The Anxiety Frenemy: Externalizing Your Thoughts And Emotions

“HI THERE, WANT TO SIT WITH ME AND WORRY ABOUT ALL THE POSSIBLE THINGS THAT COULD GO WRONG TODAY?” 

Does this sound like your anxiety screaming at you? You’re not alone. About 1 in 3 adults experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their life. Anxiety is based in fear and fear can get in the way of what we really want. 

Have you ever felt stuck at your job, but fear of the unknown got in the way of you taking the leap to find something else? Have you desired connection with others, but fear of rejection has gotten in the way of you making those connections? Do you have a general fear of bad things happening? Are you anxious about what others think of you? Do you have a general fear of the unknown? 

These are common themes I see my clients have anxiety about. There is no one size fits all for treatment, but I’ll teach you one common thoughts and emotions hack I use often with my clients. The concept comes from an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy technique called defusion to which I put a fun little spin on. I explain this as externalizing your thoughts and emotions. 

Here’s what you do: Imagine your emotion as a character or image and be as specific as possible. For example, I imagine my anxiety as a red pom pom with little arms, little legs, and googly eyes. Imagining a character or figure is helpful for a few reasons. One reason being that you’ll have the creative freedom to give your character a voice. This allows you to assign those anxious thoughts to your character, “externalizing” and separating those thoughts from The Self. You can now talk back and forth with your anxiety, whether you want to tell it off or empower yourself by not letting it win the argument. Either way, it’s nice to have someone to talk to, right? 

Sometimes my clients will describe less of a figure and more of an image, like gray smoke. Unless the smoke has googly eyes and a mouth, it’s a bit more difficult to talk to. In these cases, I encourage the client to get creative in how they want to interact with that image. I’ll suggest that they use more of a meditative approach with imagining them exhaling the gray smoke and watching it dissipate into the air. 

This technique isn’t just for anxiety. You can use it with any emotion and any thoughts attached to that emotion. Another helpful hint is to make it funny, which changes the flavor of it and makes it less intimidating. Also, giving it a name helps you more easily identify it. 

What will you call and imagine your frenemy as?