DISCLAIMER TIME: I am NOT a doctor. I am NOT therapist. I am LICENSED IN NOTHING EXCEPT IT. That being said, use my personal experience to help you begin conversations with the professionals who are certified to provide you with coping tools and psychological help. Do not use ANYTHING in this blog as a tool for your MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS. I am simply starting a DIALOGUE because our society sweeps MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS under the rug. If we put it out there, and keep talking about it, we raise awareness, and also I get extra credit from my own “shrink.”
TL;DR DISCLAIMER: Don’t rely on a random internet blog to treat your mental illness. Get a goddamn professional. Get a psychiatrist. Get a licensed therapist.
Oh, this one I know all too well (The social anxiety, not the rambling disclaimers).
It used to be Walmart. My SO never thought I’d be able to handle South America, but I did. I even go to the mall by myself, when I feel like it (Well, when the Sephora has new free samples).
If you look at my last sentence it would appear I choose when to get nervous, but it’s a mechanism of using coping strategies to take charge of a situation. The problem with abandoning all fears rooted from insecurity for a free perfume tester at the mall 15 miles away is that it’s a rather subconscious coping technique. I am excited about getting something “free”, so it’s worth it to get all “dressed up” (as in, not wearing sweats with paint splotches and actually combing/brushing my hair instead of cramming it in a ponytail holder).
Something cognitive behavior therapy and dialectical behavior therapy have taught me is everything can be overcome if we are self-aware at all times. As jumpy and distracted as I am, this can prove to be quite a challenge. Over the last few years I have gone to immediate self-loathing to quiet introspection. Mostly. We all have days where we feel our brain is releasing sad chemicals into that pit in our chest. Those are the really tough days where talking ourselves through the sadness or anger or pain isn’t enough, and as the CBT/DBT has dictated in the past, if we cannot make use of our radical acceptance and thought modification, we distract. We masturbate. We watch the stupidest, funniest crap on Youtube. We take our dog outside, talking ourselves through putting on shoes and going the eff outside.
There is so much material out there, it’s just overwhelming to take it all in and really glean anything useful from it. When we are in the therapist’s office and they hand us a worksheet and ask us “to do homework,” we nod politely, get home, and sit it on the desk with every intent of running to the sheet when we feel wonky and filling it out hoping the sheet bestows a positive emotional reward upon us at the point of completion.
That isn’t so. At least not in my experience.
I put the sheet on my desk and go about life until the next appointment. I have ups or downs, and I do the same old bullcrap every time. Then I come back to the sheet and look at it, disassociative of its possible benefits. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
So! Let us review a random worksheet I pulled from a therapy website. Running with this current post, I will focus on social anxiety. You can find the sheet here.
This is a Social Anxiety – Thought Record Sheet. Seven columns outline the phases of a trigger event that causes us to freak the eff out.
Let’s outline this process:
One may not even realize they are experiencing anxiety or emotional distress; using these tools helps you narrow down possible causes that you can discuss with your therapist/counselor so they can help you determine where the trigger is coming from. Some therapists won’t focus at all on the source. There is a reason for this.
You can’t change the past. I’ve realized that. Just because my mom threatened me with violence if I embarrassed her at the store doesn’t mean that is an excuse for me to clam up when I’m at the store with my own children. My children do not deserve a mother who freaks out everytime they disappear from her sight, then, instead of being relieved at knowing their exact location, proceed to scream at them at the top of their lungs for ‘scaring’ her.
Thanks, mom! You’ve ruined me!
I kid, I kid, the whole point of this process is for me to identify that while, yes, my mom was/is a crazy kook with paranoid delusions (my mother wasn’t scared she would lose us forever, she was scared she would look like a shitty parent if someone found us before she did, and embarrass her because ‘she wasn’t paying attention to her kids.’)
However, that’s over and done. My mother no longer takes me to the store and makes me leave the dressing room door open while I change. It surely puts things into perspective when we understand the “why” of situational social anxiety, but we aren’t trying to psychoanalyze our entire lives.
