Ever wondered why sometimes you’re just too busy to be anxious, but at other times you can’t shake the anxious, worried feelings away? It’s all to do with distraction.
I want you to remember a time when you felt anxious, worried or just down about something, and no matter what you did, at the time that feeling dogged you. And now remember a time when you were super busy, and didn’t have time to breathe never mind worry, and you just got on with things, but when you got down time, usually in the evening, all those worries flooded back into your conscious awareness.
Worries and other negative emotions can only be there if you are thinking the thoughts that create them. Trouble is, we don’t always know what we are thinking especially if the trigger for how you are feeling now comes from a long standing issue that you’ve gotten so used to that it just becomes part of your life.
But no matter how you are feeling at this very moment, whether good, bad or indifferent, you can only feel what you feel because of what you are thinking, or because of what you have already associated to a thing.
Anchoring- not just for ships
In NLP the term anchors refers to the conditioned response we all have to certain triggers in our mind or environment. So when you go past a bakery and you love the smell of freshly baked bread, then that is an anchor. If your parents had that special tone just before they told you off for something, that too is an anchor. If your partner looks at you in that way and you know he or she is going to give you bad news then that is also an anchor and you know just how to react, because you react in the same way every time.
Anchors can be as old as you are, okay maybe slightly younger, but they can be there for years and for the rest of your life, or one could have been created just last week. So what you are feeling now may have been triggered by something as old as 10 years ago or 10 hours ago, which makes it more difficult to identify why you feel as you do.
The point is, you cannot feel what you are feeling without the thinking that created it in the first place, and just like you always do certain things in the same way, day in day out and they become a habit, your feelings are now part of that same thing, something triggers you into feeling scared or anxious, or worried or annoyed, choose your favourite feeling, and that’s your normal response.
De anchor your usual response
Now I know there is no such word as de anchoring, but go with me here. The way to stop your usual response, ie worry or fear etc is to cut the association – ie to stop the usual thinking of being able to trigger your usual response, and short of coming to see me so I can help you with it, below is a process that I still use on occasion but used to use every day, until I found something stronger, and it served me well.
What If
- The context
Remind yourself of what happened and who was involved
- What conclusion did you draw from this?
- Do you believe it’s true? [Yes]
- Are you 100% sure that it’s true, that there can be no other meaning? (If yes go to 4a, if no go to Q5)
4a. If yes
Is it possible for there to be another perspective or meaning for this situation?
Is it possible that someone else would see it differently from you?
Would everyone see it the same as you?
- So given that there are possible alternative interpretations for that same event, name them.
- So can you see that what you are thinking is not and cannot be 100% true and therefore does not have to be taken as true? This is just one perspective on the thing, one of many and that all your anxieties and fears, though feeling real, are actually based on what you think is going to happen and not on what is actually happening.
- How do things stand now?
The aim of this short process is to interrupt your present negative thinking pattern. It will give you breathing space to at least have the option of thinking that there are other ways to view what has happened, and maybe, just maybe if you viewed it like that, you would feel differently about the whole thing.
Of course if you don’t want to feel differently about it then nothing will help, but if you sincerely want to feel better so that you can get on with things and it’s not playing on your mind, use this process as many times as you want.
Let me know how you got on with this.
Speak soon
Elaine
