You are totally convinced that the world is now a more hostile place. Something has changed, the problems are bigger, the solutions are further away and danger surrounds you. It is not that the world has changed; it is that your anxiety disorder makes you see reality distorted, from a negative perspective and with a pessimistic attitude. Beware of irrational thoughts that produce anxiety.
More frequent irrational thoughts
Distortion of reality, those irrational thoughts generated by anxiety is not something that can be eliminated based on self-help books. Cognitive therapy is essential to learn to manage those automatic thoughts that only hinder our recovery from anxiety. What we can do is learn to identify them for ourselves. And these are the most frequent irrational thoughts.
– Black and white. After a period of suffering from anxiety , the brain mechanisms seem incapable of finding the middle ground in any situation. Everything is black or white, good or bad, which will soon become terrible. And whatever happens to us is on the bad side. It’s not that we don’t know how to distinguish the good; it’s that it’s too far from us.
– Magnify the facts. Automatically our mind magnifies, increases the possible risks and threats that surround us. What we previously perceived as normal, we now perceive as highly dangerous. We exaggerate situations, but also our mistakes and those of others, as well as defects.
– Guilt and condemnation. This exaggeration of situations leads us to use guilt and condemnation to try to explain the disaster that surrounds us. The feeling of guilt can be towards ourselves, feeling useless in front of the world or towards others, making them responsible for the supposed misfortune that hangs over us.
– Mental fixation. Obsessive thoughts are very characteristic of anxiety disorders. Although they are more evident in cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder, when we suffer from anxiety we tend to mental fixations, always negative, always pessimistic, always with thoughts that we cannot get out of our minds.
– Generalization. Generalizing to later issue value judgments about a situation is one of the faces of this distortion of reality. With an anxiety disorder, analysis and reflection do not disappear, but the elements to be assessed are so distorted that we do not achieve a realistic and objective vision.
– Egocentrism. Everything happens to us; all the bad. The rest of the world is luckier than us and they don’t have to deal with this hostile world that has been created for us. Our suffering is greater and, what is worse, nobody understands us.
