Fragile E-Book

Stella O'Malley

• Herausgeber: Gill Books
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 400

Beschreibung

Have we reached a point where anxiety is so common we consider it 'normal'? In this exploration of the rising anxiety epidemic, psychotherapist and bestselling author Stella O'Malley delves into why we are feeling more anxious, stressed and overwhelmed than ever. From looking at how our increasingly perfectionist and materialistic society is causing us to value all the wrong things, to practical tips for uncovering the roots of anxiety and strategies to ease it, this book is an essential tool for building resilience to stress. Anyone can experience anxiety at any time. Fragile arms us with the skills to move forward to a place where we can experience challenges to our mental health and feel adequately empowered to address them, allowing us to live calmer, more satisfying lives.

Leseprobe

FRAGILE

WHY WE FEEL MORE ANXIOUS, STRESSEDAND OVERWHELMED THAN EVER(AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT)

Stella O’Malley

Gill Books

For my mam, Kathleen O’Malley

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Part 1: How anxiety impacts you

Chapter 1: How anxiety works

Chapter 2: ‘The anxious type’

Chapter 3: What are you really avoiding?

Part 2: How the world is making us anxious

Chapter 4: Always on: The age of anxiety

Chapter 5: Is it always ‘good to talk’? Misinterpreting mental health messages

Chapter 6: Anxiety is political: We’ve never had it so good – so why are we feeling so anxious?

Part 3: The recovery: leaving anxiety behind

Chapter 7: Are you getting better or worse?

Chapter 8: Self-care: Learning to honour yourself

Chapter 9: Leaving anxiety behind: Forging meaning and finding purpose

References

Imprint

About the author

About Gill Books

INTRODUCTION

The extraordinary rise in the number of people experiencing anxiety has coincided with the growth of irrational, inappropriate and just plain wrong approaches to deal with it. I have written this book to highlight the most effective approach to combat anxiety and stress and also to stress how the media, society and the world in general are misguidedly promoting the worst possible strategies for managing anxiety. In this book readers will learn why, when it comes to handling anxiety, avoidance strategies don’t help – in fact, they usually make your anxiety far, far worse.

It is not psychology but marketing forces, political spin and media scare stories that have created a world that leads ordinary people to fall down a rabbit hole where feeling tense, anxious and overwhelmed is more common than the reverse.

This book explores the way that we are weakening ourselves by using exactly the wrong techniques to deal with our anxiety. Not only that, but policies such as no-platforming, trigger warnings and safe spaces are leading people to the incorrect notion that we should avoid everything that makes us feel unsafe or uncomfortable. This has led to a situation where a lot of mental health messages, initiatives and projects are now being dumbed down and administered incorrectly.

Granted, certain avoidance strategies might feel good in the short term, but in the long term they can be like heroin to an addict – providing some short-term relief in exchange for long-term pain. Most avoidance strategies only serve to worsen anxiety and train the brain to avoid helpful behaviour that could actually help reduce anxiety. Far better to learn to grasp control of your life and your mind than to live with this constant feeling of underlying tension and nerves.

This book aims to consign short-term dysfunctional techniques to the dustbin. We all need short-term strategies to get us through the day, but we cannot rely on these techniques in the long term. They are often debilitating and they dangerously collude with the flawed thought processes that lead us to fear our anxiety, encouraging us to believe that we can’t cope with any uncomfortable feelings.

But with the right support and understanding, we can!

If you are to create a happier and healthier life it is necessary to identify the long-term therapeutic approaches that, with some work and commitment, have been actually proven to help you overcome your anxiety. This more comprehensive approach will lead you to an in-depth understanding of yourself and how you need to live your life so that you can be free to live without anxiety, stress or tension continuously hovering around the edges, always ready to attack and reduce you.

The first part of the book describes exactly how the anxious mind works and demonstrates how to get out of the common traps we fall into when we’re anxious.

The second part focuses on how most of us are weakening ourselves by doing too much, trying too hard and consuming too much. We know it. We know we should calm down and just enjoy our lives but we can’t seem to get off the relentless treadmill of being foolishly busy.

The last part of the book identifies different approaches that will enable readers to live a different, calmer, more satisfying life. Through strategies, tips and case studies, readers will learn how to withstand feelings of worry and panic and feeling overwhelmed. They will then be free to enjoy the relative wealth and stability that the developed world already offers without getting caught up in the constant search for more.

As the psychologist Oliver James warns us, ‘Beware of authors bearing gifts of happiness. It is psychological snake oil.’1 I’m hoping this book will be better than that. My aim is to make you feel empowered enough to find some meaning and purpose in the life that you already have, without feeling overwhelmed by gnawing anxiety and debilitating tension chipping away at you. You don’t need to feel fragile any more; you can instead tap into the strength in your belly and go forth with your head up, your shoulders back, with confidence and positivity about your ability to live a life that is both satisfying and pleasant.

