Unworried. Dr. Gregory Popcak

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      Chapter Three

       Getting on My Nerves — The Psychology of Anxiety

      The more you understand the different factors that work together to create our experience of anxiety, the more avenues you have to address and overcome it. In the last chapter, we explored how anxiety begins as an experience inside your body, and we identified some basic strategies that can help you get your body back under control. Now we are going to briefly explore how your thought-life can also be a significant contributor to your level of anxiety and begin to look at different psychological strategies that can help anyone experience greater peace regardless of the level of anxiety they might be experiencing in their lives.

      Psychological and Emotional Factors

      Although we often don’t realize it, when something happens to us, it impacts us on several different psychological and emotional levels at once. Let’s pick a simple illustration. Suppose you text a friend and you don’t get a response. As a result, you begin to experience some degree of anxiety.

       The First Layer — The Event

      From a psychological perspective, the first layer of experience is the event itself. You texted a friend and didn’t get a response. As a result, you are aware of a feeling of nervousness and dread. But why? Most people answer this question by simply describing what happened, as if that explains everything. “I just told you! I texted my friend and didn’t get a response! How could I NOT feel anxious and upset?”

      The problem is that this statement assumes that everyone would feel the exact same way about this event as you do. Although many people feel anxious when a friend doesn’t text them back, some people feel angry, some people are curious, and others don’t give it a second thought. Even among those who get anxious, they might be more or less anxious than you. The real question is, what is causing your unique emotional reaction?

       The Second Layer — Self-Talk

      To answer this question, you have to go a little deeper. The second layer of any emotional experience is self-talk. Self-talk is the internal narration of your life. We aren’t always paying attention to it, but our mind is always engaging in some kind of self-talk as a way of telling us what our current experience means to us, what we should make of it, and how we should respond to it based on past experience. One good example of self-talk are those internet memes that show a person thinking two different thoughts: the thing they say to be polite and the thing that they really think.

      Karen texted Julia an adorable cat video. Julia didn’t respond.

       Karen smiled and said, “It’s fine …”

      It was NOT fine.

      To get at the particular self-talk that attends a specific emotional event, rather than asking, “Why do I feel this way?” which tends to simply lead to circular reasoning (i.e., “I feel this way about the event because the event happened!”), it’s better to ask yourself, “What does it mean to me that this event happened?” Or even, “What does it say about me that this happened to me?” Both of these questions do a better job of helping us tune in to the self-talk that underlies our anxiety.

      “What does it mean to me that Julia didn’t respond to my text?”

       “It means that I’ve annoyed her and she’s trying to distance herself from me!”

      “What does it say about me that Julia didn’t respond to my text?”

       “Obviously, it means that I’m a pest who makes people uncomfortable and drives away everyone I care about.”

      Granted, this is an extreme response, but it’s a surprisingly common one. Maybe you have even felt this way from time to time. Of course, you might have a different response entirely. Another person might answer these questions in the following way.

      “What does it mean to me that Julia didn’t respond to my text?”

       “It means that she’s busy and didn’t have time to look at a cat video even though it was really adorable.”

      “What does it say about me that Julia didn’t respond to my text?”

       “It just says that I picked the wrong time to share this. No big deal, I’ll just show her when we get together next time.”

      Obviously, a person whose mind was engaging in this kind of self-talk would not experience much, if any, anxiety about Julia’s lack of response. This is usually when my client says, “But how does Karen know she didn’t drive Julia away? What if Julia does think she’s annoying?”

      Of course, the answer to this is that Karen has no idea at all what Julia is thinking. She could be thinking one of a million possible things, and “Boy, that Karen and her stupid cat videos really burn my toast” could be one of them. If that were the case, assuming that Karen took the time to ask Julia what was going on, she and Julia could work through it together and become better friends because of it. But how often do we actually stop to ask the other person what they are really thinking before we respond to them — or even react to them? Most of the time, in the absence of any other actual evidence, we assume our automatic interpretations of the event are correct. We allow our actions to be informed by these erroneous thoughts, often causing ourselves to feel powerless, isolated, self-pitying, and anxiety-ridden in the process. The situation is real, but our interpretation and reaction are entirely self-created. So, where do these interpretations come from? They come from the third layer of our psychological experience.

       The Third Layer — Memories

      When something happens to us, our right brain does a quick, gut-level search through our bank of life experiences to find the past experience that most resembles this present event. Our right brain has less than a second to sort through all our memories and choose one that best compares СКАЧАТЬ