Stop Panic Attacks And Negative Trains Of Thought, Part #5
March 25, 2010 by Alex Taylor · Leave a Comment
If you’re finding it hard to recall your trains of thought as they become more extreme, then it’s a good idea for you to do what I did and invest in a voice recorder. They’re perfect for recording these hard-to-remember parts of your trains of thought.
Now we’re getting to the exciting part – exciting because for the very first time you’re actually going to have some power over your thoughts the next time they threaten to spiral out of control.
By this stage you’ll know your negative trains of thought like the back of your hand. You’ll know every thought you have on any given subject that worries you, and you’ll know what order they come in, how long each thought lasts, and where in the train your panic gets out of control. So the moment you experience that very first thought in the negative train, you’ll be aware of it.
And this gives you the power to do several things.
Here’s what you do when you’re first using these techniques. When you notice that very first thought kick in, you focus on the entire train of thought ahead of you – this will be easy because you’ve memorized it down to the smallest detail.
But instead of waiting for your subconscious to move from one thought to the next, you move the thoughts along yourself, consciously. So take my own example. The entire train of thought would be something like this:
“Scared at something I can’t see.”
“My vision’s getting worse.”
“I’m going blind.”
“What if I go blind?”
“How would I leave the house if I was blind?”
“Would I need someone to look after me?”
“Who would look after me?”
“Would I burden someone in my family by depending on them for the rest of my life?”
“How long will it be before I forget what people I know look like?”
“Do I have eye cancer?”
“They’ll have to operate on my eyes…”
“What if they need to remove one of eyes…?”
“What if they have to remove both of my eyes…?”
“Can cancer in your eyes spread to your brain…?”
“Am I dying right now and doing nothing about it…?”
That’s a 15 step negative train of thought. And on average I’d say I used to spend about 2 minutes thinking about each of those individual thoughts. That could mean up to 30 minutes of terrible, terrifying thoughts. And I’ve discovered that it’s this long, drawn out period of time spent thinking terrible things that caused the majority of my panic attacks.
And that’s why this train of thought never had the power to cause an attack in the first few minutes – because I hadn’t worked myself up enough, or stressed myself out enough, to cause the attack.
But here’s the great part.
Now that you know each step of your train of thought and you’ve committed it to memory, you can now let the train move forward at any speed you want to. So in my own example, the moment I had the first thought, which was being scared at something I couldn’t see, I’d immediately think the 2nd thought in the train, which is “My vision’s getting worse.”
And before I could linger on it, I’d immediately have the third thought, “I’m going blind.”
And I’d do this with each of the 15 thoughts until I reached the end of the train. In the beginning, this would take me a couple of minutes, which is already 15 times quicker than it would normally take me to get through the entire train of thought.
But after a while, I got good at it. And now when I go through a train like this I’m at the end of it within about 20 or 30 seconds.
Think about that for a second.
What used to be a 30 minute ordeal for me is now over in 20 seconds. That’s more than 90 times less negative thoughts I’m having, simply by controlling my negative trains of thought.
When I started regularly using this technique I was amazed at what it did for me. I started to find myself at the very end of a train of thought in just a few seconds, and I’d still be completely calm, and the train of thought was over with nowhere else to go. There were simply no more negative thoughts left for me to have.
Until you try this for yourself it’s hard to understand how effective this method is. When I started doing this, I’d find myself almost laughing at the trains of thought as I was having them. And these were the same thoughts that were leaving me crying in the street just weeks before. It’s almost like you take all the power these thoughts have to scare you, simply by being in control of them.
There are many other ways to apply this technique in beating your anxiety, and I’d love to share those with you too. But I’ve already laid quite a bit on you today, so I’ll save those ideas for another time. Because it really is vital that you master and then start to use the fundamentals I’ve gone over in this video.
And I really hope you give this a try – I know how hopeless it can seem when you’re suffering with anxiety and you’ve hit rock bottom. I was there for years myself.
And I also know how hard it is to believe simple ideas like this can help. But this really does help. It’s helped me, and it’s helped everyone else I’ve shown it to. And I’d really love for it to help you too.
Stop Panic Attacks And Negative Trains Of Thought, Part #4
March 25, 2010 by Alex Taylor · Leave a Comment
This worked fine in the early part of the train of thought, where I was still keeping my anxiety under control, but when I got towards the end of the train of thought and I was in a full blown panic attack, it was impossible to remember anything.
The solution I found to this was to buy a digital voice recorder. It’s a great little device, and it records hours and hours of high quality audio.
I started taking the voice recorder everywhere I went, and when this train of thought started up I’d set it on record and start narrating what I was thinking and how I was feeling. Then, later on when I was calm, I could go over everything I’d recorder at my leisure.
And this is how I got to know this train of thought so well, which is also why it was easy for me to share it with you in such detail.
Just learning a train of thought inside out will immediately make it a less terrifying ordeal when you have it. That’s the first thing I noticed when I started using the voice recorder and going over the recordings repeatedly. So I’d strongly recommend you do the same thing with each of the trains of thought you catch yourself having.