PART 1

HOW ANXIETY IMPACTS YOU

CHAPTER 1

How anxiety works

‘The mind is its own place and in itself

Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.’

JOHN MILTON

Anxiety has been described as an over-estimation of danger combined with an under-estimation of our ability to cope. Usually the danger isn’t so threatening and usually we will cope better than we imagine, but that’s not how anxious minds work. Over-thinking, over-feeling and over-reacting are daily challenges for too many people because anxiety takes over and leads us to dismiss logical thinking and run with our emotional minds. Anxiety leads us to feel overwhelmed, it tramples on our wellbeing and consumes our minds with obsessive thoughts that we just can’t close down.

But most people who crack up do it silently; most of their struggle is internal and most of their pain is turned inwards, which is why most people blame themselves instead of today’s anxiety-inducing lifestyles. The problem is that we don’t know when our friends and neighbours are cracking up, so everyone tends to think that their tension is a personal failing instead of a destructive trend in our society. I know that feeling anxious and stressed is an increasingly common complaint because as a psychotherapist I meet the clients who blame themselves instead of blaming the toxic level of pressure that is foisted upon them. It’s clear to anyone who is working as a mental health professional that it is our toxic society rather than the individual that is causing most of the strain; we – the mental health professionals – all witness the destruction that society is wreaking on our mental wellbeing. But most people don’t work in the mental health industry, so most people don’t have the information to hand to see that stress, anxiety and feeling overwhelmed has become part of an enormously growing pattern that is happening to everyone.

Whether you have been diagnosed with anxiety or even if you just know you are feeling more anxious and overwhelmed than you’d like to be, this book should bring about more self-awareness so you can learn to spot what works best for you and what makes everything worse. If you are to free yourself from feeling tense and fearful, you will need to unpick the source of your tension so that you can counteract the underlying sense of anxiety and unease that is slowly growing within you and steadily becoming more unmanageable.

The challenge for people who experience anxiety is that they need to learn to live with it. Alcoholics can give up alcohol and cigarette smokers can give up tobacco but people with anxiety can’t give up anxiety; just like the anorexic who has to learn to eat again, the anxious person needs to learn to live with anxiety. You can, however, reduce the intensity, the timespan and the impact of your anxiety. If these three elements can be significantly reduced, then it is usually enough for the anxious person to live a free and easy life unrestrained by the terrible gnawing anxiety that was previously making them miserable.

ARE WE ALL ‘FEELING ANXIOUS’?

According to the latest research, we in the West are living through an unprecedented epidemic of anxiety with up to 33.7 per cent of the population affected by an anxiety disorder at some stage during the course of their lives.2 The familiar tightness, tension and fear that grips us is being experienced by so many people that we are starting to believe that we should be accustomed to living with a chronically constricted spirit.

As we will see in Chapters 4, 5 and 6, the main reason for all this anxiety and stress is that our lifestyles are too demanding and our coping mechanisms are often deeply flawed. Society is going too fast; we’re doing too much, consuming too much and asking too much of our minds and bodies. When we do too much we weaken and become too tired and anxious to feel satisfied so we search for the nearest short-term strategy that is close to hand – perhaps we drink too much wine in an effort to relax but then have to suffer the consequences of that particular short-term strategy. Or perhaps we avoid the source of our anxiety and by doing that, as we will soon see, we make the anxiety worse.

Anxiety makes you feel as if your brain is on fire, acid is burning in your stomach and you become completely consumed with obsessive thoughts that you just can’t close down. The only truly helpful approach is to learn about the patterns of your anxiety, so that you can understand clearly what works best for you and what doesn’t work and, ultimately, you learn to live a more satisfying and less stress-inducing lifestyle.

THE ANXIETY CHECKLIST

Read the following checklist3 and answer whether you experience these sensations or thoughts.

DO YOU:

… feel jumpy or jittery?

… have trembling or shaky hands or limbs?

… feel like a tight band is tied around your forehead?

… have a tightness in your chest or in the pit of your stomach?

… feel sweaty or clammy? Or have tingly, cold or clammy hands or fingers?

… have a dry mouth?

… have difficulties with your breathing?

… have difficulties talking? Or have an unsteady voice?

… have a racing heart or a sensation of your heart pounding or skipping a beat?

… experience difficulty swallowing or feel like you have a lump in your throat?

… feel like you’re choking or smothering?

… have digestive problems such an upset stomach, nausea or diarrhoea?

… need to pee more frequently than usual?

… cling to others for security?

