Written by: Karin Brauner, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Over the past year, I’ve noticed an increase in anxiety and intrusive thoughts.
In this post, I’d like to leave you with a few tips that might help with the situation that we’ve all been dealing with for the past couple of years.
Health anxiety might be the obvious thing that we might think is going on, but it is so much more than that.
People are having anxiety about many things:
Socialising
Going outside
Going back to working at the office
Financial security
Intrusive thoughts they can’t control
This last one is what I want to focus on today.
One thing I’ve noticed especially since around March 2020, is that life has changed dramatically for most of us, if not all of us.
We used to have lots of what I call “noise”. The normal things in life like going to the office, where we can busy ourselves with work and conversations with colleagues.
Things like going to the gym, or to the pub, or visiting friends and family, going to parties, and so on…
All of a sudden, in an instant, all these things were gone.
What we were left with was a great silence. A gap in our daily routines.
What happened next to many of us was this: the thoughts that were “background noise”, and we could keep away from, suddenly came to the forefront.
They were now demanding our attention, without having to scream for it.
They took their chance and said “now is our chance to have some attention”.
And so we begin to think about those things that we were either avoiding, or too busy to pay attention to.
It became intense, overwhelming, and perhaps even scary.
Anxiety arose. Depression arose. Difficulties coping arose.
Luckily, as everyone was confined to their homes, working from home, self-isolating, and so on, something also happened to the mental health professionals: they started to offer more and more online counselling.
Counsellors and psychotherapists working locally and not seeing online work as their main work, had to pivot and learn how to use Zoom and other platforms to see their clients.
This meant a lot more counsellors were available to deal with the increasing numbers of distressed individuals (for the reasons described above, and others I haven’t mentioned), had access to support online.
This is what I’ve been noticing. And it’s good – more counsellors mean more people being helped around the world.
Just as we’ve noticed a shift in how we work, this is how we need to notice our intrusive thoughts when they demand our attention.
When distractions have gone away and this is all we’re left with.
You might be thinking “but what’s noticing my thoughts going to do, Karin? I need a solution now!”
Well, I can tell you that throughout the last two years, this has been one of my go-to tools to support my clients with their anxiety and intrusive thoughts.
Another one is befriending these thoughts rather than fighting them.
Let’s think about noticing first: something happens when we become aware of what we’re thinking.
We start to recognise how we feel when the thought comes up, what we were doing just before the thought entered our mind, and what’s different in our lives that’s allowing this thought to become conscious to us.
As we do that, we are dealing with the thought, in a non-threatening way. After all, noticing something is just acknowledging that it’s there.
As we continue to notice it, we will start to deal with it differently, to be kinder to ourselves, to realise that there is a problem here that we need to deal with.
Our first instinct as human beings is going to be to eradicate, to remove the thought from our minds.
But this proves difficult, almost impossible.
It’s like when we do meditation exercises – we think that the goal is to leave our minds completely blank, not have any thoughts at all.
But even the people creating the guided meditation in apps such as the Calm App or Headspace know that you’ll get distracted at some point.
Our thoughts will intrude into our meditation time!
They don’t tell us off for doing so, they say, “just gently bring yourself back to focusing on the meditation”.
If we start fighting our thought, it is the only thing we’ll be focusing on, forgetting about the meditation and relaxation we’re meant to be getting from it.
My point is – more than getting rid of, or fighting the intrusive thoughts, try to figure out what they are doing here and why they are here, bothering you, right now.
As we start to recognise the origin of our thoughts and why we are thinking them at a particular time, we will be able to decide what to do with them and how to deal with them.
They will become less threatening or scary, as we understand and let them run their course.
So, to sum up – if you’re struggling with intrusive thoughts, experiment with this: for a week or two, just notice your thoughts without doing anything else with them. Don’t fight them, just let them exist with you, and befriend them until it’s time for them to go.
I’d love to hear your thoughts and how this is helping you.
If you’d like to find out more on how I can help you with intrusive thoughts, or other overwhelming situations you might be going through, please visit https://karinbrauneronline.co.uk/counselling
Karin Brauner, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Karin Brauner is passionate about helping people get on track – or back on track – in their personal and professional lives through practical tools and inspirational conversations in a variety of settings. Karin teaches tools that she’s learned and developed throughout her own life and career. She knows how hard things can get, but also how great things can be once you move through to the other side. She now shares the knowledge she’s gained, through various mediums, to show people a path to better self-care, support when processing their past, and working out their present so they can lead an improved life and thrive in their personal and professional relationships.
