How to calm your spiraling worries

6 things to try when you are stuck in fear territory

“Swirling Thoughts,” maybe? (Truthfully, an unfinished painting by me.)

Hello, dear friends,

I hope you have been doing alright in this season. I turned the wall calendar from February to March and discovered that the artwork — from the wonderful Lisa Congdon — said “ONE DAY AT A TIME.” That sounds about right for March.

Yesterday I emailed a query to an agent for the first time in months and opened up the file for the book I’m working on. (It would be dusty if computer files could get dusty.) After skimming a few paragraphs, I could suddenly see what was wrong and how to fix it — a discouraging and thrilling discovery. Something had been shifting in all these seemingly stagnant months.

This is my reminder to you and myself that creation takes time, and incubating is a necessary step. Rest is required. Rest is its own critical stage.

What I hope my book will do is help readers with an illness cope better and feel less alone. There are not enough classic books that serve this purpose — books that can be a guide and a balm at 2 a.m.

So, in that spirit, here’s a short post today with a sample of that kind of practical help.

How do you stop a spinning mind?

We all have worries, and some of us, some of the time, do better about helping keep those wild tigers tamed.

After all, spiraling thoughts can yank us into dark places.

If you’ve had an illness, or suspect one, that can be fertile terrority for scary thoughts.

Our brain is trying to do its job

The first thing to remember is that our human brains want to make sense of the world. Your brain’s No. 1 job is to make up a story.

Brains want to fill in the blanks. Leaving a major question empty, leaving something crucially important as an unknown, is not comfortable. Brains would rather fill in the blank with a made-up explanation than let it stay blank.

One a brain makes up a story, the brain is naturally suited to look for evidence to confirm this new belief.

And guess what! Brains are terrific at picking out the strands of confirmation among the thousands of other data points. You probably have heard of this as Confirmation Bias.

So, that’s the first thing. When you notice a horrifying story coming to mind, remember:

My brain’s job is to make up stories.

My brain’s job is to create an explanation where these is none yet.

Sometimes, those explanations will not be true.

This story may very well be not true!

Get the thought out of your head — and onto paper

Letting troubling thoughts slosh around in your head can be a recipe for diasaster, because your brain simply keeps repeating them, reinforcing them, and finding more and more compelling “data” to back it up.

It can be helpful, instead, to write down the troubling thought. Pick up a pen and write the worry out on paper. You can journal about it and write through all the reasons why this could NOT be true. That can be a huge relief.

Try asking the 4 Questions

Bryon Katie has 4 Questions that can be enormously helpful in this process when you have a troubling thought circulating:

1. Is it true?

2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?

3. How do you react when you believe that thought?

4. Who would you be without the thought?

Look at it in the third person

You can get further from this troubling thought by imagining yourself watching yourself handle this thought — and consider it in the third person. This is called “distanced self-talk.”

Once you start talking about yourself in the third person, you might find the advice rolling off easily.

For example, I might say:

Brianne is feeling worried about a test result. She doesn’t know what it will be, and she won’t know until next week, so she’s thinking about it a lot. It’s probably best if she does something to keep her mind off it, like go for a walk and call a friend.

As Psychologist Ethan Kross, author of Chatter, explains:

“Distanced self-talk helps us relate to ourselves like we were someone else, putting us in a position to think more objectively about our circumstances and work through them effectively.”

Many studies have shown the benefits of distanced self-talk: Why You Should Talk to Yourself in the Third Person (Vox)

Redirect your attention

Once you have managed to pull your brain back from the swirling thought enough to look at the troubling thought more carefully, and noticed how it may not be true, you may be able to shine your attention elsewhere.

Doing something absorbing can be useful. After all, it’s hard to worry while you are concentrating on something new and tricky, like learning a piano piece or figuring out a yoga pose from a YouTube video or making an abstract painting.

A few ideas:

• Listen to an audiobook that will grab your attention

• Put on a favorite movie or soundtrack

• Take notes during a favorite intriguing podcast

• Make a pot of soup or batch of cookies from a new recipe

• Go for a walk and give yourself a challenge — say, listen for birds and then identify their call using the Merlin app, or guess whether you’ll see more red or blue cars and count as you go

Keep track of when your brain is wrong

Your brain likes to forget all the times it is wrong and only remember when it is right. A reality check can be useful.

Keep a running list of worries you have that do not come true. Date them and put the worry in its full-blown serious form. In a month or a year, it may (hopefully) be something you can chuckle over.

And when a new trouble sprouts up, the list can help convince your brain that, well, this time might turn out OK, too.

I hope this list is a help the next time the fearsome unknown grips you. The more often you can stay calm and separate yourself from the spiraling thoughts, the easier it will be next time. ❤️

To our journeys,
Brianne