This concept may sound a bit confusing at first – especially when you’re deeply entangled in a state of anxiousness. But the only reason why your anxiety makes you have scary thoughts is because you dislike and / or you’re afraid of having scary thoughts… and anxiety is a state of mind that thrives on whatever you happen to be afraid of.
Anxiety is not unlike an emotional magnifying glass: unfortunately, it magnifies your negative emotions only… to the point where you’ll feel nothing but negativity. It magnifies your scary thoughts as well, to the point where you might thing these thoughts have control over you. And they might… unless you decide otherwise.
Here’s something that you really should strive to understand, as far as controlling thoughts go: you can’t do it. Actually, no one can easily control their thoughts. What people can actually do, in fact what you can do as well if you put yourself into it, that’s controlling the reaction to those scary thoughts… which is much easily done than controlling the thoughts themselves.
What you need to do next time you’re in a state of anxiety that brings forth scary thoughts is not saying to yourself “I’ll be brave and conquer these scary thoughts”; but rather “These are just thoughts, and they’re in my own head… there’s nothing to be brave against!”. If you succeed in remembering this, your anxiety will quickly dissipate.
Trying to control your anxiety by fighting your scary thoughts simply isn’t possible, and the more you try doing it, the stronger and scarier your thoughts will get. You need to make the very opposite effort, which is convincing yourself there really is no need to fight your scary thoughts, because that is the only way they will easily fade.
Here’s a simple example: try NOT to think of cats. Try to put all your effort and imagination into NOT thinking about cats of any kind for just 10 minutes. If you try this simple exercise, after just a few minutes you’ll realize that cats is all you can think of. Why? Because trying to suppress a thought – scary or otherwise – you’ll only give it more energy, thus effectively making it stronger.
