I find it fascinating that our minds and thoughts can be sources of either the wildest expression of freedom or the most repressive regime of control and a source of anxiety and depression. The difference often comes down to perspective and the way we relate to a single thought.
It begins with a thought.
After all everything does, nothing was ever brought into or created in this reality without it first existing as a thought, this is an essential piece of insight that is at the core of understanding the anxiety prison for what it is, self-created.
So, a thought pops up, emerging from somewhere, maybe linked to a person, place, situation or event, and at this very moment we have a choice as to whether we focus on it or not. If you’ve been lost in the habit of overthinking for a long time then actually even recognising that you have a choice is not part of the story for you just yet, but it will be, so stay with me.
The mind then latches onto that thought, like an excited puppy dog, always on the lookout for the next stimulating moment to place it’s focus on. With that attention that the mind places on the thought it brings with it energy, and it’s that energy that infuses that simple innocent thought that was just emerging and minding its own business with a level of self-importance that it didn’t previously possess.
The thought is now empowered with an audience from the mind and so it starts running around in a circuit, becoming faster, more intense, and overwhelming to you with its all-encompassing nature. The thought responds to the increasing attention and focus the mind gives it, and the more intense it gets the more excited and stimulated the mind becomes, both now feeding off each other’s reciprocal energy, stuck in a loop.
This energy then usually starts manifesting in the physical body as an uncomfortable feeling, such as an increased heart rate, higher temperature, sweaty palms, restricted chest and or throat and voila you have entered what I call ‘The Loop of Doom’.
The Loop of Doom
Once you enter the loop of doom, you enter a multi-layer experience where thought, mind and feeling combine to create a story, and it is this story that keeps the thought and feeling stuck in the body, both triggering each other through the attached story.
This can develop into a debilitating behavioural pattern, becoming embedded in the subconscious and manifesting as various anxiety-based disorders. I have worked with clients experiencing conditions such as emetophobia, an intense fear of vomiting, and misophonia, a negative reaction to specific sounds.
The types of anxiety I see most often are centred around health where the client is excessively concerned about themselves, a small child or family member getting ill or dying and social anxiety where the clients symptoms increase whenever they have an event approaching that will bring with it the pressure to interact with others.
I have also worked with clients whose anxiety is linked to the news, world events, and existential fears about their own mortality. In today’s busy world, anxiety often stems from excessive personal or professional pressure that builds over time with no healthy outlet.
Do the Opposite
Both anxiety and depression are caused by the same underlying overthinking spiral in separate ways.
If anxiety is the anticipation of future events, then depression is the rumination of the past and where anxiety generally feeds off you doing things faster and more chaotically, depression feeds off doing little to nothing.
Anxiety wants you to do more and think more, which feeds the spiral, so doing the opposite and slowing down, taking a breath and becoming more present works wonders.
Depression wants you to do less, go back to bed and focus on self-defeating behaviours. This feeds the loop of doom from a different direction, filling the mind with thoughts of self-doubt, along with a lack of meaning and purpose. So the opposite is to just do something positive, no matter how small, to move, to build, to put one foot in front of the other and to keep going.
Of course, anxiety and depression related disorders can and will escalate if awareness is not created in the early stages, they may get so bad that the individual needs to start taking medication, because they have been strengthening their mind in a specific direction for a long period of time and its become so hard almost impossible for them to think any differently but this is what it all really comes down to.
Thinking Differently
Having worked with 100’s off clients around anxiety and observed my own patterns of anxious and depressive thoughts in the past, it can be very difficult to even think about thinking differently when your thoughts are so all consuming, did that make sense? It’s all quite meta.
But never fear, relief is possible and attainable, it just needs some consistent effort, because you’ve become very good at thinking or perceiving life in a specific way, so we need to start strengthening a new way of thinking and perceiving which begins with a two-part process.
The Present Moment
The reality of the situation is that in the present moment, right here, right now, everything is fine and is always fine. If you need to act then you just act in the present moment, you don’t think about it.
Thinking pulls you into the past or future, so the aim is to return to balance: the middle and the present moment. To do this, we need to give the puppy-dog mind something steady to focus on, and the body provides exactly that.
Luckily, we have five senses that are all connected with our body, that generally function for us autonomically, we rarely connect with them consciously, but this is where the magic happens.
When we consciously connect with each of our senses, we give our mind something to focus on. It’s like saying to our mind “hey come over here and try this”, we are not forcing or controlling our mind to stop doing something, which is where frustration and judgement come from, which then just creates more suffering through resistance. Instead, we just place our awareness and attention on something different.
When the mind takes its attention off ‘The Loop of Doom’ and the spiralling of thoughts, those thoughts lose the energy that was keeping them running around the never-ending circuit. So, they slow down and if the minds focus stays off the thoughts long enough, they become starved of energy and they dissolve.
This is the first of the two steps, and it’s the one I teach live every Monday.
A warning on Distraction: This is why distraction works, such as doom scrolling on your phone or distracting yourself with other unhealthy habits such as drinking, smoking or eating etc
They may work temporarily and indirectly but they don’t address the mechanism underneath in a healthy way, so it will keep coming back and you’ll end up using that unhealthy method more and more, which will then create its own negative impact on your physical and mental health.
Space = Choice
Once you have practiced consistently the regular diversion of mental attention to your sensory experience, spending more time in the here and now and less time in the past or future, you create space, space between thought and reaction, and in that space exists choice, a choice that’s always been there but that you’ve never been consciously aware of.
What appears is a crossroads with two paths, going in different directions. One path is the reaction that you’ve always taken, and the well-worn path that leads you to a place you know all too well. Whilst the other path is a response that takes you to a new place, of new possibilities and new opportunities.
But without the space between thought and reaction, you don’t even realise you have an alternative path to take, so creating space in the first place is essential for the possibility of a new choice to appear.
You then get to ask yourself, “am I going to react or respond?”, “do I feed the loop of doom?” or “do I create something fresh and new?”
From this space, an inner realisation often begins to emerge: you can see how much of your future has been shaped by past experiences and old perspectives, rather than by a fresh, positive vision of the future you truly want to create and experience.
This is where I will be taking us next.
To be continued…
Your Calmly
Adam
Break The Anxiety Loop – Workshop
If you’d like to learn and implement these two steps, then my Break The Anxiety Loop workshop will give you everything you need to break free of this loop.
Teaching, techniques, workbook and audio meditation.
You just need to invest £20 and commit 60-minutes of your time to learn the techniques at my workshop tonight @ 7pm UK time.