… use alcohol or medication to calm down?

… avoid particular situations because they fill you with dread?

… become agitated for no apparent reason?

DO YOU:

… worry too much?

… think you’re about to lose control?

… feel filled with a sense of dread that something terrible is going to happen?

… feel intensely impatient, intolerant or irritable?

… lack patience?

… procrastinate endlessly?

… need endless reassurance?

… become preoccupied with what’s happening to your body?

… feel overwhelmed and unable to cope?

… feel like everything is going too fast?

… feel like the world is caving in on you? Or feel like the walls are closing in on you?

… become obsessed with tiny little details?

… have difficulty shaking off nagging, intrusive thoughts that don’t seem to leave you alone?

… think you are seriously ill but know that the doctors disagree with you?

… have difficulty concentrating or maintaining your attention?

… worry that you are going to be all alone?

The more you can identify with the above feelings and behaviour, the more likely you are to be experiencing anxiety. Anxiety disorder is a serious ailment and it is essential for every person who believes they are suffering from this to go to their doctor first to ensure they receive proper medical treatment. Although more and more people are feeling stressed and anxious these days, some types of personalities are more prone to feeling anxious than others, but, as we will see in the next chapter, just because you are more sensitive and highly reactive than others doesn’t mean you are condemned to a lifetime filled with stress and anxiety.

HOW ANXIETY IS TRIGGERED

The science of the brain is terrifyingly complex and, on the assumption that most readers aren’t neuroscientists, I have simplified the descriptions in this book to make it more relatable and readable.

The amygdalae are two almond-shaped groups of nuclei which are located deep within the limbic system in our brain. The limbic system is often referred to as our ‘emotional brain’ and research shows that the amygdala performs a crucial role in processing our emotional responses.4

Another part of our brain, the cortex, is often described as the thinking, wiser brain as it is designed for higher thought processes. The amygdala keeps us alive in an emergency, while the cortex makes life interesting. Our wise brain is slow-moving, reflective, unsure, intelligent and wise. By contrast, our emotional brain is fast, furious, dramatic, not so wise and often a little bit thick.

When a person’s brain gets a signal of danger, the amygdala within the emotional brain is triggered. This trigger, also known as the fight-or-flight response, is necessary because we need to be able to react to danger immediately and powerfully. (Some people believe that ‘flight, fight, freeze or appease’ is a more accurate description of this response.) However, we humans have evolved from a very different world from the one we inhabit today. When the world was full of predators, our main job was to get enough to eat without being eaten. The amygdala governed our survival instinct and it served as an emergency alert system to keep alert to the danger of passing lions and tigers and bears.

The psychologist Daniel Goleman coined the phrase ‘amygdala hijack’ in his 1996 book Emotional Intelligence:Why it can matter more than IQ to describe the immediate and overwhelming power of the amygdala when it has been triggered. When it is triggered, the amygdala turns into an emergency first responder and shuts down the more rational parts of the brain. With that, any hope of reason or logic flies out of the window. The amygdala works quickly – because speed is of the essence in an emergency; and it has no conscious awareness – because this is exactly when you have no time to think. The amygdala is also very powerful because we need to act with full commitment when we are faced with danger. Many people feel as if they are out of control when they are experiencing ‘amygdala hijack’, even though they are in fact being controlled by this tiny part of the brain. It is only in hindsight that we can see the impact of the amygdala on our decision-making – for instance, when we quickly pull a child back from walking in front of an oncoming car, it is the amygdala that totally controls the situation and propels us to action.

The problem with the amygdala is that it doesn’t care how many times it makes an error. The amygdala doesn’t care if you over-reacted and in actual fact the child was perfectly safe on the footpath while the car was way up the road, cruising along at a slow speed. When a person makes a decision based upon a false anticipation of danger it is known as a ‘false positive’. The result of a false positive is that no one gets hurt – however, no one was likely to get hurt in any case, and being highly over-reactive is tedious both for yourself and for everyone around you.

A ‘false negative’ has the opposite effect, where the person decides that there is no danger from the oncoming car but it then hits the child. In this scenario, the person didn’t get anxious, didn’t react and then the child got hit.

The amygdala is constantly working away in the background, always asking the question, ‘Am I safe?’ It is madly concerned with avoiding false negatives and couldn’t care less about false positives. The amygdala doesn’t care about how anxious and unhappy you are – it only cares about keeping you alive by reacting to what it perceives as oncoming danger. Nor does the amygdala care if you are constantly over-reacting to random and highly unlikely dangers, nor that you are becoming a drain on yourself and on your loved ones. But you should care about false positives as they can mean the difference between living a pleasant life and living a wretched life. And, thankfully, the rest of your brain does care about your sense of wellbeing and about your relationships. It is intolerable living under irresolvable tension and crippling anxiety as a result of a trigger-happy amygdala, and it is your wise brain that might urge you to pick up a self-help book in a bid to quell your fiery emotional brain.

