Centering Thought: I feel my anxiety in my body, moods and thoughts. It can keep me safe from imminent danger. And when true danger is not present, but only perceived, I can use tools like breathing and grounding to center myself in safety.
Anxiety has physical, emotional and mental components. We can feel it in our bodies (a pounding heart rate, sweaty sensation, shaking hands); our moods (nervousness and other feelings on the fear spectrum); and in our thoughts (worry thoughts like, “What if it doesn’t work out?” or self-critical thoughts like, “I’m not good at this” or “They’ll never like me”). Knowing this can help us get some perspective. But over-intellectualizing our emotions is not often enough to cycle out of them, especially when it comes to those that are higher on the spectrum of the more negative emotions——mad, sad or scared.
If we were to plot all feelings along a continuum of 0 to 10——with 0 being a neutral sensation and 10 being the most extreme version of the feeling, such as rage on the mad spectrum——we would find that any version of the mood that goes beyond that middle number 5 on the scale is shaped by “thought distortions.” Thought distortions are just what they sound like: thinking that is skewed by assumptions we cannot actually know.
One example of a thought distortion that leads to anxiety is: “They’ll never like me.”
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