Is this type of anxiety normal?

[Louna]

Hey everyone,
lately i have been really scared & i have never opened up about the type of thoughts i have. Its starting to worry me, that maybe i’m just not normal :/

obviously i have posted on here many times about health anxiety and such. But the other type of stuff i deal with gets so dark.

Like today, i ordered a new desk online. I’m excited for my new desk. I started thinking like where id position it in my room, how it would look. And then all of a sudden i thought about something going wrong with putting it together. Like what if it falls and severely hurts me?

The other day i went to pick up a knife to make a sandwich. Then i just got an overwhelming panic that i would drop the knife on my foot and it would stab me? I was so anxious i ended up not even making the sandwich. I was too scared. This is one i deal with a lot and i have worried about several times in the past.

Another example is when me and my uncle where lifting a table. It was junk and we were taking it outside. I suddenly panicked because i thought i was going to drop the table and if i did it would snap in my uncles direction and hurt him badly.

this type of stuff scares the hell out of me. Surely this is more than just anxiety? Like am i a psycho?

of course i don’t want to hurt myself or anyone, so its 100% not that. Its just fears that it will happen.
This type of irrational worry happens so often and it sends me into tears.

Does anyone else experience this? :(

[ankietyjoe]

Yeah it's pretty common.

The trick with this is to try and intercept the catastrophising.

You're not a psycho, it's 'just' anxiety.

Your brain has got into the habit of scanning for danger, and attaching danger to more and more benign situations. In every example you give, it's actually possible for the thing you're worrying about to happen, but exceptionally unlikely, and that's what you need to focus on.

If you need to, tell yourself out loud 'nothing dangerous will happen here, I am in control'. You need to re-teach your brain that you can exist in a world full of potential danger, without needing to mentally explore worst case scenarios of extremely unlikely situations.

It's not a bad idea to develop a physical or mental mantra when these kinds of thoughts happen. So instead of going down the worry road, stand up and walk around whilst counting to 10 slowly (or whatever it is that you feel will help). Because you have developed this habit of over worrying about these things, it may take hundreds of times doing the opposite for new connections in the brain to form, but that's all this is really, a learned habit that's not serving you well. So unlearn it.

[Louna]

Thank you for this. Its comforting knowing that these type of thoughts are common. Your response has really helped & i’ll definitely try your suggestion of counting to 10. Thank you again for such a great response

[ankietyjoe]

It's worth keeping in mind that these are ingrained mental habits that take a while to reverse. When you use mantra's you may find part of your brain telling you it's not working because you aren't experiencing immediate relief, but these are tried and tested methods. It will take you practising it 100's of times before the mental habits start to fade.

You can ad lib your own mental distractions too. For some people it's counting to 10, other people like to tell themselves they are safe and that the sensations aren't dangerous, others might jump on and down on the spot and singing. It doesn't matter, whatever works for you, and whatever breaks the cycle.

You might also find meditation to be a great help. The whole point of meditation is to intercept the reaction to stimulus. For example when you are meditating you may have a thought pop in to your head (in fact, you definitely will) and the point of meditation is to just observe the thought without reacting to it, and then re-focus on the object of your meditation. What it does over time is helps your brain NOT react to negative thoughts. So after you meditate for a few weeks you may find yourself using a knife to make a sandwich, you'll have the same thoughts of dropping the knife on your foot, but instead of becoming hysterical and something that's not even happening, you'll simply carry on making the sandwich without reacting. That's the true magic of meditation that's almost always overlooked. It gives you the power to ignore irrelevant thoughts.