If you’re anxious, you might often feel like your thoughts are tormenting you, filling your head with all kinds of awful scenarios and endless “what ifs?”.

Focusing on all the things that might – just might – go wrong, the anxious mind alerts you to all kinds of unlikely possibilities, urging you to over-analyse and over-prepare and check and recheck, to seek reassurance over and over again. The anxious brain can seem like it’s a pest, a bully, a torturer that won’t stop ringing the alarm even when there’s no fire.

Yet, paradoxically, you might also treat these anxious thoughts with a form of reverence. As American CBT therapist and anxiety expert Dr. Michael Stein puts it, ‘Your mind is your torturer, yet you worship it.’ It may sound exaggerated – most anxious people might baulk at the word ‘worship’ – but Dr Stein is making a serious point
here. When anxiety strikes, it often floods the mind with warnings about what could go wrong. The thing is, you must remember to not automatically trust an untrustworthy narrator. The thoughts might feel urgent, convincing you that they must be analysed or addressed.

However, this is a trap. As Stein puts it, ‘Just because your mind says something is important does not mean it actually is’.
In other words, to use that simple adage at the heart of CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy): thoughts are just thoughts – not facts.

The thing with anxiety is that it tricks us into treating thoughts as if they are facts. It persuades us to engage with even the most unlikely fears, believing we must find a solution or reassurance. That’s why sometimes you might look back on an old worry that gripped you at the time, and think, why did I get so worked up? The answer is that the risk felt all too real at the time. The uncertainty you felt may have seemed urgent, as if something demanded immediate attention, even if there was no real emergency at all.

That’s why one must remember that anxious thoughts are not reliable indicators of danger, and it’s important not to reinforce them by behaving as if they are. Instead, try to see them more like random background noise generated by an overactive and over-protective brain.

If your mind tells you that touching a doorknob might expose you to a deadly disease, says Stein, this thought is not a prophecy but a simply ‘a random neuron firing in your brain’. Similarly, if you have a sudden thought that your partner might leave you, that’s ‘just a fart noise in your head’. It doesn’t mean anything, and it’s best to treat such thoughts as irrelevant noise rather than serious warnings that demand your attention. To repeat, thoughts are just thoughts, not facts, so don’t worship them. They don’t inherently carry meaning or truth, even when they feel compelling.

False alarms

‘Our minds like to warn us about stuff because our minds think they are keeping us safe by doing this’, notes Stein. This in-built survival mechanism prioritises false alarms over missed dangers, which is why anxiety tends to exaggerate risks.

Of course, while this may have been useful in our evolutionary past, it often backfires in modern life, causing undue stress over minor or non-existent threats. Recognising this evolutionary quirk can help you tame your anxious thoughts, and to see them as a natural but over-protective safety mechanism.
To change your relationship with anxious thoughts, then, aim to respond to them differently. One response is to take a sceptical and even humorous approach.

For instance, when your mind predicts that your relationship might end or that your anxiety will never improve, aim to casually dismiss these thoughts as baseless noise. You might even respond sarcastically: “Thanks for the input, mind. Great stuff.” This strategy doesn’t aim to eliminate anxious thoughts, but it does seek to strip them of their authority. It’s a reminder that the thoughts are not important, but your response to them is important.

A useful place to land is this: your mind is not an authority, it’s a commentator. It produces a constant stream of suggestions, warnings and noise – some helpful, much of it not. No one thinks they worship their thoughts, but in practice many of us treat them as if they were authoritative, as if every “what if” deserves an answer and every passing prediction deserves to be taken seriously.

Try a different approach. Hear the thought, note it, and carry on. Not every alarm deserves a response, and the less seriously you take them, the less power they tend to have.

Linda Hamilton is a Kinsale-based cognitive behavioural therapist. If you would like to get in touch with her, call 086-3300807 For more information, go to www.kinsalecbt.com