Dr. John Eaton (min terapi-læremester) la ut dette på bloggen sin i dag.
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Fuel for Anxiety
World Mental Health Day falls on Saturday, and the usual advice to anxious people will turn up on schedule: relax, breathe, think positive.
In 36 years as a psychotherapist, I have not met one person who relaxed because somebody told them to.
The difficulty is that anxiety is a state the brain produces, in the way it produces hunger or sleepiness, and a state of that kind does not take instruction. Nor does it respond to requests to disappear.
What keeps it going is the alarm and resistance that forms around it. You might ‘force’ yourself to think of something else, distract yourself on your phone, take a pill, or count your breaths. Or you might decide not to do the thing you are anxious about. Following any of those moves will confirm to the Threat Detector in your head that it’s dumb alarms are getting the reaction it seeks.
Or you could try a different move: noticing the state, witnessing it with curiosity, and letting it be whatever it wants to be as you float by on to your next priority. Doing that won’t stop the Threat Detector going about its business. But it will end the loop you are in when you fight it. And when that happens the brain will gradually run out of fuel for the alarm.
