I see now that I didn’t adequately emphasize my experience with meditation and CBT-style thought dissection enough, and perhaps my advice is terrible if you have not done those things first. Thinking in terms of “my body feels threatened” helps me because I 1) have the mindfulness to notice quickly, 2) I am able to rewind the tape a little and, often, recall the moment the anxiety wave broke over me even though I wasn’t mindful of it at the time, which 3) often makes the “threat” clear. Noticing the things I consider threats helps me to keep them in perspective as I continue to encounter them. Mostly importantly, realizing the banal thing that actually triggered my anxiety helps me not to make false attributions.
It frequently happens that people suffer from anxiety because they don’t allow themselves to be angry because they want to be a “nice guy” or “nice girl”. David D. Burns sees this need to be nice as one of the pillars of a lot of cases of people have anxiety disorder in When Panic Attacks.
Hear, hear. Yes, this is what I think was happening with me and jealousy. I basically felt that good person is not jealous and steeped in comparison, and so I stopped being aware of when I was jealous, getting anxious and attributing the anxiety to other stuff instead.
I see now that I didn’t adequately emphasize my experience with meditation and CBT-style thought dissection enough, and perhaps my advice is terrible if you have not done those things first. Thinking in terms of “my body feels threatened” helps me because I 1) have the mindfulness to notice quickly, 2) I am able to rewind the tape a little and, often, recall the moment the anxiety wave broke over me even though I wasn’t mindful of it at the time, which 3) often makes the “threat” clear. Noticing the things I consider threats helps me to keep them in perspective as I continue to encounter them. Mostly importantly, realizing the banal thing that actually triggered my anxiety helps me not to make false attributions.
Hear, hear. Yes, this is what I think was happening with me and jealousy. I basically felt that good person is not jealous and steeped in comparison, and so I stopped being aware of when I was jealous, getting anxious and attributing the anxiety to other stuff instead.