Anxiety can be such a burden, it can push you to a place of feeling overwhelmed, hopeless and alone. It is easy to get lost in it and begin to explore the potential worst possibilities and outcomes of situations.
Here is a quick tip on how to possibly decrease your anxiety when you’re worried about a situation…
Focus on probability rather than possibility.
Anxiety can cause hyper focus on an array of possible negative outcomes. Anything bad could happen (according to our imagination.) For instance, if you have high anxiety and you are not doing a task well at work, you probably are not calmly thinking through the next steps of how to improve and become more efficient… your thought pattern may look a little more like this:
“If I don’t do this better my boss will notice and eventually fire me… if they fire me, I will end up with no money… then I’ll lose my home and live on the streets.”
It’s like the Series of Unfortunate Events movie, taking place in your mind… if you were to voice it you might think of how silly it sounds to dwell on one catastrophe after another, but these fears can feel very real in the moment and blur your capacity to think at all sometimes, or kick you into a hyperdrive of attempting to control the situation to prevent these fears becoming reality. (This is the reason I love going to the beach during shark week on the Discovery channel…there aren’t really any crowds because everyone’s fear of the possibility of the shark has surfaced.) I’m being facetious, but really the empty beach is so lovely, you should try it.
If you shift your focus to probability over possibility, you will be able to think with more of a calm rationality. Are you fearful that a passing plane might land on your home or office right now? No… why? Well because the probability of that happening is pretty slim. Are you fearful that when you stand up to walk today you will fall and break your neck? No… why? Because again you are trusting the probability over the possibility. When the focus is on the probability it allows us to operate, even in scary situations.
In conclusion, thinking of probability is a great way to rationalize your thought process and stop the destructive spiral of anxious thoughts. If you can do that, the next step can be thinking about possibilities again but think of everything that could possibly go right.