Remember. Seven billion humans. On this planet. All farting and sleeping and sexing and lying to their co-workers about their fantastic vacation. All at the same time.
There will always be unstable people, people who are not like you, and shitty situations. It is our goal to transcend the nature of the people that cause us to have issues today.
In order to transcend, we must take each unique or repeating situation as it comes and deal with it.
If you look at the bottom of the column on the worksheet, you are to identify the “sitution & trigger” and gives details about it, to help you establish patterns of situations that may have commonalities. You may never figure out you get nervous at work parties and at church, but if you start to write it down, you may discover when you are around figures of authority, you think you’ll get some food stuck between your teeth and look like a moron to the fancy, shiny, perfect people who are obviously better than you because they lead the church, they lead the team, they write you a bullshit traffic ticket because they are playing God!!! Stupid cops!
Ha, ha, ha, whhhaaaat? I’m not afraid of cops at all! (I’m afraid of cops, totally afraid of cops).
Identifying patterns is important because once we start implementing a plan of action to combat the physical and mental manifestations of our anxiety, we can begin to practice the techniques in each example of the triggering scenario; over time, you may find you are automatically preparing yourself in your head. You identified the trigger, you know what typically happens when you encounter said situation, so you start pulling all the stops on modifying your thought pattern so the situation doesn’t get out of hand.
And the dopamine rush after you whiz right through situations that previously had you shaking in your stylish yet affordable boots is truly something to savor.
Back to the columns. Looking at the second column wherein we assess our emotional response to the trigger, we can begin to categorize the response our body and mind have to the stressor. People tend to exhibit symptoms of anxiety in different ways. Some people get sweaty, clammy. Others will develop a sharp headache. Me? My heart beats at what feels twice as fast as the speed of sound. I experience a shortness of breath.
Blending a bit into the third column, while we begin to understand and document the physical manifestations of anxiety, we also should identify and write down what has gone through our mind. Thoughts begin racing through my mind. I feel self-conscious. I dread failing, making a mistake, tripping, embarrassing myself.
The worksheet requests we answer some questions in this third column.
“What’s disturbed me? What’s the worst that could happen? What did I think others would notice or think about me? What would that mean to me, or say about me?”
See? It’s starting to get good? We are taking an instance of what really is a few minutes of panic attack hell and breaking it down into a reflective thought process.
I’m gonna answer these as if I’m going to a meeting at my weight loss clinic. I hate going to these. I don’t do well with humans, and yes, obviously it is something I am working on. We can’t play the avoidance game our whole lives because then we aren’t learning anything about how to live life, are we?
What went through my mind? Panic, fear of embarrassment, people staring at me
What disturbed me? The thought of being called on to speak out loud, the nurses at intake making a comment I don’t respond to correctly, essentially? All the people and the mere thought at fucking something up and making a fool of myself.
What’s the worst that could happen? Honestly? Someone could give me a weird look. But I don’t go home to them. I don’t live with them. If it’s another patient/member, and I accidentally do or say something rude, I can just apologize. Or, alternatively, when I get there and do my intake sheet for the meeting, a nurse could magically stop me and tell me I’ve been kicked out of the program. That would suck. I hope that doesn’t happen. That would be humiliating.
What did I think others would notice or think about me? Sort of answered this already. I’m fatter than I’ve ever been in my life; I don’t want anyone to look at me and think, “Oh she’ll never lose that weight.” “Why does she even bother?”
Ha. Interesting! I’m making a lot of assumptions up there. Going to a bariatric clinic for a meeting with other obese people who are in the same boat as me. Instead of being a member of a support group, I am making paranoid assumptions that automatically seem to position me at a point of defense. With that mindset, everything everyone does or says will be suspect to me. That’s no way to encounter a support group meeting; the idea is to get educated about better taking care of my body and getting ready to change behaviors and diet and exercise to continue taking steps towards a healthier body and a longer life. If I’m only worried about being embarrassed it’s probably difficult to actually glean any useful information from the meeting.
