Want to Reduce Your Anxiety? Part II: Separate Your Thoughts & Feelings
Want to Reduce Your Anxiety?
Part II: Separate Your Thoughts & Feelings
So you know the classic therapist question? Personally, it is one that I loathe.
You know the question, right?
“And how did that make you feel?”
Despite my disdain, there’s a reason why as a therapist, the “And how did that make you feel?” is still the #1 arrow in my questioning-bow.
Knowing how you feel in any given moment—essentially, how your soul is experiencing its present reality—will give you more control and less anxiety over your reality.
Now, while people know it’s healthy to know what they’re experiencing in a given moment, rarely do people actually take ownership over their experience. For example, if they’re annoyed about something, they think everyone else is annoyed. They might even believe everyone around them is being annoying.
Why is that?
They’re not using a proper, “I statement,” about the matter. Therefore, saying something like, “I feel annoyed because I can’t find my car keys,” is going to be quite a healthy statement and will reduce your anxiety over time. (Therefore, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to read the last blog on what an “I statement” is all about.)
For this blog, I’m going to tell you to go into the next level of “I statements:”
s e p a r a t i n g your thoughts from your feelings.
Like the last blog, this might sound simple, but you’ll find it can be difficult. In fact, effectively separating your thoughts and feelings is a lifelong practice. Knowing exactly what you think and feel in a given, anxiety-provoking moment will not only increase your emotional maturity, it will reduce your anxiety.
Because did you know that when you’re anxious,
your thoughts-and-feelings merge as one?
As in, when you’re anxious, your thoughts become your feelings and your feelings become your thoughts.
Actually, ask yourself: when you’re anxious, do you get flooded with a million thoughts? Or perhaps you get overwhelmed with waves of feelings? Neither is bad. But when we can’t sort out what we are really thinking or feeling, we’re losing touch with ourselves. With reality.
Perhaps you’ve been there before. Have you ever been stressed out, and received either an email from someone, and just lost it? Perhaps your thoughts or feelings went into overdrive? Then, a few days later, you check over that email, and the other person wasn’t nearly as off-putting as when you first read the email.
I also want to make a quick aside.
Some might say processing out of thoughts or feelings is a person’s personality—that they are either a “feeler” or “thinker”—but this is a little different. And sure, everyone has a preference for processing through feelings or thoughts, but it’s when you are not fully taking in both sides that you’ll experience anxiety.
Allow me to give you an example of how this might work in the therapy room. I’ll depict the most generic of situations:
| Wife: “Thursday was trash day. I ALWAYS have to tell him to take out the trash! He’s got ONE chore. ONE thing. ONE responsibility…the trash! That’s it! I do everything else around the house…is that one thing too much to ask for?!”
| Husband: “You take care of EVERYTHING else? You act like I do nothing for our family. Do you know how hard I work?! When I get back home after a 9-hour shift, the first thing I’m thinking is not, ‘I wonder how high the trash is.’ You know what I think about when I get home? Nothing. I was on all day. I just want to turn off. Why is that so hard to understand?!”
Okay, you get the picture. For brevity’s sake, I’ll just zoom in on my conversation with the wife.
| Me (to the wife): “The last time you had to remind your husband to take out the trash, how’d that make you feel?”
| Wife: “You don’t understand. It’s not just the last time. It’s every time. We missed the last trash day. We were the only house on the block that didn’t have its bins out. Now this week our bins are overflowing. It’s like he doesn’t even care anymore. And it’s not even just the trash. His video games are more important than me. It’s like I’m his mother or something.”
Did you see how I asked about feelings, but she answered with thoughts? Because of anxiety, her thoughts and feelings have merged.
| Me: “I hear you. Obviously, this is bigger than trash. Tell me though, without talking about your husband or the situation, how do you feel when he forgets to take out the trash? Key in on how you feel.”
| Wife: “I just don’t think it’s that hard. I feel that I don’t really expect much from him. I really don’t.”
It happened again.
| Me: “Your thoughts are completely valid, but I want you to slow down…focus on how you feel, and less on what you think. Just to clarify, thoughts are many words strung together…a feeling is one word. Describe what you experience when this happens. The exact moment you noticed he didn’t take out the trash, how did you feel?”
| Wife: “Oh. I guess I feel…alone. Not important. Scared.”
Better!
| Me: “…Alone. Not important. Scared. Phew. Thank you for sharing that. Now I want you to go a little further. With what you said—alone, not important, scared—how does that make you feel in relation to your husband?”
| Wife: “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I feel that he doesn’t really love me. Like if he can’t even remember to change out a small, stupid trash bag once a week, I feel pretty worthless.”
You realize the husband and wife’s discord was never about “trash,” right? But can you also see how the trash symbolized everything?
And while getting to those deeper feelings of, “Aloneness, unimportance, scared,” and finally, “Worthlessness” is a tough pill to swallow, this visceral feeling will allow for deeper thoughts to emerge. As well as deeper truths from her husband…and I’ll say: revealing true feelings is downright terrifying. However, this is anxiety that we are constantly keeping within, rarely revealing to the outside world. Or even ourselves.
Every seemingly inconsequential issue (i.e. trash day) points to a deeper relational issue. Did you also see how as each layer was stripped, truer, deeper thoughts and feelings emerge? Our thoughts and feelings completely color how our lens for the world.
This is why schemas are so important to discern in every given moment. They drive our thoughts and feelings in unhealthy ways.
For example, if someone approaches us with constructive criticism and we have a “defectiveness” schema and we have learned to “overcompensate,” out of feeling offended and angry we might then instantly criticize another. I’m sure you’ve been there before; you try to give someone feedback and they respond by giving you feedback. This is just because out of anxiety (through that defectiveness schema). As the person works through a different pattern when feeling defective (i.e. listening to any form of truth that could be in the constructive criticism), they’ll find that their thoughts and then feelings will change.
In some way, we are all stuck in feeling and thought patterns. We are not only addicted to how we feel and think, but we will continually bend our environments to make sure our experiences validates our internal reality.
So what can you do?
Working on separating your feelings and thoughts is like a muscle.
Just as you’ve had thousands of repetitions of merging thoughts and feelings, you now need to practice separating your thoughts and feelings. Rewiring your brain takes effort. Some clients take weeks to separate a thought and feeling; some can do it right away. We all start somewhere. Regardless, as you begin to practice, more effectively separating your thoughts and feelings will become faster and faster.
As you become more aware of your identity, your anxiety will drop. You’ll feel that time slows and you have more control over your reactions (and your future) as well as more clarity on others. Knowing exactly what you’re experiencing (feeling) in a moment and thinking is not easy. It’s the start of emotional maturity, and a huge step in knowing your identity.
Further, as you can only experience another as clearly as you experience yourself, you’ll be able to intuitively separate another’s thoughts and feelings when they cannot. From here, you’ll notice that you have many more options in a given situation—this is how you develop wisdom.