When a negative train of thought starts up and you know it inside out, you’ll immediately be less panicky than you normally would, simply because you know in advance where it’s going. The comparison I make here is that it’s like turning a light on in a dark room. Walking into a fully lit room is easy, even if it’s unfamiliar. Walking into any dark room always causes some apprehension, purely because there are more unknowns.
So by learning your trains of thought off by heart, in great detail, you’ll immediately wipe out those unknowns and make them much less intimidating.
So that’s the first benefit.
Now onto the second benefit, and this is the huge breakthrough I made, and the one I most want to share with you.
When you study your own trains of thought and memorize every part of them in detail, you’ll suddenly find yourself with the power to manipulate them. You won’t be able to stop yourself having them, because as I pointed out just now, obsessive thoughts will always win over distractions.
But you’ll find that you can speed up or slow down the train of thought. You’ll find that you can skip entire stages of the train of thought. And you’ll find that you can reposition yourself relative to them so that you’re a spectator to them, and not a victim of them.
Before I show you how to manipulate your own trains of thought, you’re going to have to learn yours the way I’ve learned mine. To start doing this, simply start paying very close attention to your thoughts, especially those you have when you’re anxious. In the beginning, the process will be unfamiliar to you, so it might feel awkward. But stick with it and it should quickly become second nature.
Start with a single train of thought about a specific subject that causes you anxiety, and pay attention to your pattern of thoughts on that subject.
When you feel like you’ve made yourself familiar with the train of thought, it’s time to go a step further. Now you’ll need to start writing your trains of thought down, making a note of each of your thoughts and where it lies in relation to the others.
I’ve made a simple chart that you can use, if you’d like to, and it’s perfect for making quick notes about your own trains of thought. I used this same chart when I started out, and I thought it would be helpful for you to have something like this ready to use. I’ll tell you how to get the free chart in a moment, but for now, back to the main topic.
So after you write down your train of thought, the next step is to study it. And by study, I just mean to check it over 3 or 4 times a day. It’s almost like you’re revising for a test, and you want to memorize what you’ve written by repetition. This is a vital step, because the more familiar you become with your trains of thought, the less power they’ll have over you, and the less chance they’ll have of causing panic attacks.
Stop Panic Attacks And Negative Trains Of Thought, Part #3
March 25, 2010 by Alex Taylor · Leave a Comment
By this stage in my train of thought I would be genuinely panicking.
After 2 or 3 minutes of going over the “What if I go blind?” scenarios, the next thought would kick in. At this point, for reasons I still don’t understand, I’d begin to wonder if my vision problems were due to some other health problem. And my health problem of choice is typically eye cancer.
Once I’d hit this eye cancer idea, my negative train of thought would really pick up speed. Each thought would now hit me like a bullet, lasting just a few seconds, before provoking another thought, and another, each one worse than the one before it.
“They’ll have to operate on my eyes…”
“What if they need to remove one of eyes…?”
“What if they have to remove both of my eyes…?”
“Can cancer in your eyes spread to your brain…?”
“Am I dying right now and doing nothing about it…?”
By this point in my train of thought I’d usually hit a full on panic attack. If I was outside, and I was almost always outside with this train of thought, then I would either be running as fast as I could, crying, heading nowhere in particular. Or I’d be cowering somewhere indiscreet, like behind a car, or in an alleyway, crying, and just trying to hold it together long enough for the attack to end.
I had this train of thought once or twice a week for years, and it always caused a massive panic attack. But it wasn’t until I read the book on cognitive behavioral therapy that I really became aware of it. Obviously I was conscious of what I was thinking, but it was always hazy and in the back of my mind. And that that might be because it’s natural to push these thoughts away, to try to get away from them.
And that’s a good example of why cognitive behavioral therapy doesn’t work.
Because pushing negative thoughts away, or distracting yourself from them, is the basis of all CBT methods.
But there’s a fundamental flaw in that approach. And the flaw is that distraction will never overpower an obsessive thought. This is a concept that’s vital to everything I’ve discovered that’s helped me to overcome my anxiety.
Distraction will always lose to obsession. Distraction will never work.
Once I’d realised that distraction could never work, I started looking for different ways to combat the negative trains of thought that I was now aware of.
But I quickly realised that everything I was trying was just another form of distraction. Everything I did to stop myself having these thoughts was based on distracting myself from them, and just like cognitive behavioral therapy, it was failing miserably.
But it turns out that this lead to a breakthrough for me.
The breakthrough was my acceptance that my negative trains of thought were here to stay, and that nothing I did would ever stop me from having them. That might not sound like much of a breakthrough, but let me tell you why it really was a huge leap forward in my way of thinking.
Now that I knew I was stuck with my negative trains of thought, I switched my focus from stopping them to experiencing them on my own terms.
So the first thing I did was to keep a record of one of my trains of thought, and the one I chose was the one I shared with you just now. Every time I had this train of thought I made mental notes of what thought came where, and which thought lead to which other thought.