THE TAKEAWAY

We need to retrain the amygdala to calm down so we can get our act together and use other, better, parts of our brain to work out any forthcoming problems. If our rational brain is allowed space to think we will soon work out that we aren’t living in a war zone and that really, if we look around us, life is mostly quite safe and with a bit of care and attention, we could live reasonably happy lives.

UNDERSTANDING YOUR AMYGDALA

Your amygdala is always on, always in the background watching out for danger. It acts like an emergency responder, and its motto is ‘better safe than sorry!’ When it perceives any danger, whether it is true or false danger, POW, it presses the big red button in your head – the fight-or-flight button – and fills you with fear and adrenaline so that you are suddenly ready for extreme action. The problem is that we live in AD 2019, not 2019 BC, and the amygdala, which is really quite prehistoric in its assessment of danger, often makes the mistake of seeing danger when there is none. The truth is that today we have never been safer than in any moment since the history of time – we live longer, we suffer fewer premature deaths – indeed we have less chance of dying a violent death today than at any other time in history. In the last one hundred years, the number of deaths from natural disasters has halved and, in the last 20 years, the proportion of the world living in extreme poverty has also halved.5 The world is much safer and the world is getting much, much better. If we could just train our emotional and dramatic brains to appreciate just how safe we are, then we would automatically be freed from unnecessary worrying and tension.

The amygdala learns by association, not by reason or logic.6 And so when you run away from danger the amygdala calms down from being on red alert and goes back to waiting in the wings. If your amygdala urged you to run away from a mugger or a rapist, then that is a good thing but if it urged you to run away from a social gathering that you were looking forward to, that is not so good. You might feel temporarily better, but you have also missed out on a party and you have created a destructive link in your brain. By running away and thereby calming down, you will have further cemented in your amygdala the idea that social gatherings are inherently dangerous. It has no reason to believe otherwise.

A key aspect of the amygdala is that it isn’t influenced by conscious thought and instead learns by conditioning and association. This means that when you run away from the social gathering you will have inadvertently taught your amygdala to fly to your rescue in future situations like these and from this point on, it will urge you to run like the wind the next time you are confronted with a similar situation. No amount of consciously telling your amygdala that social gatherings aren’t dangerous will get through the red alert wall. Reason, discussion or rationality don’t work with the amygdala; what works is conditioning and association. This means that if you ignore your amygdala screaming RED ALERT and you go ahead, despite the crazy messages telling you to flee, and walk into the social gathering (to find you don’t get eaten by a passing tiger), then the amygdala will begin to recondition your response to view social gatherings as safe places.

The amygdala decides what memories are stored and where they are stored.7 Because of the way the amygdala learns, we need to make sure our associations are appropriate. For example, if a mother tells her young child that dogs are dangerous, the child’s amygdala could become triggered by a dog, making the child very scared whenever they see one. If this fear isn’t ever confronted and overturned through association, it can become an everlasting, irrational fear of dogs.

FIVE FACTS ABOUT THE AMYGDALA

1. The amygdala is triggered in less than a fraction of a second. This means that you ‘feel’ fear before you can understand what it is that you fear – for instance, you are scared by a ‘snake’ that turns out to be a rope.

2. Roughly 20 per cent of people are considered to have a more sensitive amygdala than others but not everyone with a sensitive amygdala goes on to develop anxiety.8 Such people might be nervy and more reactive than others, but with the right coping mechanisms this can be managed perfectly well.

3. When the amygdala is triggered it releases stress hormones to put the body on alert. The metabolism speeds up, the heart beats faster, breathing increases and we literally get pumped up as our blood starts to pump directly to the muscles in the body. The point of all this is to prime the body to be ready for a fight or to run away quickly; this is why so many people have physical responses to stress and anxiety.

4. The amygdala learns by association and conditioning; it is only by prolonged exposure to the triggering event that it can learn to associate safety with the event.

5. The amygdala can be retrained only by facing down the fear in the moment, i.e. when it has been triggered. If you wait until you have fled the scene before you try to tell your brain that there was nothing to fear, you have lost a golden teachable moment.

ARE YOU THINKING FAST OR SLOW?

Ever since the discovery that different parts of our brain rule different parts of our thinking habits, psychologists have been falling over themselves trying to come up with the best metaphor to explain how our brains function. While Daniel Goleman coined the evocative phrase ‘amygdala hijack’ (p. 8), the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, described our brain functioning with the phrases ‘system one’ and ‘system two’ thinking.

