We’ve all head of “fake news”.
We may think that the last President of the United States invented that silly phrase, but anxious brains have been in the business of fake news for thousands of years. Anxiety invented the idea of fake news.
When you are doing your best to move forward in recovery, you are learning to allow anxious thoughts without engaging with them. You work on allowing them to come without trying to stop them, argue with them, or otherwise interact with them directly.
Why? Why do we take this approach?
When your over-sensitized brain keeps screaming scary thoughts at you, it would seem like common sense to argue with those thoughts so you can prove them wrong. You want to feel safe. Those disturbing thoughts make you feel anything but safe, so you want to argue them away. It makes sense at face value.
In fact, the world is jam-packed with misguided mental health advice that will tell you to counter the thoughts with facts or to replace them with positive or happy thoughts. These seem like common sense approaches. Your own common sense and desire for soothing will compel you to ask your friends and family to assure you that the thoughts are wrong and that you are safe.
The problem here is that when you do this, you put yourself into a debate with an opponent that does not exist in the reality you exist in.
You are bound by the laws of physics, probability, unidirectional time flow, and everything else that makes reality into reality. Your anxious brain is not interested in any of that. Anxiety and anxious thoughts have no limits on them. They are not bound by the laws that govern reality. They can simply make things up for any reason and without regard for validity or veracity. An anxious brain will dismiss all of your arguments as “fake news” no matter how well grounded and watertight they may be. That same anxious brain will then respond with a firehose of actual fake news in the form of distorted, irrational, catastrophic predictions and thoughts that scare the hell out of you.
Arguing with an anxious brain is pointless, frustrating, and exhausting. Just when you make an iron-clad argument that proves those scary thoughts untrue, your anxious brain will shrug, call your arguments fake news, then bury you in it’s own fake news.
You can’t win an argument with an opponent that will just make things up without restriction while ignoring your arguments completely. Anxious thoughts are impossible to reason with. It’s like beating your head against the wall when you try.
So … we stop trying. We allow the EXPERIENCE of reality to prove our point over time, difficult though that might be. This is why we do what we do. Keep this in mind when you are feeling compelled to make yourself feel better … by beating your head against the wall. It’s never a good plan.
73. Anxious Thoughts Don't Have Limits