Anxiety Is Lying To You
We all experience anxiety to some extent. It’s that pesky voice in our heads keeping us from sleeping at night, making us worry about past or future events, or telling us that we are not good enough.
Anxiety’s purpose is to keep you safe. If you are walking on the edge of a tall cliff, anxiety will make it’s presence known and tell you to get away from the edge. If you are walking down a dark alley by yourself, anxiety will tell you to get away from that situation.
Anxiety serves a very important role in keeping us away from harm. But that does not mean it is always telling you the truth.
Sometimes anxiety lies to you in order to keep you safe from any possible threat, no matter how harmless it may actually be. It may decide that it not only needs to keep you safe from imminent danger, but it also needs to keep you safe from any kind of embarrassment, shame, discomfort, judgment, or negative emotion.
Anxiety takes it’s job very seriously and if it has to lie to you to keep you away from any of the above emotions that it has deemed to be “extremely” dangerous, then it will.
Some common lies that anxiety tells us are:
If you worry about it at night, you’ll be able to come up with a solution
You’re not smart enough, so you shouldn’t speak up and embarrass yourself
You’re not good enough, so don’t interact with those people
Someone can do it better/already did it, so don’t even attempt to try because you’ll just fail
These are called cognitive distortions, because they are not realistic thoughts. They are lies your brain tells you to keep you safe from negative emotions or circumstances. But it also keeps you from living your life to the fullest and stepping outside your comfort zone.
So what do we do to stop our brains from lying to us and distorting our reality?
Notice the lies. See them for what they are.
Challenge them. Find the evidence that proves they are not true.
The more you practice with challenging these cognitive distortions, the quieter the anxiety will get. You will see the world in a more realistic way and your anxiety will more accurately know what is and what is not a dangerous situation.