How To Create Fertile Soil For Your Anxiety Or 5 Ways To Recognize Your Worries

Imagine you are planning to grow a flower in your garden. First, you do research about seeds, you buy seeds. Then you start thinking about what will help the flower to thrive. Finally, you start thinking about what soil do you need to buy.

You start doing research about fertile soil for your flower.

A quick search in Google gives you some ideas to add organic matter and compost. But you really want this flower to thrive. So you start reading how often you need to water and whether some exposure will benefit your flower. You follow all suggestions and advice, and ta-da, your flower is blooming.

I love using analogy work with my clients to break down psychological concepts into simple examples.

So the question of the day is… you got it. How to make your anxiety thrive?

The best soil for anxiety is intolerance to uncertainty. This is a central feature to make the anxious cycle going. Anxiety LOVES ambiguous situations. Intolerance to uncertainty or an ambiguous situation occurs when you cannot control one hundred percent of the desired outcome. For example, a person might be waiting for a medical test result and being anxious about it. Another example, if a person does not receive a text message right away, they might start worrying by questioning friendship.

Intolerance to uncertainty triggers another core pillar of fear is thinking in the worst-case scenario.

I hear many worries in the therapy room: health, career, parenting, relationship, and failure. What if the test result shows something wrong with my health that when you dismiss an alternative outcome? What if my kids will not succeed academically? That's when you ignore that success is not linear. What if I will be fired? What if the date will turn into a disaster? What if I fail? The common denominator in these scenarios is a negative problem orientation. It's a fancy word for therapists to conceptualize your thinking, which focuses on the threat and dismisses resilience, coping, and acceptance.

Another way to create a thriving condition for your anxiety is to overestimate the probability of the bad event happening and your inability to cope.

What if I will make a wrong decision with my startup and I fail? Anxiety wants you to be stuck in a helpless mode when you do not see how you will cope if it is the case. Anxiety also does not want you to bring the element of acceptance to the situation. What if I go on a date and will be rejected? The threat is the rejection that is keeping anxiety going. You do not see yourself coping with rejection. Imagine you about to cross the road in the city, and you are focusing on the probability of car accidents which are pretty high in NYC. This focus on the threat will prevent you from crossing the road.

Anxiety LOVES rigidity and not being flexible.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT provides a simple way to think about rigidity which is all or nothing thinking. Success or failure, good decision or bad decision, right or wrong, healthy or unhealthy. Remember being in elementary school and writing your first story. You would probably use such words as bad /good, right/wrong when describing your character. The teacher would probably give you an A. Now, remember when you were in the 7th grade, and you need to write an essay about the main character in the book. If you use bad or good, right or wrong, the teacher will not be impressed with the work. You are expected to bring up the complexity of the character, controversy. You describe the main character's elements of strength and weakness. What part of the book you might be confused about and so on… In other words, you bring complexity, not simplicity. Anxiety tends to subside when you start seeing the whole situation.

Anxiety also thrives when you have tunnel vision.

For example, you did a presentation at work, everybody like it. However, you still think repeatedly about a spelling mistake that you made in the second slide. Imagine standing near a new house, and you would like to see what is inside, but you can open the door just slightly. You can see a sofa, but you do not see the rug, curtains, wall unit with TV, and a fluffy dog sleeping on the carpet. So you start forming your opinion about the house only on the sofa that you could see through a tiny gap in the door. If you open the door fully and see what is inside, you might form a different perception.

Anxiety also dictates you to do everything by Yourself. It does not want to delegate any tasks, whether it comes to work, relationships, or parenting. Anxiety tells you that you cannot be 100 percent sure that tasks are being done the way you want them when you delegate responsibilities. At the end of the day, you might find yourself doing or making the bed by yourself, so you know the tasks are done correctly.

Lastly, your worries thrive when you avoid anxiety-provoking situations.

The cycle of avoidance allows you not to face your fears, whether driving a car, going on a date, procrastinating speaking with your manager, looking for a job, or schedule a medical test. Avoidance eliminates any uncertainty since you bypassing this situation but not facing them. Thus, it helps you to manage your anxiety. At the same time, it does the opposite work by maintaining the anxious cycle since you do not create an opportunity to face your fears and develop coping skills and resilience.

In my work with my clients, we have a deep dive into their thought the process to bring awareness of how the particular narrative reinforces the anxiety cycle or creates fertile soil for worries.

How do you create fertile soil for your worries? Does any of these sound familiar to you?