passing exams, they will study as much as possible to the point where some may see it excessive. However, from their perspective, they are decreasing the possibility of not passing the exam. There are a few issues with this. First, there is no way to make sure that unwanted future will not occur because we just cannot see the future. Two, if you are doing something excessively, there might be some impairment in your life. For instance, you might be sleeping less because you are so anxious about not passing the exam; or you are purposely sleeping less to create more time to study.
Just like other strategies, looking for confirmation is designed not to work because there is no way to confirm with 100% accuracy that unwanted future will not come. However, as long as we are listening too much to anxiety, we will try to look for 100% confirmation. At the end, again, the vicious cycle is created.
So, what can we do now then?
I would like to talk about the actual solution for this anxiety issue in the next blog.
Tatsuya Arakawa, LMFT 82425