I continue today with my review of the basics of the Fear Mastery roadmap of anxiety. Thanks to the unnamed (in this blog post anyway) commenter who said to me in email this past week that I should call the “Worry Engine” stage of the Chronic Anxiety Cycle the “Oh My God!” stage. Pretty funny!

What happens if we don’t stop the Worry Engine? I’m guessing you don’t need me to tell you. What happens is that we usually tend to land on one or two or three of those scary projections about the future, focusing on them in our thinking – often because they are the scariest to us.

We do this, and then we start assuming that those hypothetical outcomes are actually certain to happen. Worse, we assume it will be bad ALWAYS – it will go bad and stay bad – hence the name – the Indefinite Negative Future. It isn’t that (to use my example about the work presentation from my last blog post) someone will merely laugh at us once if we flub a presentation.

No, they’ll laugh, and then continue to laugh. They will mock us, dismiss is, and it will go on FOREVER. And of course that means it will be horrible, unendurable. We will be unable to show our face in the lunch room, we’ll never be able to go out after work with our colleagues, we’ll be made fun of by strangers in the supermarket… you get the picture.

That’s the heart of Indefinite Negative Future thinking.

INF – This Way Lies Madness…

I could almost describe landing on one or two or three Indefinite Negative Futures (INF’s for short) as a way of “carving a groove” in your fearful thinking. I suspect you know exactly what I’m talking about.

You’ve been doing that Worry Engine thinking thing for a few days, or weeks, or months, or YEARS, and you keep revisiting the same scary scenarios over and over again… and now you seem to go there at the drop of a hat, and you’re roaring along with your worrying about the future with no effort at all.

As I said in my last post this dwelling on the potential scary future is the Flight or Fight’s attempt to find you an escape route from the scary thing in your thinking. Sadly there IS no escape route – because it isn’t a crisis, it’s a problem. However to YOU it FEELS like a crisis, it LOOKS like a crisis, so you’re responding to it AS a crisis.

So you keep “worrying” the same fearful projections about the future over and over, like a dog with a bone -

Keep that up for any length of time and you’ll start to “shorthand” those fears – boil them down to a handful of fearful scenarios that you revisit again and again. Which of course keeps firing up Flight or Fight.

Which keeps scaring you. After awhile we don’t even remember how the scenario got started! If we even get close to a general area in our thinking we get afraid…

The Tiger in The Room

One metaphor I use a LOT on this blog about our problems-turned-crises is that we (metaphorically) create a tiger in our thinking. Tigers are dangerous. They are big, they are unpredictable, they tend to eat things like people when they’re hungry, and they seem unbeatable. Why wouldn’t we be scared of them?

Each of those INF’s in our thinking is another glimpse of what happens if we let the tiger get too close to us. Remember, all we’re really trying to do (in our brains) is figure out a way to get away from the tiger.

You’re hard-wired to do this. You’re not crazy, you’re not weak, you’re not “obsessive” – you’re just doing what our evolutionary histories have taught us to do – find a way to get away from the danger.

And It Isn’t Like We Just Have One Tiger!

If we only had one tiger in our thinking to contend with we might not have it so bad. But of course life just keeps coming at us, and if we’ve been set up in our thinking to find one thing frightening we can definitely do it with another thing, and another, and another.

This is part of what can make this Fear Mastery work so tiring. We’re often not fighting one tiger, we’re fighting three or four or seven of them in our thinking. Nope, we can have multiple INF’s running on multiple fears.

And let’s not forget that we’re often not really conscious of our fight to escape the tigers. So much of our thinking isn’t in the center of our awareness – a lot of it runs in the background unless we call it up front in our consciousness.

I probably can’t overstate that whole thinking-running-in-the-background thing when it comes to fearful/anxious thinking. This is the root of why so much of our anxious physical and emotional responses can seem to come up from nowhere, or catch us off guard the way they seem to do.

And this does a great job of explaining why we can feel so overwhelmed, so tired, so trapped. You have this shorthand list of fears that can be triggered by a memory, a comment from someone, a particular situation where you often worry about this or that fear, etc. This gets even easier when you’re tired, or upset, or feeling overwhelmed by the day.

Let me say it again – 1) our thinking often isn’t very conscious, and we are usually dealing with more than one fear at a time. Energy suck – check. Exhaustion – check. Wishing we had a switch in our brain for our fear – CHECK.

What To DO?

I mentioned in the last post on The Worry Engine that when you’re starting into Chronic Anxiety (and doing that projecting into the future, imagining all kinds of horrible outcomes to your problem-turned-crisis) a big key to shutting that process down is becoming aware of what you’re doing, and then deliberately calming ourselves down physically.