Moving along, we see the fourth column mentioning “Self-focus.” More questions for which I seem to have already provided answers above. However, I’ll go over them:
As I felt anxious, where was my focus of attention?
What did I notice about myself?
What do I imagine I look like, or how others see me? How do I picture myself looking?
Well, shoot. I stated previously that I think I look bad because I’ve gained weight, and my focus of attention was my feet because I’m too scared to look at anyone else seated in the rows in the room. I’ve already kind of beaten down my own assumptions though (hooray for lucid auto-therapy via blogging!) by recalling that everyone else in that meeting is going through exactly what I am going through, and we are all there to get information and share our ideas or worries. If I approach each of these situations with that mindset, I’m sure to have a much more positive experience with the meetings. Many obese people tend to exhibit some types of mental illness (allow me to cite with GOOGLE IT), so it’s unfair of me to assume I am the only one there that is feeling any type of anxiety.
It’s different if it’s a meeting for Widget Enthusiasts. The focus is on the Widgets, not our morbidly obese bodies. If I go to a meeting for the love of Widgets, I probably wouldn’t feel this way. The fact that the meeting is specifically addressing a highly visible physical feature of mine exacerbates my fear and paranoia. However, that ‘s the whole purpose of the meeting. The nurses there have dealt with hundreds upon hundreds of human beings, if not thousands, many of whom I’m sure weight a lot more than I do. It’s unfair to assume these nurses, who chose to enter this profession to care for other humans, are secretly fat-shaming us all, myself included.
Safety Behaviors is our next column.
What did I do that helped me cope?
What did I do to hide it or prevent others from noticing?
What did I do to try to stop it from happening?
Did I have an urge to do anything?
How did what I did affect my anxiety?
Now, the great thing about safety behaviors is what you can do to get you from the tipping point. You can tip to the Anxiety Abyss, or you can tip to the Anxiety Annihilator! Breathing helps, and while you are focusing on breathing exercises, you can go over the sixth column in your head to rationalize your thoughts to influence you to tip toward annihilating your anxiety: the sixth column being, “Balanced: more rational response to thoughts and self-focus.”
STOPP! Take a breath….
Is this fact or opinion?
What would someone else say about this situation? What’s the bigger picture?
Is there another way of seeing it? What advice would I give a friend?
Is my reaction in proportion?
If I was seeing this as an outsider, what would I notice about other people? What’s really happening?
Change focus!
These are all great questions. The most helpful for the physical symptoms being the breathing exercises. It’s funny how if you focus on your breathing, your body slows down enough for you to center within your mind and rationally divide and conquer your negative thought patterns. Once you nail inhalation techniques you can really take a seat (in your mind) and learn to memorize and go through these questions. If you can keep asking this stuff, hopefully your mind is still within a frame where you can dial back the negative or fearful thought patterns. Because, to answer the questions, most people wouldn’t give a damn about the other people in this situation; they’d waltz in and sit down and get to business. The bigger picture here is you are attending a meeting to address this hazardous problem that is affecting your health as well as physical and mental state. To see it from another perspective, you are doing something that is good for you, and you may look this way now and feel this way now, but the meeting it temporary, and if you keep up all the temporary thoughts, you will see a permanent change in your body. If I had a friend I would tell this friend not to sweat it; everything is fine, the feelings they have will pass and life will move on. You should note that the reaction is not within proprotion to this particular situation; this will help you to compartmentalize the notion of fear and anxiety as “silly” and that a silly overreaction isn’t worth getting “all worked up” over. What is really happening? You, and a bunch of other obese persons, are seeking help for you problem and are doing so in a positive and supportive environment with healthcare professionals?
Now, just say all that crap in your head, every single time you do your meetings, and you will be forever cured of anxiety, hooray!
I digress like I invented rambling on.
