Predict thoughts, sensations, and interpretations

Predict distressing thoughts, feelings, sensations, and interpretations.

Your goal is to interpret an anxious experience as an opportunity to predict your distressing thoughts, feelings, sensations, and interpretations. You want to predict them ahead of time. You don’t have to know exactly what’s happening in your anxious moment. But, the better that you predict what’s likely to occur, then the easier it will be to get distance from it.

Predict that you’ll get anxious.

If your trigger often makes your heart rate increase or often makes you sweat, you might frequently have the same types of anxious thoughts based on certain triggers. These are all helpful to identify beforehand.

Predict that you’ll have fear of fear.

Your anxious process probably looks something like this:

First, you experience a trigger, either internally or externally.

Next, your mind says, Oh no, why am I anxious? What’s happening? That’s fear of fear.

Your mind will then answer why is this happening? with a catastrophic response in alignment with your content area.

If you experience health anxiety, your mind will say, It might be a heart attack or a stroke.

If you experience harm intrusions, your mind will say, I probably did something wrong. It will probably harm someone.

If you experience social anxiety, your mind will say, I feel anxious because I showed my incompetence as a coworker, a friend, a person. Everyone will judge me and no one will like me.

It’s important to think about this type of thinking as a catastrophic answer to your mind’s fear of its fearful reaction. When you feel fear, your heart races, you start to sweat, and your mind has catastrophic thoughts. The catastrophic thoughts are not messages, predictions, or threats. They are just thoughts that show up when you feel afraid. They are the same types of thoughts every time because you have a well conditioned response cycle that reinforces the presence of those thoughts. They are not happening again because they are true. They happen again because you are afraid of them.

If you can predict this pattern, you have the chance at relating to it effectively.

When you try this new approach, it will be uncomfortable at first, but eventually your anxious moment becomes an opportunity for courage, empowerment, and self-trust.

You get triggered and your mind says, Oh no, why am I anxious? What’s happening?

You can answer, I know what’s happening. I was expecting this! This anxiety happens when I go towards my triggers and this is really my opportunity to practice. Right now, I need to stay with my sensations. I need to turn courageously towards my sensations and approach them like a crying child — slowly, tenderly, curiously. My catastrophic thoughts are not messages. They are just what my mind does when my heart is racing. I just stay with this experience, without adding secondary fear, until it passes.

Predict that you’ll feel hopeless when you feel fear of fear.

A secondary process that’s very common for those with anxiety, OCD, and depression is that you experience sensations and intrusive thoughts, you feel fear of that fear, and then you feel hopeless, helpless, or worthless because it’s happening again.

Try predicting your secondary processes too.

You might think to yourself, I have this type of thought and I have this type of sensation and then my mind says, ‘Oh no! it’s happening again. This is going to happen forever. I’m never going to get out of this.’ Then I feel hopeless, helpless, worthless and forget to go towards it and surrender to it.

Your new response is Oh, yeah, that’s what happens when I do this type of activity. If you don’t act as though it’s true, then you can get to the other side of it without it feeling true.

When you try this new approach, it will be uncomfortable at first, but eventually your anxious moment becomes an opportunity for courage, empowerment, and self-trust.