#61: 5 Habits That Feed Anxiety and What to Do Instead

Does anxiety rule your life?

In this episode I discuss five common habits that anxious people tend to do which can keep anxiety going. I also provide actionable strategies to manage and cope with anxiety. I explore the detrimental effects of worry and overthinking, avoidance, catastrophising, hypervigilance, and the desire to eliminate anxiety. 

To help you manage anxiety effectively, I talk through evidence-based tools such as mindfulness, gradual exposure, reality checks, grounding exercises, and acceptance techniques.

Highlights include:
00:57 Understanding Anxiety and its Habits
01:19 Habit 1: Worrying and Overthinking
02:57 Habit 2: Avoidance
06:15 Habit 3: Catastrophising
09:23 Habit 4: Hypervigilance
11:00 Habit 5: Wanting to Eliminate Anxiety

You can also watch the episode on YouTube. 

Videos mentioned in this episode:

54321 Grounding Exercise

If overthinking and worry is draining you, start with my 30-minute mini course How to Stop Spiralling. It gives you the exact tools I teach clients to interrupt thought loops in real time.

 If you want something for the moments you’re already anxious or overwhelmed, the Spiral Rescue Kit has guided audios and a printable SOS plan you can use anywhere.

 → Get both HERE (get £5 off when you buy both or gift it to a friend!)

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The Hello Therapy podcast and the information provided by Dr Liz White (DClinPsy, CPsychol, AFBPsS, CSci, HCPC reg.), is solely intended for informational and educational purposes and does not constitute personalised advice. Please reach out to your GP or a mental health professional if you need support. 

Transcript

Introduction to Mental Health and Wellbeing

Dr Liz White 0:02

If you're looking to improve your mental health and well-being, then keep listening. I'm Dr Liz White, a consultant clinical psychologist with over 20 years of experience. Whether you're a frazzled parent, a stressed out professional or finding your way through the challenges of midlife, you're in the right place. Through a mix of solo episodes and insightful conversations with expert psychologists and therapists, I'm bringing you evidence-based tools and strategies to help you navigate life's ups and downs with confidence, clarity and compassion. With confidence, clarity and compassion this is your space to feel seen, supported and empowered. Welcome to Hello Therapy. If you experience anxiety, there are certain habits that you are probably doing that don't help the anxiety in the long term. I'm going to take you through five habits that highly anxious people tend to do and what to do instead to manage and cope with anxiety better. So let's dive in. The number one thing that I tend to see people do who are highly anxious is worry and overthink. So think of it like this it's like you take the worry train to overthinking land, ie you end up in an endless loop of worries and overthinking all sorts of different scenarios. On the worry train, you get stuck in scary imagined futures that are all hypothetical in nature. What if the presentation goes really badly at work today? Or what if I lose my job? Or what if I fail my exams? So worrying and overthinking excessively tends to exacerbate anxiety and anxious feelings and over time, becomes a real habit. So what can you do instead? Going back to the worry train metaphor, try and practice noticing when you are getting on the worry train and sometimes actually visualising yourself getting on a train can help with this. Name it as worry. I notice that my mind is worrying again and remind yourself that you have a choice in that moment. Or I can choose not to get on the worry train, to stay on the platform and to watch the worry train leave the station. I can observe these worries for what they are just worries, just anxious thoughts, and they are just thoughts like any other thoughts that come and go just like trains through a busy station. And this is a skill of diffusion from acceptance and commitment therapy. So, coming in at a close second, the next habit that I see highly anxious people doing is avoiding.

Dr Liz White 3:03

Anxious people avoid all sorts of things people, situations, events, places, anything that they feel will trigger or increase their anxiety. So maybe one day you experienced a panic attack out of the blue in a particular supermarket and now you can't go into that particular shop. Perhaps you avoid certain foods or certain restaurants because you fear being sick in the case of emetophobia. Now, avoidance like this is understandable. No one likes to feel anxious. It is highly unpleasant and can be very distressing, and as humans, we are hardwired to try and avoid pain and suffering. Now, avoidance may relieve the physical sensations of anxiety and the anxious thoughts in the very short term, but it only reinforces the idea that you must avoid that supermarket, or you must avoid those foods or that restaurant in order to be safe. So it sets up a vicious cycle where you have to avoid those particular circumstances in order to not trigger or exacerbate the anxiety, and essentially, this keeps the anxiety going.

Dr Liz White 4:20

Now, the thing about avoidance and anxiety is that it tends to get bigger over time. So it may be that you're just avoiding one supermarket at the moment, but over the years I have seen this time and time again where somebody ends up avoiding many different things in their lives because they feel like they have to do that in order to manage their anxiety. So what can you do instead? So, instead of total avoidance of particular situations or places. Try gradual exposure, and this is a tried and tested and science-backed technique that can really help anxiety problems. The key thing to know about this type of exposure is that it needs to be gradual, so you are just stepping outside of your comfort zone, but you're not going too far so that it overwhelms you. So let's say that public speaking really makes you feel very anxious and maybe makes you feel very panicky. Now, instead of avoiding it altogether so you know you might avoid it at work or in other places try it gradually, exposing yourself to public speaking. So practice speaking in front of one person just to start, and that person might be a close friend or a family member, somebody that you feel safe with, and practice that several times. So what you're doing is you are getting your brain and your body used to doing that particular activity in a situation that you perceive as scary, and once you are relatively comfortable, you would then move on to the next step, which might be doing it in front of two people that you know, or maybe doing it in front of a group. So facing anxiety and facing your fears in these small ways and incrementally helps retrain your brain to know that actually you are safe.