But we do fail sometimes. I remember one time in December among the stress of the Generic Winter Holiday Season (GWHS =D), I drove all the way out to a meeting and sat in the car, my hands firmly dug into the steering wheel. I was right outside.
But I didn’t move. I wasn’t doing a damn thing to eliminate the thoughts, or at least change their direction. I tipped, completely, into the Anxiety Abyss.
This is where the seventh column plays up it’s importance.
“Outcome: What I did – how that helped” along with a re-rate of your emotion of 0-100%
What could I do differently?
What would be more effective?
Outer-focus: look around, listen – move focus of attention away from self.
Do what works. ACT WISELY.
I talk the big talk, walk the big walk, but in the heat of the moment our emotions can and do get the better of us. I sat in the car, put the ignition on, and just drove straight home. I was so angry at myself. I had failed.
But I started thinking about it. I can fix this. I can go to the next meeting, and it’s going to be okay. I will be okay. This is not the end. It already happened, and I couldn’t change the fact that I did not go. But I can go the next time. I will go the next time.
And I did.
To answer the questions as if I had failed that day:
What I would do differently? I would have made little bets with myself, and broken the “huge” goal of sitting in on the meeting into what felt like “digestible” chunks. I would have gathered my purse, and while filled with all the fear, just gotten out of the car and started walking. That’s it. Just walk. Now, start breathing and paying attention to your breaths, and get to the door. Open that door. Smile and nod at the attendant. That’s it! I’m doing it! I still need to sign in and I’m still scared, so I’ll sit in the lobby for a few moments and start talking myself through how ridiculous I am making myself feel. These emotions are real and they are not silly. What is causing me to react with these emotions is silly.
What would be more effective? Just walking in is enough to get started. But we need to rewind to before I even left, and start re-framing my thoughts so I don’t build this up to a precipice from which I inevitably tip over into the Anxiety Abyss. Next time, I’m going to put on some makeup, because I feel more confident when I look good. I’ll make extra time to prepare my appearance for the meeting. I will chant mantras of radical acceptance and positive ideals in my head while I contour my cheeks and dab on blush and blend, blend, blend. I got this, this time I got this.
Outer-focus: look around, listen – move focus of attention away from self. What this is trying to get at is, instead of internalizing the incessant negative thought patterns, if we have already tipped over into the Anxiety Abyss, we may not be able to stop this Katamari/Snowball of negative internal thoughts; when preemptive and proactive thinking has failed, CBT/DBT suggests we distract ourselves. Stopping the self-defeating talk, just for a moment, and looking up and around ,helps take our mind’s stream of consciousness away from repeating the insecurity-laden Anxiety Abyss talk and externalizes our senses to the environment around us. I like to see what kind of jewelry the ladies are wearing. Or I’ll count the number of people with glasses. I’ll make up fake backstories for people. You realign your thoughts to something that consumes you until you realize the chest pain is subsided and you’ve dazed off thinking about how Bob over there used to be a Somali pirate but was booted from the crew for being way too white, so he drowned his sorrows in Popeye’s Chicken (I’ve never had it, wonder if it’s good?) until he had to be rolled to the weight management support group meetings. There, I’ve externalized my stimuli to include the other people. I overcame the momentary Anxiety Abyss, crawling out on hands and knees and dragging my belly across thorns on the ground, but at least I made it to, and through, the meeting.
Everyone experiences varying degrees of anxiety in social situations, or in situations where you fear something will happen to you, or your child, or your pet, or your beloved Honus Wagner rookie baseball card.
It’s all about taking the good situations and outcomes and identifying the factors that made it successful, documenting them, and employing them the next time the Nervous Nasties decide to take up residence in your beleaguered mind so you are able to emerge victorious. In the same vein, it is more important to document when things did not go well; so you can identify the whens, whos, wheres, and so on. If you realize which mistakes you appear to be making during each step, or column, during the scenario you can begin to identify how you can change for the better the next time it happens.
