Ep.49 The Content Of Your Thoughts Are Not Important

Your Anxiety Toolkit - Anxiety & OCD Strategies for Everyday

Kimberley Quinlan, LMFT | Anxiety & OCD Specialist

Self-improvement, Education, Anxietymindfulnessmeditation, Mental Health, Health & Fitness

4.9 • 802 Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2018

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Content Of Your Thoughts Are Not Important

One of the biggest struggles my clients have is when they get caught up in the belief that their specific intrusive thoughts or fears warrant LOTS of attention and moral weight.

This is one of the most difficult things to manage when you are struggling with significant anxiety. We can see that other peoples fears are irrational, but when it comes to our specific fear, we become unglued, confused and reactive.

Here are a few questions that I want you to ask yourself before listening to this podcast.

Have you caught yourself saying any of the following?

The Content of Your Thoughts are Not Important OCD Anxiety Your Anxiety Toolkit

1. “It's easy for you to say to, "just accept the thoughts". You don’t have thoughts about hurting someone all day like I do (insert here whatever thought you are obsessing or ruminating on). This thought is WAY worse than other thoughts.”

2. “This isn’t any old thought. This would destroy my life if this thought came true.”

3. “I know I have to accept the uncertainty, but this isn’t just a thought”

These are all examples of getting caught up in our thoughts content.

When we get caught up in the CONTENT of our thoughts we can get stuck in a cycle of anxiety.

When we give our thoughts all of this attention and value, our brains become hypervigilent and get even more worked up about the presence of these thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Please note here, I am in NO WAY telling you this is your fault. This is just the way our brains work. We also have be to careful about our narrative about this thought. If we tell ourselves the thought is "bad", that triggers self-judgment, shame and self-doubt. Then we are off and running, judging ourselves more and putting ourselves down.

Listen to the podcast to hear my FIVE STEPS to help when you are getting caught in the content of your thoughts.

At the end of the podcast, I offer a little Challenge for you.

Observe your thoughts and ask yourself if you could start to make any of these changes in your life.

If you do notice that you are giving too much weight to a thought, try to practice Non-judgment (Ep 1) or Beginners Mind (ep 6) or What you say to yourself Matters (ep 17).

Thank you again for supporting me with this podcast and with CBT Schools online courses. Please click here to find out more about Mindfulness School for OCD.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Your Anxiety Toolkit, episode number 49.
0:09.4	Welcome to Your Anxiety Toolkit.
0:12.1	I'm your host, Kimberly Quinlan.
0:14.3	This podcast is fueled by three main goals.
0:17.2	The first goal is to provide you with some extra tools to help you manage your anxiety.
0:22.8	Second goal, to inspire you. Anxiety doesn't get to decide how you live your life. And number three,
0:29.9	and I leave the best for last, is to provide you with one big, fat virtual hug, because experiencing
0:36.9	anxiety ain't easy. If that sounds good to you, let's go.
0:45.2	Well, hello, hello and welcome back. Again, my name is Kimberly Quinlan. I'm so thrilled to
0:53.1	have you here in your Anxiety Toolkit
0:55.6	podcast. Today, we're going to talk about thoughts and how we tend to place a lot of importance
1:05.2	on those thoughts and how when we place that importance, how that creates a ripple effect of continued problems.
1:13.9	So, you know, one of the biggest struggles I see with my clients in my private practice,
1:20.2	treating OCD and social anxiety and phobias and anxiety and generalized anxiety,
1:26.9	is that we get really caught up in the belief that
1:31.8	our specific thoughts and fears and intrusive thoughts warrant a lot of attention and
1:40.9	warrant a moral way in on what kind of person it makes us by having those thoughts.
1:48.8	And this is a really big problem because if I'm really honest, this is probably one of the
1:55.5	most difficult things to manage in addition to just having anxiety present in our body.
2:01.8	Once we start to really add heavy weight to those thoughts and again start to judge
2:09.6	ourselves for them, we end up having a much bigger problem.
2:14.3	Now we can see, as a person with anxiety, we can see that other people's thoughts are irrational.
	...

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