System one thinking is centred on the quick and impulsive part of our brain. This helps us make snap decisions, particularly those focused on food, sex and immediate danger. System one thinking is fast, powerful and not very wise, and it is the direct opposite to system two thinking, which uses a slower, less certain, more considered and wiser part of our brain. System two recognises that what you see isn’t always the full picture and that more analysis is often required.9

The psychologist Steve Peters, author of The Chimp Paradox, probably provided the easiest metaphor for all this when he called our emotional brain our ‘inner chimp’.10 Our inner chimp is fast and furious; powerful, exciting and a bit foolish. Market forces appeal to our inner chimp. ‘Buy one get one free’ appeals to our inner chimp; so does paying with a card instead of with cash. It could be argued that the majority of the internet appeals to our inner chimp – Twitter is made for the chimp; as are Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and any media driven by clickbait; phrases such as ‘make America great again’ and other catchy, sloganistic politics are also perfect for our inner chimp.11

Indeed all slogans suit our inner chimp, so ‘talk to someone’, ‘listen to your gut’, ‘focus on your feelings’ and hundreds of other slogans (see Chapter 5) are a perfect fit. The basic premise of Peters’ book is that we don’t have to be at the mercy of our impulsive and reactive emotions and we can instead learn to organise and have command over our behaviour by appealing to the more rational part of the brain.12

Thankfully, we don’t only have an inner chimp in our brain; we also have, according to Peters, ‘the computer’ and ‘the human’. The human is a much wiser wizard, and, although either the chimp or the human can take control of our brain, they can also work together. According to Peters, ‘the computer’ is spread throughout the brain and stores programmed thoughts and behaviours. And so Peters suggests that we don’t have to be ruled by our gut instinct, we can instead learn to wait and give some time for other parts of our brain to catch up: and if we wish to make wiser and more considered decisions we need to allow some time for other thought processes to overtake our inner chimp.13 Our inner chimp leads us to avoid anxiety while the computer in our brain might do a cost-benefit analysis and understand that our initial anxiety will soon give way to more pleasurable feelings, and the human will help us to face down our initial anxiety.

HOW TO RETRAIN THE AMYGDALA

Because the amygdala only learns when you are afraid, you need to address your fears in the moment when it is triggered by a potential ‘threat’. The rest of the time, when you are calm, the amygdala is on autopilot and isn’t really listening to you. It lolls around at the back of the class playing hangman and not listening to your wiser brain. This is why you can end up like a prisoner to your old fears because your amygdala just doesn’t pay attention to your wise brain and only learns when it is activated. The only way to get at the amygdala is in the middle of heightened emotion when the amygdala is fully on, and the only way to recondition the amygdala is to demonstrate to it, in the moment, that this isn’t a dangerous situation; that RED ALERT isn’t necessary and that it needs to chill. And as the amygdala learns from experience, if you can confront your fear in the moment, it will eventually get with the programme.

Here’s one way to teach your amygdala a good response to perceived danger:

1. Activate the amygdala by exposing yourself to what you perceive as a mildly anxiety-inducing situation.

2. When the amygdala is activated, grit your teeth and behave appropriately, without running for the hills. This gives your amygdala the chance to learn by association that it got all worked up for nothing.

3. We learn to swim in shallow water. Begin with a relatively easy task. Don’t choose a highly stressful situation as it might not work and you will then have further cemented inappropriate responses in the amygdala.

In this new scenario – and I’m not saying that this is easy – it isn’t, it’s incredibly hard – the amygdala learns that social gatherings hold no threats; that dogs won’t necessarily kill you and that oncoming cars won’t necessarily kill everyone in sight. The amygdala will then begin to recondition itself to view social gatherings, dogs, cars or whatever the fear du jour happens to be, as non-threats. With repetition, the amygdala will develop a new memory and will stop disrupting your life with inappropriate RED ALERT signals.

This doesn’t need to be done radically or quickly; it can be done in your own time and at your own pace. The grand plan is to make sure the fear leaves your brain before you leave the scene as this is the way you will recondition your amygdala. Some people choose to use certain coping strategies such as deep breathing or distraction techniques to help them stay in situ while others just ‘float’, as the psychologist Claire Weekes called it, and stoically wait for the fear to subside. According to Weekes, floating is ‘masterly inactivity’ where you accept your panic and concentrate on mindfully being. All self-analysis about why you are afraid and why you shouldn’t be afraid will cease when you ‘float’ and your struggle against anxiety then ceases. Weekes suggests that when you feel you are about to fall apart you don’t try to ‘hold yourself together’ – instead, just allow yourself to be.