I’m glad I wrote this. It was really helpful for me! I hope someone out there may get something out of this one day.
TL;DR DISCLAIMER: Don’t rely on a random internet blog to treat your mental illness. Get a goddamn professional. Get a psychiatrist. Get a licensed therapist.
Oh, this one I know all too well (The social anxiety, not the rambling disclaimers).
It used to be Walmart. My SO never thought I’d be able to handle South America, but I did. I even go to the mall by myself, when I feel like it (Well, when the Sephora has new free samples).
If you look at my last sentence it would appear I choose when to get nervous, but it’s a mechanism of using coping strategies to take charge of a situation. The problem with abandoning all fears rooted from insecurity for a free perfume tester at the mall 15 miles away is that it’s a rather subconscious coping technique. I am excited about getting something “free”, so it’s worth it to get all “dressed up” (as in, not wearing sweats with paint splotches and actually combing/brushing my hair instead of cramming it in a ponytail holder).
Something cognitive behavior therapy and dialectical behavior therapy have taught me is everything can be overcome if we are self-aware at all times. As jumpy and distracted as I am, this can prove to be quite a challenge. Over the last few years I have gone to immediate self-loathing to quiet introspection. Mostly. We all have days where we feel our brain is releasing sad chemicals into that pit in our chest. Those are the really tough days where talking ourselves through the sadness or anger or pain isn’t enough, and as the CBT/DBT has dictated in the past, if we cannot make use of our radical acceptance and thought modification, we distract. We masturbate. We watch the stupidest, funniest crap on Youtube. We take our dog outside, talking ourselves through putting on shoes and going the eff outside.
There is so much material out there, it’s just overwhelming to take it all in and really glean anything useful from it. When we are in the therapist’s office and they hand us a worksheet and ask us “to do homework,” we nod politely, get home, and sit it on the desk with every intent of running to the sheet when we feel wonky and filling it out hoping the sheet bestows a positive emotional reward upon us at the point of completion.
That isn’t so. At least not in my experience.
I put the sheet on my desk and go about life until the next appointment. I have ups or downs, and I do the same old bullcrap every time. Then I come back to the sheet and look at it, disassociative of its possible benefits. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
So! Let us review a random worksheet I pulled from a therapy website. Running with this current post, I will focus on social anxiety. You can find the sheet here.
This is a Social Anxiety – Thought Record Sheet. Seven columns outline the phases of a trigger event that causes us to freak the eff out.
Let’s outline this process:
- Situation & Trigger
- Feelings & Emotions (Rate 0 – 100%) / Physical Sensations
- Unhelpful Thoughts or Images
- Self-focus
- Safety Behaviors
- Balanced more rational response to thoughts and self-focus
- Outcome: What I did – how that helped (Re-rate Emotion 0 – 100%)
One may not even realize they are experiencing anxiety or emotional distress; using these tools helps you narrow down possible causes that you can discuss with your therapist/counselor so they can help you determine where the trigger is coming from. Some therapists won’t focus at all on the source. There is a reason for this.
You can’t change the past. I’ve realized that. Just because my mom threatened me with violence if I embarrassed her at the store doesn’t mean that is an excuse for me to clam up when I’m at the store with my own children. My children do not deserve a mother who freaks out everytime they disappear from her sight, then, instead of being relieved at knowing their exact location, proceed to scream at them at the top of their lungs for ‘scaring’ her.
Thanks, mom! You’ve ruined me!
I kid, I kid, the whole point of this process is for me to identify that while, yes, my mom was/is a crazy kook with paranoid delusions (my mother wasn’t scared she would lose us forever, she was scared she would look like a shitty parent if someone found us before she did, and embarrass her because ‘she wasn’t paying attention to her kids.’)
However, that’s over and done. My mother no longer takes me to the store and makes me leave the dressing room door open while I change. It surely puts things into perspective when we understand the “why” of situational social anxiety, but we aren’t trying to psychoanalyze our entire lives.