Dr Liz White 6:15

The next habit that I see highly anxious people doing is catastrophizing. Catastrophizing is when your brain takes a small worry and blows it up out of proportion, and obviously catastrophizing is very closely linked with worry. If you are worrying and experiencing what if thoughts, then you are likely also catastrophizing, worrying about hypothetical future scenarios that might happen, jumping to conclusions. For example, you get an email from your boss that just says we need to talk. Someone who is highly anxious might see that email and say oh my gosh, what have I done? What have I done wrong? What mistake have I made? Oh, my goodness, I'm going to get fired.

Dr Liz White 6:59

Or you are a parent and you get that dreaded phone call in the middle of the school day saying that your child has hurt themselves. They've fallen over in the playground and almost instantly you have an image in your mind of your child in a hospital bed and hooked up to machines and in a coma, when in fact it just turns out that they have sprained their ankle. So here is my tip with catastrophizing so try and slow things down, take a reality check and look at your options. So with the example of the email from the boss, the reality check there would be OK. So in reality I don't actually know what my boss wants to talk to me about. So what are my options? I can email my boss back and say what is it that you want to talk about? Or I can leave it and wait until the meeting and just deal with whatever it is at that point. And just deal with whatever it is at that point. And this is about reminding yourself that there is no actual here and now evidence that there is anything wrong and there certainly isn't any evidence of that. You're going to get fired. So it would be about saying to yourself okay, yeah, that's my reality check. I can notice that my mind is jumping to really bad and scary conclusions. That isn't helpful to me. With the phone call from the school, the reality check is okay, so I know it's an injured ankle. Usually what I know about injured ankles and my common sense is that they're usually not serious. What are my options? Well, I can find out more information from the school and take my child to hospital to get them looked at. So again, it's touching base on the well, the evidence in the here and now. This is just an ankle injury. There's no evidence to suggest that there's any kind of coma situation.

Dr Liz White 8:47

The way that I like to visualize catastrophizing is thinking about it like you are in a hot air balloon. So each catastrophic thought is another blast of gas in the hot air balloon, making it rise up in the sky. And the more thoughts you have, the further away you get from having your feet on the ground in the reality of the situation. So slowing things down, taking a reality check, considering your options, naming it as catastrophizing helps get your feet back on the ground.

Dr Liz White 9:23

The fourth habit is hypervigilance. When you feel anxious, you tend to do something called hypervigilance. This is when your brain is scanning for potential dangers or threats, because your brain, when you're anxious, is in fight or flight mode. So this could show up as scanning your body for potential signs of a panic attack, or checking your emails every five seconds because you're worried that your boss is going to fire you. So what can you do instead? Hypervigilance is a hard habit to break, but it's not impossible. You need to do things that teach your brain that you're not actually in danger and that you are in fact safe, and a quick way to do this is to calm your nervous system through deep breathing or doing a grounding exercise. So, for example, the 5-4-3-2-1 method can be really effective and I'll link my video where it takes you through that exercise. Grounding is about moving your attention from that hypervigilant, scanning mindset to the here and now, and slowing your breathing down or doing some deep breathing exercises is a really good way of doing it, so you could also do some kind of soothing rhythm breathing or slowing your breathing down and just repeating the word still or calm to yourself as you do that. As I said, all of that is to try and calm your nervous system down so that you don't need to engage in the hypervigilance, the scanning the environment or scanning your body for potential threats.

Dr Liz White 11:00

The last habit that highly anxious people tend to do is wanting to get rid of their anxiety. Something that is very common that anxious people tend to experience is believing that they need to get rid or eliminate the anxiety. I need to completely get rid of these feelings, these anxious sensations and thoughts and feelings, and then I'll be okay. Now, obviously, experiencing anxiety can be very distressing. Experiencing anxiety can be very distressing, particularly if you're anxious over a long period of time or it keeps coming up and is impacting on your life in a really negative way. Anxiety can lead to quite catastrophic thoughts and worries like I can't cope with this, what if this is with me forever? And those are really scary thoughts to have.

Dr Liz White 11:55

So it makes complete sense that you would want to get rid of the anxiety, but here's the truth. Anxiety isn't the enemy. It is actually your brain doing the thing that it has evolved to do, which is to protect you and to help you survive via the fight or flight response, which is the anxiety response. But what tends to happen is that the more you struggle with the anxiety, the more you struggle to get rid of it, the stronger it gets. So what can you do instead?

Dr Liz White 12:30

So, instead of trying to get rid of the anxiety anxiety, instead of trying to eliminate it from your life, try and practice something called acceptance. So this, essentially, is allowing anxiety to be there. So when anxiety shows up, you might say to yourself I don't like this, I don't want this here, but I can allow it to be here, I can handle this. It can be helpful to think about anxiety as being a bit like a wave. So there will be a build-up, there may be a peak to it, particularly in panic attacks, and then, gradually and gently, it will fade away. So remember you don't have to control it, you don't have to struggle with it, you just have to ride it out. And my final thought on that is that that is not easy, especially if you are very used to the habit of pushing the anxiety away, trying to get rid of it. But it does help if you can practice acceptance and it does take time. So think of it like a skill and if you can be consistent with it and keep trying to allow it and to let it be, then that is going to help in the long run.

Dr Liz White 13:47

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