Your Anxiety Is Lying To You
Would you base your decisions on advice from a liar?
Anxiety acts like a filter on our cognitive lens, shaping how we view situations, ourselves, relationships, etc. If your anxiety is lying to you, it can impact your ability to set healthy boundaries, maintain balanced relationships, limit sense of fulfillment, skew decision-making, and impact self-esteem.
Let’s take a look at some common ways your anxiety may be lying to you, and some simple tips on how to catch and reframe anxious lies into more helpful and realistic thoughts.
5 Common Lies Anxiety Tells Us
1. The worst-case scenario is going to happen
Your anxiety amplifies your fears into catastrophic thinking.
You’re definitely going to get fired, your flight is the one that will be cancelled and you’ll miss an important event, your sore throat is probably a fatal illness, you probably failed the exam and will flunk out of school, the date didn’t go well and the next one probably won’t and you’ll end up spending your life alone.
The possibilities are endless. And they’re all bad.
2. People don’t like you / are mad at you / annoyed by you
Anxiety often says everyone is judging you, people are pretending to like you, they actually think you’re annoying, etc.
A friend didn’t respond to a text - you must have done something to upset them. If you talk “too much” at a social event, people thought you were annoying. You are having a hard time making friends in a new town - people don’t like you.
3. You’re not good enough
Often tied with efforts to be perfect, and anything less is “proof” that you actually aren’t good enough after all.
This is often quite generalized, applied to career, relationships, physical appearance, skill or talents, material possessions - whatever is your “success” of choice. Anxiety will tell you you’re not good enough in many circumstances.
4. You are a burden or bothersome to others
Anxiety whispers in your ear that asking for what you need or want is burdensome. Telling the waiter you ordered something else would be a bother to both them and your friends at the table. Setting boundaries is asking for too much from others. Anxiety tells you it’s preferable to be passive and keep the peace.
5. You are weak
Dealing with the barrage of anxious thoughts can impact your productivity, emotional regulation, or energy - and the cherry on top of the emotional drain is when your anxiety declares you are weak, small, or pathetic.
How to overcome the lies anxiety tells you
Observe Your Thoughts
A good time to observe your thoughts is when you feel a negative emotion. When negative emotions escalate, we are more vulnerable to experiencing distorted thoughts.
Observe what activated your thoughts, where they start and where they go. Oftentimes in an anxiety spiral, the thoughts will begin about the situation and end up at a core belief about ourselves (e.g. I’m a failure, unworthy of love, helpless).
It may be easier to identify your thoughts them by writing them down. An additional benefit of writing your thoughts is that it can help give a degree of separation from your thinking, giving you distance from your thoughts.
Once you have captured some of your thoughts, you can determine their accuracy.
Evaluate your thoughts
Now that you’ve plucked your thought out of your cortex and written them down, engage with your thoughts differently. For each thought, ask yourself the following questions:
What is the evidence that supports this thought? What is the evidence against it?
Am I viewing the situation as black and white, when it’s really more complicated? What are some of the more ‘grey” options in this situation?
How many times have I predicted this outcome? How many times has this actually happened?
Am I basing my thoughts on facts or feelings?
Am I having this thought out of habit, or do facts support it?
What would I tell a friend if they were having this thought?
Can I see this thought as just a thought?
Reflect with Self-Compassion
The final step is reflecting on your thoughts. How easy/difficult was it to refute your thinking? Was it hard to believe the thought was not true? What was the stuck point? Can you move forward with action based on a more accurate perspective?
If you can use logic to argue against the lies of anxiety, but have difficulty emotionally connecting with it, it is an indicator that this might be a particularly vulnerable belief that is too threatening to challenge with conviction. In those instances, consider reframing your thoughts to add distance and add an affirmation that you would like to grow.
“My anxiety is telling me I’m not good enough, and I am choosing to think in this moment that I am good enough / worthy of good things / lovable / [insert fear of choice]”
Challenging your thinking takes practice and time. You’ve likely spent years listening to anxious lies as if they were truths. It will take time to restructure your thinking. Be gentle with yourself during the process.
If you are struggling to do this work yourself, a skilled Cognitive Behavioral therapist can be helpful. Therapy can help you identify and process deeper core beliefs that are maintaining these negative automatic thoughts, and provide greater depth to the cognitive restructuring process. Feel free to contact me for a free consultation.