Remember. Seven billion humans. On this planet. All farting and sleeping and sexing and lying to their co-workers about their fantastic vacation. All at the same time.
There will always be unstable people, people who are not like you, and shitty situations. It is our goal to transcend the nature of the people that cause us to have issues today.
In order to transcend, we must take each unique or repeating situation as it comes and deal with it.
If you look at the bottom of the column on the worksheet, you are to identify the “sitution & trigger” and gives details about it, to help you establish patterns of situations that may have commonalities. You may never figure out you get nervous at work parties and at church, but if you start to write it down, you may discover when you are around figures of authority, you think you’ll get some food stuck between your teeth and look like a moron to the fancy, shiny, perfect people who are obviously better than you because they lead the church, they lead the team, they write you a bullshit traffic ticket because they are playing God!!! Stupid cops!
Ha, ha, ha, whhhaaaat? I’m not afraid of cops at all! (I’m afraid of cops, totally afraid of cops).
Identifying patterns is important because once we start implementing a plan of action to combat the physical and mental manifestations of our anxiety, we can begin to practice the techniques in each example of the triggering scenario; over time, you may find you are automatically preparing yourself in your head. You identified the trigger, you know what typically happens when you encounter said situation, so you start pulling all the stops on modifying your thought pattern so the situation doesn’t get out of hand.
And the dopamine rush after you whiz right through situations that previously had you shaking in your stylish yet affordable boots is truly something to savor.
Back to the columns. Looking at the second column wherein we assess our emotional response to the trigger, we can begin to categorize the response our body and mind have to the stressor. People tend to exhibit symptoms of anxiety in different ways. Some people get sweaty, clammy. Others will develop a sharp headache. Me? My heart beats at what feels twice as fast as the speed of sound. I experience a shortness of breath.
Blending a bit into the third column, while we begin to understand and document the physical manifestations of anxiety, we also should identify and write down what has gone through our mind. Thoughts begin racing through my mind. I feel self-conscious. I dread failing, making a mistake, tripping, embarrassing myself.
The worksheet requests we answer some questions in this third column.
“What’s disturbed me? What’s the worst that could happen? What did I think others would notice or think about me? What would that mean to me, or say about me?”
See? It’s starting to get good? We are taking an instance of what really is a few minutes of panic attack hell and breaking it down into a reflective thought process.
I’m gonna answer these as if I’m going to a meeting at my weight loss clinic. I hate going to these. I don’t do well with humans, and yes, obviously it is something I am working on. We can’t play the avoidance game our whole lives because then we aren’t learning anything about how to live life, are we?
What went through my mind? Panic, fear of embarrassment, people staring at me
What disturbed me? The thought of being called on to speak out loud, the nurses at intake making a comment I don’t respond to correctly, essentially? All the people and the mere thought at fucking something up and making a fool of myself.
What’s the worst that could happen? Honestly? Someone could give me a weird look. But I don’t go home to them. I don’t live with them. If it’s another patient/member, and I accidentally do or say something rude, I can just apologize. Or, alternatively, when I get there and do my intake sheet for the meeting, a nurse could magically stop me and tell me I’ve been kicked out of the program. That would suck. I hope that doesn’t happen. That would be humiliating.
What did I think others would notice or think about me? Sort of answered this already. I’m fatter than I’ve ever been in my life; I don’t want anyone to look at me and think, “Oh she’ll never lose that weight.” “Why does she even bother?”
Ha. Interesting! I’m making a lot of assumptions up there. Going to a bariatric clinic for a meeting with other obese people who are in the same boat as me. Instead of being a member of a support group, I am making paranoid assumptions that automatically seem to position me at a point of defense. With that mindset, everything everyone does or says will be suspect to me. That’s no way to encounter a support group meeting; the idea is to get educated about better taking care of my body and getting ready to change behaviors and diet and exercise to continue taking steps towards a healthier body and a longer life. If I’m only worried about being embarrassed it’s probably difficult to actually glean any useful information from the meeting.