THE LIES WE TELL OURSELVES

Sadly, it is not just the amygdala we have to contend with when dealing with anxiety. There is also the rest of our emotional brain and the tendency most of have to tell ourselves lies because we don’t want to face the truth. If we are to truly overcome our anxiety, we need to identify and address the lies we tell ourselves whenever our emotions are heightened.

Our emotional brain tends to reframe our perception of the world so we can continue to cope with life as we know it – and this can often involve avoiding the bitter truth. Deirdre, a mother of three boys, became convinced that the zipline in the local playground was unsafe when her eight-year-old fell off it. She wrote to the local county council to get it removed and put up a notice on the zipline to tell other parents that it wasn’t safe. She also spoke to other parents at every opportunity to tell them about this dangerous hazard. Anxious people tend to inadvertently spread anxiety all around them, not realising the damage they do when they become desperate to infect everyone else with this dis-ease.

The county council were comprehensive in their defence of the zipline and backed it up with technical information from the professionals who had designed and built the equipment. Deirdre dismissed this as ‘brown envelope politics’ and preferred to believe that the designers were in cahoots with the county council over their shoddy equipment. She was willing to fight to the death to show that it wasn’t she who was in the wrong. Deirdre’s emotional brain was filled with anxious conviction and she felt compelled to tell everyone that she had exposed corruption in the town council. Her emotions were too highly charged for any level of critical thinking to emerge and so she lost her grip on rational thought processes as a consequence of her understandable anxiety over her child.

COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS

If you truly want to overcome your anxiety, you need to confront head-on the cognitive distortions – lies – that urge you to make the wrong decisions about how to manage your anxiety. It was the psychiatrist Aaron Beck, one of the pioneers of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), who first identified different cognitive distortions as common but defective ways of thinking. Cognitive distortions are inaccurate thoughts, ranging from ‘subtle inaccuracies’ to ‘grotesque misinterpretations and delusions’, that reinforce thought patterns or emotions and convince us of a reality that is simply not true.14

Our cognitive distortions make us feel better in the short term but in the long term lead to more complicated problems. If we don’t know our cognitive distortions then we won’t know when our amygdala is right or wrong. So we first need to identify our distortions, then commit to making a huge effort to challenge them, and finally we need to replace our distorted cognitions with healthier and more helpful cognitions. The process is long but the benefits are everlasting.

The following is a list of common cognitive distortions that could help you identify your own common pitfalls and also build your self-awareness. You might only identify with one or two of the following list, or you might find that you use them all a little bit; it doesn’t really matter. The main thing is to identify some of the distortions that you use and then, with some effort and commitment, you can begin to retrain your emotional brain by consigning your distortions to the bin.

MAGICAL THINKING

From Santa Claus to belief in the power of prayer, it could be argued that magical thinking is used everywhere as a coping mechanism to keep us vaguely sane in an incomprehensible world. Magical thinking is defined as believing that one event happens as a result of another without a plausible link of causation.15 For example, when Jane put a statue of Buddha in her garden, she hoped it would bestow great abundance to her home. Then when she received a gift or unexpected largesse she happily believed it was the Buddha working its magic charms. It’s comforting to believe that there is some unknown magic working away in the background for our benefit and so almost all of us engage, on some level, in a bit of magical thinking to make us feel better. It is only when the magical thinking prevents us addressing serious issues in our lives that we need to knock it on the head and tackle the reality of life’s challenges. This means that if Jane really needed more money, she probably needed to do a lot more than put a Buddha in the garden.

Fortune-telling and rituals

Just like magical thinking, fortune-telling is when a person ‘just knows’ a certain disaster is going to happen. When it doesn’t happen, they tend to dismiss it as if their actions have prevented certain fallout and when it does happen, as a stopped clock is right twice a day, they use this as fuel to convince themselves they have some sort of second sight about impending disaster. They don’t, though, and they are probably missing out on a shedload of happiness as they focus on future disasters. The expression ‘Don’t meet the devil halfway’ comes to mind for this person as they need to practise some discipline in not allowing themselves to waste their life imagining future disasters and doing pointless tasks in a misguided bid to avert these disasters.

CASE STUDY: SALLY, 19

When Sally was a little girl she couldn’t face the reality of her beloved father’s alcoholism so she used cognitive distortions to deny the reality of her sadness and hurt. She believed she was casting a type of spell where everything would be okay if she tapped certain objects in a certain way. So whenever Sally felt overwhelmed by worry about her daddy and her parents’ unravelling marriage, she would soothe herself by tapping her fingers along different surfaces. As life came to feel more and more uncertain and her father’s drinking continued to disturb the family’s equilibrium, Sally developed certain ‘symmetry rituals’ whereby she would turn her head first to the right and then to the left. She believed that if she engaged in her tapping and turning exercises, her father would stop getting drunk.

