Overcoming anxiety, internal friction, and negative thoughts is so useful

1

The first few weeks, I was depressed for a while. The reason is that there has been a slight turmoil in the work, a colleague in the department has been dismissed by the company for "cost optimization" reasons, the company's cooperation with some partners has been suspended, and the work functions of our department have also been adjusted. For a moment, people were panicked.

This kind of juncture is often the time for emotional villains to jump out and make waves. My emotional villains also "lived up to expectations". For about a week or two, the anxious little man who had been away from me for a long time came again, and all kinds of worries came to mind:

"Will I also be fired?"

"Now that it's hard to find a job, what if you're fired?"

"There is still some money borrowed from relatives when I bought a house last year, and if I am dismissed, how long will it take to pay off the money?" And the mortgage..."

These "wild thoughts" often invade the mind when I am not paying attention, which is really overwhelming.

During that time, the negative news on the Internet was also wave after wave, the emergence of new coronavirus strains, the end of the epidemic seemed to be far away; the housing market was cold, the housing prices in Yanjiao, Hebei Province, were even cut off, and from time to time we would see the news that buyers cut off supply; the information on layoffs in various industries was continuous... These messages added to my anxiety.

At this time, I tried to fight anxiety with cognitive behavioral therapy in Burns' New Emotion Therapy and rational emotional behavior therapy in Controlling Anxiety (one of the most famous forms of cognitive behavioral therapy, and I once wrote a special introduction), both of which are extremely useful methods for treating anxiety, depression, and various emotional problems. But this time, I found that these methods didn't work as well.

I reflected on why, and found that it was because the anxiety problem applied to cognitive therapy was anxiety caused by cognitive distortions. That is to say, reality may not be so bad, and nothing really threatens you, but your own thoughts are too subjective, imagining things badly, imagining yourself as incompetent, and feeling anxious. And this anxiety is often accompanied by low self-esteem and doubts about self-worth. The greatest effect of this type of approach is to reconstruct your perception of the world and yourself, as well as to rebuild your self-worth. In addition, these therapies are also effective for anxiety in specific situations such as social anxiety and public speaking anxiety.

But the anxiety I faced this time wasn't this type of anxiety. I knew that my self-esteem had not been hit; my perception of danger might be exaggerated, but not out of thin air. The turmoil of the environment, the pressure of life, the crisis caused by the uncertainty of the future... These threats are not distorted cognitive imaginations, they are not brain storms, but reality storms.

In the face of this kind of anxiety, it is not enough to change cognition.

So what to do?

Coincidentally, when I was struggling with the inability to alleviate my anxiety, a book inspired me, The Trap of Happiness.

At the heart of the book is an introduction to a method that can be used to relieve anxiety, deal with negative emotions, and negative thoughts: acceptance commitment therapy, or ACT therapy for short.

After a short period of practice, I have a feeling of seeing each other and hating each other. This method is very promising in solving the anxiety caused by real threats, and it can also help you get out of the pain of the death of a loved one, or the pain of unemployment, schooling, or love, or the pain of feeling worthless, in short, the pain caused by various practical or psychological problems.

2

When dealing with negative emotions and negative thoughts, our first reaction is to control it, and the purpose of many psychological self-help books and psychotherapy is also to control.

For example, rational emotional behavior therapy will teach you to refute irrational beliefs in your heart and evaluate yourself more objectively. There are also self-help books that will tell you to replace negative self-suggestion with positive psychological cues. These methods are all about trying to control negative emotions and thoughts and make them disappear quickly.

But ACT is different in that it doesn't recommend controlling your negative emotions and thoughts, it shows you how to be unaffected by these dark sides and then do what's really important to you.

At its core is to tell you:

You can live with painful emotions, negative thoughts.

Maybe you have a lot of negative thoughts, but don't worry, you won't be hurt by those thoughts.

One of the most central approaches to acting is to "dissociate" negative thoughts.

Cognitive behavioral therapy teaches you to correct and refute irrational beliefs and change distorted cognition. For example, if someone claims that they will not be able to find a partner in their lifetime because of their average appearance, the counselor will suggest that they go to the park to observe the couples around them and rate the charm value of these couples. This step can help the person find out whether or not to find the other half is actually irrelevant to whether the person's appearance is attractive, because many couples who look sweet are not the kind of people with high charm values.

Dissociation in the ACT is different. Dissociation does not require you to refute or correct those negative thoughts, it is as long as you do one thing, which is to recognize the essence of those thoughts.

What is the essence?

The essence of an idea is a story. The story is something that does not exist objectively, the story is the theater in the brain, and the story is just the story.

Stories may be realistic, like the best movies or novels we've ever seen, and we throw ourselves into them, leaving tears of emotion or pain for them, as if we've become one with the world in the story. But in fact, stories are just things that the brain makes up.

The various ideas in our minds are also some of these stories. It is not that the story does not reflect reality at all, but it means that the story, even if it is written on the basis of real experience, is different from reality, and when it is conceived by our brains, it has no substance. The thoughts that happen in our minds are not entities either. It's as if the word "dog" is different from the real dog after all.

So dissociation is when an idea arises, as soon as possible to realize that it is just an idea, a text, a story. Then, let the idea come and go and don't give it too much attention.

If you want to dissociate your own thoughts, try this: find an idea that often bothers you, such as "I am so failed", change the sentence pattern to the idea, and add the phrase "I have an idea..." to "I have an idea, I am so failed".

This exercise can help you distance yourself from your ideas and allow you to take a few steps back to observe your own ideas so that you don't get immersed in them and believe them.

3

You may have to ask: is this method too mediocre, is it really useful?

