Stopping the Noise in Your Head: The New Way to Overcome Anxiety and Worry

I recently had an experience that I wouldn't wish on anyone. About 150 times a day, for several weeks, my brain would throw highly unpleasant images at me, all around the same theme, which would cause me a huge rush of anxiety. These are called intrusive thoughts.

Picture this. You're working, you're listening to TV, you're taking a walk, and all of a sudden, "BAM", the event you're most afraid of happens before your eyes. It was only in my head, but brains don't really know the difference between what is real and what is imagined. Each time, my heart would explode in my chest, I would get hot and feverish. It was purely and simply disabling. I really had to get out of it.

Normally, when something bothers me, I use the Life Coach Schoolapproach, which basically consists in becoming aware of our thoughts, deciding if we want to keep them, and if not, finding alternatives to them. I had done this work frantically. I knew what I was thinking, I knew it wasn't true and why, and I knew that these thoughts were doing me absolutely no good. But rationalizing was no longer useful to me in this case. I needed another strategy.

And that's when my mother, a psychologist, suggested I read Stopping the Noise in Your Head, by Dr. Reid Wilson.

Summary

Dr. Reid Wilson is a specialist in anxiety. He understands what it is, what it wants and where it comes from. And he knows that usually what we do to eliminate it only feeds it. We need to change our attitude towards it.

The first distinction he teaches us is between a real red flag and a noise: a real red flag is the anxiety felt by a sloppy student who has a 12-page paper due in 12 hours and hasn't yet read the text she's supposed to discuss. She thinks, "Damn, I really should have started my work earlier. I don't know if I'll be able to finish it in time." Here, her anxiety comes in handy. She says, "Here's a problem. You'd have to come up with a solution as soon as possible." And the solution is pretty simple: get to work.

A noise is the anxiety felt by a student who has turned in her paper four days in advance, who has reread it three times rather than once before turning it in, who has emailed it to the professor in addition to handing it in on paper at his office to make sure he has received it, and who wakes up in a panic at 3 a.m. thinking, "Maybe I read the question wrong. Maybe the angle I chose is not the right one. I need to rewrite my paper or I'm going to fail." The solutions available to this student are not so simple. She would have to hack the professor's email to delete his email, break into the university, steal the hard copy of her work, and rewrite everything in a few hours. That's not a real solution. It's also not a real problem.

So the first step is to determine whether our anxiety is noise or a red flag. If it's noise, we need to realize that all the mental energy spent worrying about this pseudo-problem is wasted. If, for example, our second student were to say to herself, "But no, I've already reread my work, it seems to me that I was careful to choose my angle, and then even if I fail it's not the end of the world, I may not get into the master's program I want but I'll surely have a good life anyway," etc., do you think she'll feel better? No. All this inner monologue that she thinks is "reassuring" is only feeding the anxiety by giving her material to produce more and more convincing counterarguments. Anxiety will scream even louder to try to convince the student to act.

So what can we do? The opposite of what the anxiety wants. Put yourself in a fighting stance and invite anxiety into the arena. "Thank you Anxiety, that's totally how I want to feel right now. I love it. Give me more!" "Ah yes Anxiety, you are absolutely right. I should actually hack the teacher's email and spend the next few hours rewriting my 12 page paper. Thanks for the heads up." "Yay, you again, Anxiety! I'm so glad you're here. Come back anytime!", or "I'm not afraid of you, Anxiety. I am more than capable of handling you." We can also ask anxiety to exacerbate our physical symptoms. "Could you please make my heart beat MORE strongly? I seem to be too calm." And once we address anxiety in this way, we return to our activity: sleeping, driving the car, walking, working. When our thoughts bother us again, we start over. Again, and again, and again.

This process is proven to work. You can trust it.

They didn't mention it in the edition I had, but they developed an app to help us with that process. It's called Anxiety Challenger. It's free.

Impressions

I read this book in just two days. It was fascinating. I was taking my problem so seriously and everything was so dramatic in my head, and the author managed to make me laugh. He is very convincing, and he gave me hope. He also helped me realize that I wasn't crazy.

The solution he proposes is simple, but not at all easy to implement. In fact, it's terrifying. Inviting anxiety to make us more anxious is absolutely the opposite of what we want to do. But the reason for this is so well explained, that we do it anyway.

I used the application. I counted hundreds of points. And once I saw that my attitude toward anxiety had actually changed, I applied another strategy on top of it: accept that my situation was crap. Having compassion for myself. It really sucks to have anxiety attacks every ten seconds. It really sucks to have such disgusting images in my head so often. Yes, it does. That's life. "Oh, is that you, Anxiety? Thanks for coming to warn me again about this impending danger, I clearly hadn't thought enough about it. Ah, you're offering me a new angle on my disgusting image? Wow, that changes everything. I'll take that into consideration. Come back anytime!"

I can proudly say that I no longer have these intrusive thoughts. They may come up from time to time, but they are no longer emotionally charged. I no longer take them seriously. You have no idea how relieved I am.

If you suffer from anxiety in any form, I strongly suggest you get it. It could change everything.