Of course, this didn’t work and Sally felt even more anxious when her mother noticed her elaborate rituals and tried to make her stop them. Sally’s response was to internalise her rituals – she began to silently count things and also to spell words backwards. Sally’s mind became filled with elaborate rituals, chants and prayers that all served to distract her from her complex feelings about her father – she loved him and she hated him – and also served as a pretence that her rituals were keeping everything in control.

Eventually Sally was brought to counselling and the therapist used exposure response prevention (ERP, see Chapter 3), to help Sally move beyond her obsessive-compulsive behaviour. The therapist supported Sally by ever so slowly exposing her to reducing her rituals and confronting the source of her true anxiety. It took some time but eventually Sally’s desperate need to engage in magical thinking to calm her frantic mind ebbed away and was replaced with a more helpful and self-aware understanding of her sensitive nature.

Religion, superstition and heaven’s reward fallacy

The idea of organised religion is appealing to the type of person who likes to believe that everything is under control and that everything will make sense in the end. Religious people can feel comforted that every grain of sand is counted and all that seems uncertain and meaningless is really part of God’s mysterious plan. The concept that we might be random accidents of cells with very little idea of where we have come from or where we are going makes many people feel anxious.

In many ways, the rise of tension and anxiety in the Western world correlates with the sharp fall in religiosity. It could easily be argued that a vacuum has appeared that was once filled with ideas of a benevolent God looking after everything. This has created intense feelings of anxiety for some people as they now feel that everything is out of control and no one has any idea what’s going on.

Some religious people fall into a cognitive distortion called ‘heaven’s reward fallacy’ where they cling to the belief that sacrifice or self-denial will pay off in the future. Some call this karma, and believe that karma will one day reward us for our good deeds. Of course, this can result in feelings of bitterness and resentment, especially when they see a particularly nasty person winning the lottery of life – it’s then that they suddenly suspect that perhaps it’s not all planned out so well and maybe, just maybe, they won’t actually receive their just reward when they die.

In a similar way to religion, superstitious people can feel immediate relief when they cross their fingers or throw salt over their shoulder or perform any other random act that serves to let them believe there is a secret plan to everything in the universe. Yet again, this is underpinned by a need to believe that somebody, somewhere, is in control of the universe. Indeed, obsessive-compulsive disorder could be construed as an extreme form of superstition whereby, for example, the person needs to touch the handle three times on the way out if they are to have a good day and if they step on the cracks in the path they will have a bad day.

Shoulds, musts and the fallacy of fairness

It was the German psychoanalyst Karen Horney (1885–1952) who coined the phrase ‘the tyranny of the should’ as she believed that ‘shoulds’ divide a personality into an ‘ideal self ’ and a ‘real self ’ and the conflict between the two is a measure of the dysfunction of the person. When a person becomes ruled by what they ‘should’ or ‘must’ do, they soon lose a sense of life’s pleasures and this joylessness can lead them towards anxiety and depression. If life has become a series of duties to perform then it can be helpful to draw up a list of the attributes of your ‘ideal self ’ and your ‘real self ’. So your ‘ideal self ’ might be easy-going, cheerful and flexible while your ‘real self ’ could be anxious, moody and neurotic. The sooner you acknowledge the reality of who you really are, the sooner you can free yourself from inner conflict and come to a place of self-acceptance. Try listing below a few attributes that correspond to your two ‘selves’:

Ideal self:

Real self:

In a similar way, the American psychologist, Albert Ellis, a pioneering figure of CBT, wrote about how ‘musts’ create demands on ourselves and others and usually only result in anxiety and distress. We become angry, anxious and resentful when we ‘musterbate’ and become difficult people to be around. If we can eliminate ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ from our vocabulary, we can free ourselves from a shedload of mental distress.

‘Shoulds’ and ‘musts’ represent a sort of bargain that people make with the world – if we do X then we can expect Y – but this ‘fallacy of fairness’, just like karma and religion, has often been shown to be a sham. This belief that if we do what we ‘should’ do then life will go more smoothly isn’t necessarily based on truth. It’s usually based on magical thinking that you’ve created just to make you feel better about the uncertainty of this world.

A strategy for magical thinking

The sooner you accept that magical thinking gives your power away, the sooner you will feel more in control and empowered as you come to realise that you have power within you and you can make a huge difference to your lot in life. You will need to build your feelings of self-efficacy for this so that one day you can come to the conclusion that you have enormous potential to change your life just as soon as you stop giving your power away to others.

