Beyond the Spiral: Why You Shouldn’t Believe Everything Anxiety Tells YouSample

Anxiety’s Lie: I Have No Control.

We think tens of thousands of thoughts every day. The truth is most of them are negative and repetitive. Dr. Daniel Amen coined the term ANTs: Automatic Negative Thoughts. These thoughts swarm through your brain, and it can feel as if you’ve no control over them. And, of course, your ANTs (about yourself, your environment, or your circumstances) lead to anxiety. These recurring negative thoughts form a vicious cycle: When you feel anxious, your thoughts tend to be more negative, more catastrophic, and involve what-if worries about the future—which makes you feel even more anxious and even more out of control.

You find yourself thrown into planning, anticipating, preparing (and sometimes avoiding) future events that may or may not occur. The crazy thing is that 90% of what we worry about never even happens. But over time, repetitive negative thinking can change your brain’s hardwiring and increase anxiety, sadness, and depression, even compromising your immune system. You may feel overwhelmed, exhausted, stuck, or numb. That’s because neurons that fire together wire together. When you repeat an experience (like a thought), your brain learns to trigger the same neurons each time. That means the more you think of certain thoughts, the more of those types of thoughts you think.

Thanks to research on neuroplasticity, we know we can retrain our brains by creating new neural pathways and getting rid of those no longer needed. So, ask God to help you recognize your thinking traps—those triggers that take you down the pathways of your cognitive distortions (habitual, negative, inaccurate thought patterns). You can try some of these strategies:

• Write down your negative thoughts and counter them with thoughts that are more accurate and uplifting.
• Choose to smile. Acting calm, happy, or confident can cause you to feel those things.
• Clean or declutter something.
• Do something for someone else.
• Watch a funny movie.
• List three things you’re grateful for.
• If you hear your negative self-talk, ask yourself, ‘would I say this to a friend?’ If the answer is no, then don’t say it to yourself.
• Most importantly, fill your mind with God’s Word by reading, memorizing, and reciting Scripture.

There’s almost always a trigger that sets off the anxiety spiral, making you feel as if you’re spiraling out of control. But the reality is you do have control over your thoughts. You can learn to recognize your thinking traps, identify your triggers and worries, and finally reframe them to reflect a more accurate representation of reality. This is not always easy to do, so invite God to help you take every thought captive by reading the Bible and discovering what is true about God and what He says is true about you.