Moving along, we see the fourth column mentioning “Self-focus.” More questions for which I seem to have already provided answers above. However, I’ll go over them:
As I felt anxious, where was my focus of attention?
What did I notice about myself?
What do I imagine I look like, or how others see me? How do I picture myself looking?
Well, shoot. I stated previously that I think I look bad because I’ve gained weight, and my focus of attention was my feet because I’m too scared to look at anyone else seated in the rows in the room. I’ve already kind of beaten down my own assumptions though (hooray for lucid auto-therapy via blogging!) by recalling that everyone else in that meeting is going through exactly what I am going through, and we are all there to get information and share our ideas or worries. If I approach each of these situations with that mindset, I’m sure to have a much more positive experience with the meetings. Many obese people tend to exhibit some types of mental illness (allow me to cite with GOOGLE IT), so it’s unfair of me to assume I am the only one there that is feeling any type of anxiety.
It’s different if it’s a meeting for Widget Enthusiasts. The focus is on the Widgets, not our morbidly obese bodies. If I go to a meeting for the love of Widgets, I probably wouldn’t feel this way. The fact that the meeting is specifically addressing a highly visible physical feature of mine exacerbates my fear and paranoia. However, that ‘s the whole purpose of the meeting. The nurses there have dealt with hundreds upon hundreds of human beings, if not thousands, many of whom I’m sure weight a lot more than I do. It’s unfair to assume these nurses, who chose to enter this profession to care for other humans, are secretly fat-shaming us all, myself included.
Safety Behaviors is our next column.
What did I do that helped me cope?
What did I do to hide it or prevent others from noticing?
What did I do to try to stop it from happening?
Did I have an urge to do anything?
How did what I did affect my anxiety?
Now, the great thing about safety behaviors is what you can do to get you from the tipping point. You can tip to the Anxiety Abyss, or you can tip to the Anxiety Annihilator! Breathing helps, and while you are focusing on breathing exercises, you can go over the sixth column in your head to rationalize your thoughts to influence you to tip toward annihilating your anxiety: the sixth column being, “Balanced: more rational response to thoughts and self-focus.”
STOPP! Take a breath….
Is this fact or opinion?
What would someone else say about this situation? What’s the bigger picture?
Is there another way of seeing it? What advice would I give a friend?
Is my reaction in proportion?
If I was seeing this as an outsider, what would I notice about other people? What’s really happening?
Change focus!
These are all great questions. The most helpful for the physical symptoms being the breathing exercises. It’s funny how if you focus on your breathing, your body slows down enough for you to center within your mind and rationally divide and conquer your negative thought patterns. Once you nail inhalation techniques you can really take a seat (in your mind) and learn to memorize and go through these questions. If you can keep asking this stuff, hopefully your mind is still within a frame where you can dial back the negative or fearful thought patterns. Because, to answer the questions, most people wouldn’t give a damn about the other people in this situation; they’d waltz in and sit down and get to business. The bigger picture here is you are attending a meeting to address this hazardous problem that is affecting your health as well as physical and mental state. To see it from another perspective, you are doing something that is good for you, and you may look this way now and feel this way now, but the meeting it temporary, and if you keep up all the temporary thoughts, you will see a permanent change in your body. If I had a friend I would tell this friend not to sweat it; everything is fine, the feelings they have will pass and life will move on. You should note that the reaction is not within proprotion to this particular situation; this will help you to compartmentalize the notion of fear and anxiety as “silly” and that a silly overreaction isn’t worth getting “all worked up” over. What is really happening? You, and a bunch of other obese persons, are seeking help for you problem and are doing so in a positive and supportive environment with healthcare professionals?
Now, just say all that crap in your head, every single time you do your meetings, and you will be forever cured of anxiety, hooray!
I digress like I invented rambling on.