EMOTIONAL REASONING

This cognitive distortion involves thinking that if we feel a certain way, it must be true. People with this distortion tend to live in the emotional brain and assume that their unhealthy emotions reflect the way things really are – ‘I feel it, therefore it must be true’ is the modus operandi. Of course our emotions are not always indicative of the objective truth, but it can be difficult to look past how we feel. The guiding star for this type of thinking must be an unrelenting bid for accuracy.

Mental filtering/arbitrary inference/jumping to conclusions

Many anxious people tend to use a mental filter to filter out all positive aspects of a situation and instead focus exclusively on one single, unpleasant detail. This can make their vision of reality darkened and distorted and it is also false because this ‘arbitrary inference’ involves faulty reasoning in how we make conclusions. So they might say to themselves, ‘I went wrong in question 8 so I’ve probably failed the exam. That’s it! I’m a failure!’

When our emotional brains put the whole situation into a negative context with arbitrary inference, we start to believe that we ‘know’ things when we are in truth only guessing. You may be convinced that someone dislikes you with only the flimsiest of proof, or you may be convinced that your worst fears will come true before you have a chance to find out. This often means you will under-perform as, when confronted with a problem, you fly to the first conclusion and stubbornly remain there. You are being driven by your emotional brain and motivated by an inordinate fear of uncertainty rather than realising that your beliefs are influencing your brain.

Dichotomous thinking

This polarised ‘black and white’ thinking is a delusion that leads stressed people to believe that there are no shades of grey. Everything becomes all or nothing, with no room for complexity or nuance. If you don’t perform perfectly in some area, then you see yourself as a total failure instead of simply unskilled in one particular task. This way of thinking is a pretty foolish method of analysis because it is too generalised and it lacks subtlety.

Whenever Joanne became anxious she tended to wildly over-generalise and so she would take one statement that her boyfriend said, such as, ‘I feel we’re going too fast in this relationship,’ and she would jump to the nearest certain conclusion, ‘He clearly wants out of this relationship. This always happens to me. I’ll never get it right, I just can’t keep a steady relationship!’ Viewing a single event as part of an endless pattern of bad luck and making sweeping generalisations are seldom accurate or helpful. A good method to overcome this tendency is to move beyond your emotional brain by pushing yourself to think about the nuance involved in this situation – can you dig a bit deeper? Can you probe for a more accurate analysis? If you can’t see anything positive then what are you missing?

Polarised thinking also occurs when you magnify the bad things in life and minimise the good things. Although it might seem like a common trait, it can be quite damaging if this is ongoing and it can have a significant impact on your wellbeing. Studies show again and again that having a negative perception of events makes your life harder.16 It’s probably unhelpful for pessimistic people to be told to be optimistic but being realistic and accurate is the best place for an anxious person to be – the dreaded situation, whatever it is, probably won’t be quite as awful as you think and you will probably be able to cope better than you think you will.

Catastrophising and discounting the positives

This thought distortion involves expecting that the worst will happen or has happened, often based on a slight incident that is nowhere near the tragedy that you’re making it out to be. For example, you might make a small mistake at work and then become convinced that it will ruin the project you are working on, your boss will be furious, and you will lose your job. The mishap moves seamlessly from a minor problem to a catastrophe.

If you tend towards catastrophising then, yet again, accuracy is the key. You need to do an accurate analysis of what the true outcomes of any given event are likely to be and call out your outlandish, catastrophic imagining for what it is.

A strategy for emotional reasoning

If you can learn to take a few deep breaths and have the patience to listen to the slow-thinking but wiser and more rational part of your brain, then you will soon see the difference in the quality of your responses. This will create a positive cycle of change where you will recognise the value of slowing down to wait for more considered thinking and that will further encourage you to be more probing with your thoughts.

CONTROL FALLACIES

Dermot became increasingly anxious about his thriving new business, to the extent that he began working every day around the clock; he just couldn’t accept that, whenever he took some time off, his employees could survive without him. When we are anxious we can become obsessed with control and might falsely believe that we are in complete control. But this is seldom true and when Dermot, through tiredness and overwork, accidentally left a tap running overnight which flooded his whole premises, he realised that his need to control had gone out of control. Dermot didn’t have to work all his waking hours and he needed to accept that he just couldn’t cover all the bases. He needed to let go of his control fallacies and learn to live with a bit of uncertainty and imperfection.

Control fallacies involve feeling that everything that happens to you is only a result of external forces or entirely due to your own actions. The truth is, as always, somewhere in the middle ground; it’s seldom completely all your responsibility, neither is it likely totally in the hands of someone else. Likewise, some people who are given to control fallacies tend to believe that they must control the actions of the people around them – the worry is that if other people are out of their control then the whole stack of cards will fall down. This is clearly a damaging way to think, since nothing is certain and very little is under control in life.

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