About Being "Here-and-Now" And Anxiety

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Do you fret often? Little things? Or really important things? How do you differentiate between them? Why worry at all?

This article will focus on being aware of the present and one of the cognitive techniques for getting rid of anxiety.

In the third wave of CBT, there is an approach called mindfulness. Mindfulness translates to “Mindfulness”.

The irony of this word is that it can be misspelled, which will absolutely distort the meaning. For example, you can write with two Ls to get MindfuLLness, which can be translated as “overcrowding” of consciousness (with all sorts of rubbish). You can write MindFOOLness - "stupidity" of consciousness.

In the Mindfulness approach, there is the concept of a “thinking machine”. Her goal is survival, so she tends to throw up disturbing thoughts for reflection about how something can go wrong so that her carrier (that is, you and I) can protect himself as much as possible. Sometimes this does not harm at all, but often the thinking machine works too intensely, taking you into thinking about a future filled with dangers, forcing you to constantly worry about something, often about something completely unrelated to the present moment and being "here-and-now. ".

The thinking machine is trained to solve problems. For example, how to properly design a trap to catch a mammoth and drive it there, how to build a shelter from the rain, how to choose a good cave to live in. The thinking machine was "developed" a long time ago to solve absolutely practical problems. However, she is not at all suitable for solving emotional problems. This is due to its very essence: when you start trying to get rid of a negative emotion and improve your mood, the thinking machine, trying to provide you with more information you need to solve the problem, offers memories from your experience in which you also had a bad mood. This method hardly improves the mood - failures, losses, mistakes are remembered. Thus, a bad mood kind of "spins" itself and can eventually plunge you into depression. In this case, you are stuck in the past, instead of being in the present, enjoying the moment "here-and-now."

The mindfulness approach is recommended for clients with repeated episodes of depression precisely in order to interrupt the described “self-unwinding” cycles. The brain is full of automatisms, and even if depression is worked out, its causes are eliminated, a sad thought can "slip through". But there is always a choice to follow her or give her space, watch her leave, and let her go.

The mindfulness approach suggests learning to deliberately distance oneself from the “thinking machine”. I.e:

1. Understand that anxious or sad thoughts can arise and disappear without affecting anything, that an anxious or sad thought is just a thought and nothing more.

2. Understand that a person can not only experience emotions about thoughts, but also learn to observe them and at the same time remain calm.

For this, special techniques of conscious meditation are used, the purpose of which is to learn to stay here and now, and not in thoughts about the future or the past and various anxieties. All of this may sound too complicated, but meditation is actually quite simple. For example, you are lying on the floor and concentrating on your breathing. It is quite natural that at this time a bunch of distracting thoughts begins to rush through my head, which the “thinking machine” slips: disturbing thoughts about the future, or simply about what needs to be done, “right now, get up and do, instead of being so useless lie down”, or sad thoughts about what did not work out in the past. Your goal is to observe and accept them without trying to change and in no way get upset that they come and distract you. Just imagine that you are sitting on the shore with your hands and the current carries small boats. You put thoughts on boats and they float away. You do not sit with them - thoughts are separate from you, they come and go, but you return to watching your breathing.

To begin with, two such meditations a day for 10 minutes are enough. This is how you learn to return to the here-and-now.

Studies show that mindfulness meditation is very beneficial for physical health, the prevailing mood throughout the day, enjoyment of seemingly ordinary things and, paradoxically, free up a lot of time.

One of the possible excessive manifestations of the "thinking machine" that "carries you" into the future is the so-called. "Catastrophization".

For example: you are a high school student and got a bad grade. You perceive it as “everything is lost” and you experience intense anxiety. The chain of automatisms that leads to such a result may look like this: “I got two - I will never learn this subject - I will not get a diploma - I won’t go anywhere without a diploma - I won’t be able to find a job - I won’t be able to receive money to support my family - I will remain alone and die alone. " This example is comic, but it shows what kind of "elephant" catastrophization can inflate. When a person is in this "circle", he does not follow the chain of thoughts, it sweeps very quickly. The "Thinking Machine" tries to get rid of anxiety in the way it knows how to solve problems - for this it slips the relevant experience of disturbing memories and predictions, which only generates a new round of anxiety.

Task number 1 here is to stop and "stretch" the "accordion" of catastrophic thinking. When you are experiencing severe anxiety over little things, try to track your possible thinking process and ask yourself, "Does the fact that I got a Two really mean that I will die alone?"

This is exactly how catastrophization works: the student from the example feels despair not because of the "deuce" (a specific episode of school life), but because of the fear "I will not be able to find a job - I will die alone." And he reacts to the "deuce", as if he is already 45 years old and he has not found a job. Experiencing this kind of fear, he is not in the here and now. Because now, at the moment, he is not alone (he has at least parents), he is only 14 years old (for example), and there is still time before entering a university and looking for a job. There are still many "threes", "twos", "fours" and "fives" ahead. By catastrophizing, he loses the enjoyment of the present moment.

The task of the technique is to learn how to return to the "here and now". The more you stretch this "accordion" of catastrophic thinking, the more likely it will break and the more fun you will get the result.