But we do fail sometimes. I remember one time in December among the stress of the Generic Winter Holiday Season (GWHS =D), I drove all the way out to a meeting and sat in the car, my hands firmly dug into the steering wheel. I was right outside.
But I didn’t move. I wasn’t doing a damn thing to eliminate the thoughts, or at least change their direction. I tipped, completely, into the Anxiety Abyss.
This is where the seventh column plays up it’s importance.
“Outcome: What I did – how that helped” along with a re-rate of your emotion of 0-100%
What could I do differently?
What would be more effective?
Outer-focus: look around, listen – move focus of attention away from self.
Do what works. ACT WISELY.
I talk the big talk, walk the big walk, but in the heat of the moment our emotions can and do get the better of us. I sat in the car, put the ignition on, and just drove straight home. I was so angry at myself. I had failed.
But I started thinking about it. I can fix this. I can go to the next meeting, and it’s going to be okay. I will be okay. This is not the end. It already happened, and I couldn’t change the fact that I did not go. But I can go the next time. I will go the next time.
And I did.
To answer the questions as if I had failed that day:
What I would do differently? I would have made little bets with myself, and broken the “huge” goal of sitting in on the meeting into what felt like “digestible” chunks. I would have gathered my purse, and while filled with all the fear, just gotten out of the car and started walking. That’s it. Just walk. Now, start breathing and paying attention to your breaths, and get to the door. Open that door. Smile and nod at the attendant. That’s it! I’m doing it! I still need to sign in and I’m still scared, so I’ll sit in the lobby for a few moments and start talking myself through how ridiculous I am making myself feel. These emotions are real and they are not silly. What is causing me to react with these emotions is silly.
What would be more effective? Just walking in is enough to get started. But we need to rewind to before I even left, and start re-framing my thoughts so I don’t build this up to a precipice from which I inevitably tip over into the Anxiety Abyss. Next time, I’m going to put on some makeup, because I feel more confident when I look good. I’ll make extra time to prepare my appearance for the meeting. I will chant mantras of radical acceptance and positive ideals in my head while I contour my cheeks and dab on blush and blend, blend, blend. I got this, this time I got this.
Outer-focus: look around, listen – move focus of attention away from self. What this is trying to get at is, instead of internalizing the incessant negative thought patterns, if we have already tipped over into the Anxiety Abyss, we may not be able to stop this Katamari/Snowball of negative internal thoughts; when preemptive and proactive thinking has failed, CBT/DBT suggests we distract ourselves. Stopping the self-defeating talk, just for a moment, and looking up and around ,helps take our mind’s stream of consciousness away from repeating the insecurity-laden Anxiety Abyss talk and externalizes our senses to the environment around us. I like to see what kind of jewelry the ladies are wearing. Or I’ll count the number of people with glasses. I’ll make up fake backstories for people. You realign your thoughts to something that consumes you until you realize the chest pain is subsided and you’ve dazed off thinking about how Bob over there used to be a Somali pirate but was booted from the crew for being way too white, so he drowned his sorrows in Popeye’s Chicken (I’ve never had it, wonder if it’s good?) until he had to be rolled to the weight management support group meetings. There, I’ve externalized my stimuli to include the other people. I overcame the momentary Anxiety Abyss, crawling out on hands and knees and dragging my belly across thorns on the ground, but at least I made it to, and through, the meeting.
Everyone experiences varying degrees of anxiety in social situations, or in situations where you fear something will happen to you, or your child, or your pet, or your beloved Honus Wagner rookie baseball card.
It’s all about taking the good situations and outcomes and identifying the factors that made it successful, documenting them, and employing them the next time the Nervous Nasties decide to take up residence in your beleaguered mind so you are able to emerge victorious. In the same vein, it is more important to document when things did not go well; so you can identify the whens, whos, wheres, and so on. If you realize which mistakes you appear to be making during each step, or column, during the scenario you can begin to identify how you can change for the better the next time it happens.
I’m glad I wrote this. It was really helpful for me! I hope someone out there may get something out of this one day.