Dissociation works for two reasons. First, it prevents us from getting caught up in self-debate and self-attrition because we are too obsessed with the correctness of an idea.

Let me give you an example. I wonder if you have ever had an experience of regretting it? Suppose there is such a person, he was young to join the film industry, dream of becoming a first-class director, although he has some talent, but the things he made have never been too well-known, the financial returns are limited, life is very difficult. Therefore, he gave up his dream of filming, returned to his hometown to find an ordinary job, and lived an ordinary but stable life.

One day more than a decade later, he suddenly discovered that a friend who had entered the industry with him and was in the same difficult situation as he was had made a movie that was recognized by the market. It is conceivable that after learning the news, he will be swallowed up by regret.

For several days in a row, he would ask himself a question repeatedly: If I had persevered like him, would I have been as successful as he is today? But this kind of thinking is too bad, so he will change his perspective to comfort himself, saying to himself: My talent is not as good as his, even if I insist on ten years, I may not have such achievements as him, so I chose to leave in the first place. This idea can comfort him for a while, but another voice is also looming, about to ring, it will say: To say that my talent is not as good as his is not a fact, it is just self-consolation, if I did not leave, I am afraid that today I will really succeed.

Did you find out? When he began to regret it, and began to care about what the little man said, trying to fight it, he was actually caught up in a struggle with that idea. "If I hadn't left that year, wouldN't I have succeeded today?" On this issue, he will support the positive side for a while and the opposite side for a while. But no matter which side he supports, he can't give himself a satisfactory answer. This kind of self-intriguation will only delay his life in the present moment and make him panic for the rest of his life.

And dissociation is to recognize that it is an idea, a story, and then go with it. If you don't fight it, you won't get caught up in it.

The second reason dissociation works is that it prevents us from falling into a vicious circle of negative thinking and escalating negative emotions.

Negative thinking reinforces itself and forms a vicious circle, which I experienced once a while ago. I was at work that day, changing a manuscript, I encountered a problem, usually encountered that type of problem, I can deal with it in about 1-2 hours, but that day I spent a whole morning and failed to solve.

The inefficient state made me very dissatisfied with myself, and the voice in my head rang out: You are useless! In an instant, my brain was wrapped in negative emotions.

At the same moment, another voice came again: When is it, you don't solve the problem, and you still have time to worry and blame yourself? This voice makes me angry with myself. You see, after anxiety, the "second-level emotion" of anger comes again.

At this time, the brain that is manipulated by emotions is even less able to think normally, so the problem cannot be solved for a long time. The problem was not solved, and it had a bad impact on my mood, making me more anxious and angry.

They reinforce and escalate: the more anxious I am to solve the problem, the more disturbed my thinking becomes, and the more difficult it is to solve the problem; the more bored and impatient the problem is not solved. In this way, a vicious circle is formed. I was caught in this emotional vortex and couldn't move.

Dissociation, on the other hand, is embracing negative thoughts and emotions before they escalate. For example, if I accept that I am not always efficient, I will not be dissatisfied with my inefficient state, nor will I say to myself, "You are really useless"; if I accept my anxiety and do not regard anxiety as a "bad" state, I will not be angry and blame myself for my anxiety; if I do not try to drive these emotions away as soon as possible, I will not be distracted and unable to solve the problem.

Dissociation and acceptance can free us from various emotional struggles and are the starting point for us to solve problems. Their biggest role is to let us stop tangling, no longer internal friction, and start to act.

Have you ever had such an experience? When you really start to pay attention to the present moment and invest in something, it's easy to get into a state of flow, you're so focused on that thing that time seems to stop.

4

The most critical method in act is dissociation, and its effect is to fully accept your thoughts and emotions, let them come and go, and not confront and entangle with them.

There is a figurative metaphor in the book to describe this process.

Imagine you sailing on the seas, and you see a large group of devils dancing with their teeth and claws under the deck of a ship. Some are the devils of emotions, such as guilt, anger, and fear; some are devils of thoughts, such as "I will fail" and "I will be ugly." If you drift on the sea, the devils will stay peacefully under the deck, but as soon as you try to sail the ship to the shore, the devils will jump up and threaten and intimidate you. You are jealous of the devils, so you have been drifting at sea, and you dare not come to shore.

But interestingly, those devils, no matter how scary they may look, can never cause direct damage to your body. As long as you are aware of this, you are free and can sail the ship anywhere.

You will still be intimidated by the devil, but as long as you accept their existence, get used to their existence, and do not fear them, you can sail freely.

This is the relationship between your negative thoughts, emotions and yourself. It's very real because anyone's brain is invaded by thoughts at every moment of their life, and 80% of those thoughts are negative. For anyone, the idea that they can't do it, that they feel too bad is as common as a common thing, and they are the devils. And what you can do is to live peacefully with these devils, uninterrupted and uninterrupted by them.

If you are also troubled by anxiety, regret, depression, etc., then you can try ACT therapy.

But no matter how useful the ACT is in solving emotional problems, psychological problems, don't expect it to solve all problems. If your uneasiness is caused by real-life problems, then only by taking action to solve the problems that are bothering you can you extinguish the fire of uneasiness from the root.

But sometimes, the problem may not be your own responsibility, or it may be the responsibility of others, the responsibility of society. In this case, you don't have to be too demanding of yourself.

Finally, a word for you:

With fearless courage to change what can be changed,

Accept with a calm heart what cannot be changed,

Use the wisdom of life to distinguish the difference between the two.

A Bowl of Sweet Bean Blossoms: Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts from Wuhan University, from real estate planning to text editing. Reading heals my anxiety and feeds my curiosity.