That is good advice for this stage of the Chronic Anxiety Cycle as well, although it is fair to say that it is harder here – takes more energy and effort, very often, to power down at this point.

Remember that you’ve been doing serious work at scaring yourself, and you’ve picked some favorite scary scenarios, when you get to the INF point of any particular fear or worry.

So:

1) Identify the fact that you are focusing on frightening future scenarios, and, at this stage of Chronic Anxiety you’ve landed on a small collection that scare you the most. This is the HEART of what is making you anxious right now.

The work here is to get clear on WHAT you’re afraid of in the future, and then steadily convert these fears/crises in your thinking back into problems that need resolution for you.

When I use the word problem I am not implying that your particular concern is necessarily light, easy or small. It might be huge. You could be dealing with serious family issues, financial problems, work challenges, you name it. No, I’m definitely not saying small when I say problem.

I AM saying that (hopefully you’re sick of my saying this by now!) that a problem is a fundamentally different creature from a crisis.

If you’re treating back taxes or your retirement in 15 years as a crisis (something that will hurt or kill you RIGHT NOW) then you are both burning enormous amounts of energy in self-hurting and usually useless ways, and you’re still not (in all likelihood) actually doing much to resolve the problem.

So – you need to get clear in your thinking, first, about what you’re afraid of/treating as a crisis.

That means doing what I call triad – making the decision to look your fears in the eye, identifying them clearly – wading through the inevitable Flight or Fight Response reactions in your body, feelings, and thinking – and then practicing unpacking/converting those fears/crises back into problems.

2) Come out of the future and back into the present! You’re burning a lot of time at this point, consciously or otherwise (usually otherwise). Practice realizing that you are obsessing over the future, whether you “mean to” or not!

A good way to counter that relentless focus on what might happen in the future is to, along with the identifying of and converting crisis back to problem, is practicing activities that pull you into the present.

Take a long walk. Visit with a friend and deliberately focus on them and their lives for a little while. Take a drive and practice just noticing what you see around you.

Put a record on and dance by yourself for 30 minutes. (You’ll feel great when you’re done, btw.) Play with your dog at the local dog-park. (He or she will thank you for it.) Make a meal, or bake some cookies (you can send me some if you like – always up for cookies.)

In other words, do whatever makes you come into the NOW, and get out of the future.

It is an illusion, to be very blunt, to think that by obsessing over the future you can somehow avert disaster. It is a very clear betrayal that we have Flight or Fight activated in the wrong direction (see the discussion on Flight or Fight in the two most recent blog posts.)

3) Work to identify what you CAN do, as you convert these fears back into problems, and take first, even if only small steps, to move in that direction, instead of obsessing. Some problems are remarkably easy to correct with even small amounts of action.

Some problems are larger, more tangled, or involve us confronting other fears. That takes more work.

But the ONLY way our problems will get solved (or at least 99% of the time) is by us ACTING rather than WORRYING. Which, of course, you already know…

4) How about asking yourself (and focusing on) what IS working for you right now? It is SO tempting when we’re doing anxiety to focus on how things are bad, how they are going wrong, how awful things will get later -

But how about deliberately centering your thinking on what is working in your life, right now? This isn’t a feel-good exercise or just something to make you feel better. This is deliberate practice of taking control of your thinking.

Because in case it isn’t clear yet from this blog the central theme of this Fear Mastery stuff is developing the skill and capacity to become a better master of your thinking. It is our thinking that gets us in trouble, and it is our thinking that will get us out of trouble.

It is all about acquiring a new set of skills in directing and being a better manager of our thinking. It is learning to think more clearly, more usefully, and as a result, with a lot less fear and anxiety in our lives.

5) Last, but not least, remember that you’re always able to calm your body down somewhat with deep breathing, deliberate relaxation efforts like stretching and meditation, exercise, etc. You’re dealing with both your thinking and your body’s/emotions reaction to that thinking.

Now Let’s Get To It!

OK, so there you have some basic recommendations for pulling this stuff apart at the Indefinite Negative Future stage of things.

You can use these recommendations really at any stage of the Chronic Anxiety Cycle (remember, this cycle is a linear structure imposed on a very organic process – useful for explaining, but limited in that most of us are at different points in the cycle for different fears, as well as moving back and forth along the cycle over time.)

Next up here in the blog I’m skipping over the stage called Anticipatory Anxiety – I completed several posts about this in the early fall, and I encourage you to look back at those after you finish this post.

I will be going on to a review of the basics around The Comfort Zone, that final stage of the development of anxiety in our lives, in my next few posts.

In the meantime, patience and stamina to you as you make the move to face down what is making you anxious. This is work you CAN do. It can feel overwhelming, impossible – but it is completely possible.

Advertisement