Let’s not demonize anxiety, let’s recalibrate it!

CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is a process of anxiety recalibration.  Our goal is not to eliminate all anxious thoughts – that would be dangerous! Humans need some way of perceiving and quickly responding to actual dangers, and true crises.  However, we cannot live a healthy life in a constant state of alarm. 

When working with a therapist who utilizes CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) we learn to identify and question some of the thoughts that precede our emotions.  We learn to identify when our thinking is rational and we are truly picking up a real (and not exaggerated) danger.  On the flip side, we become better detectives of our thinking distortions.  We learn to recognize when our brains are tricking us and our anxiety is unwarranted. 

Through the distortions of magnification, catastrophizing, future-telling, and mind-reading, we are perceiving fictional dangers. 

We are also exaggerating the potential probability of terrible outcomes.  When we recalibrate our anxiety through CBT, we are giving ourselves a chance at true clarity.  We may not eliminate all the feelings of distress, but we no longer assume that just because we feel anxious or afraid, that we need to go into fight or flight. 

With time, practice, and loving-kindness to ourselves, we can learn to walk our brains back from states of panic and conscientiously return to reason and emotional stability.