Whether you experience scary thoughts and anxiety, bad thoughts and anxiety or crazy thoughts and anxiety, this is worth reading.
Someone submitted a detailed question to me some time ago. To preserve anonymity I have summarized it in a way that is not too revealing and assigned this person a name “Tom”.
Since experiencing his first panic attack, Tom is now starting to get anxious about a variety of his thoughts. For example he is very fearful that he might hurt someone. He is also having more scary thoughts in general.
My take:
Obviously it is important to consult a psychologist or other mental health professional if you’re having such thoughts and have not seen a professional about your anxiety before. However one of the things that many sufferers of anxiety and panic attacks are often completely unaware of is that these types of thoughts are quite typical for sufferers of anxiety and panic attacks. Sufferers would not necessarily even share such thoughts with a close friend.
These kinds of bad thoughts could be about going crazy, the fear that you’re going to hurt someone or even thoughts of dying or committing suicide.
To be clear: I’m not suggesting that you or another sufferer of panic attacks is actually going to do any of these things. Sufferers do not act on these thoughts – such as someone with a severe mental disorder might – they just become incredibly anxious about their thoughts. Such crazy thoughts are more akin to thinking something like “what if I did something bad to someone?” versus something like “I want to do something bad”.
Here is an example of a scary / crazy / bad thought (however you would view it): Tom has a fear of having knives in the house, in particular that he might hurt someone with a knife.
Dr. Martin Seif, Clinical Psychologist explains this very well: when you are not anxious you might have a variety of thoughts but they are very easy to distinguish from things that you would never act on. When you’re anxious however it is harder to distinguish these thoughts as just thoughts and it feels as though you are close to acting on them. Even though this is not the case. This process is called catastrophic thinking, another name would be catastrophizing or magnification under the cognitive behavioral therapy model.
While our mind is a wonderful and creative instrument, the problem is that this wonderful and creative instrument is capable of having a positive or negative influence on us.
Additionally, your mind is creatively able to keep you distracted from a problem that is really bothering you. Often there are problems that are working in the background of your anxiety. For example you might be in a job that you absolutely hate or you may recently have lost your job.
These things would be examples of things that you really need to deal with – as opposed to the scary thoughts that your mind is generating about actions you will never take. I do a whole article on the hidden emotions technique in another section of my site which you can access by clicking here (it will open in a new browser window) and coming back.
Unfortunately as your thoughts become preoccupied with more scary thoughts – like I’ve discussed above – you can’t address these real life problems, which makes you feel even more gloomy.
However there is much reason to have a great deal of optimism..
The fact that you’re having these thoughts about those things which you will not do means that you can move forward by writing down some things that are really of concern to you. By using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) on the real issues in your life – and it’s nothing to be ashamed of because we all have them – you can work them out and feel better. Often then your scary, bad, or crazy thoughts (whatever you want to call them) will drop off. But if they don’t, you still don’t need to despair because you can do CBT on them too!
You will be able to recognize the cognitive distortions present in all of your thinking and then generate more realistic ones that make you feel better. And you have addressed the problems that you really need to look at. Everyone has things in their lives that they need to address. If you want some good examples of CBT click here.
To summarize: the good news is that whether you experience scary thoughts and anxiety, bad thoughts and anxiety or crazy thoughts and anxiety, you can tackle them with CBT, on top of dealing with the real life challenges that you and all of us face in our day-to-day lives.
To obtain even more in depth information about a comprehensive and overall approach to anxiety, panic attacks and agoraphobia, I would encourage you to sign-up for my free newsletter below.
Reference (Scary Thoughts and Anxiety)
M. Self. Retrieved May 8, 2012, from: http://www.drmartinseif.com/resources/anxious-thinking.html