In my life I’ve struggled with starting conversations and asserting myself in social situations, a thing I’ve historically chalked up to shyness and a general introverted personality. Lately, through some conversations with my friends, I’ve started to realize that perhaps I might tend to make myself anxious through the way I tend to think through things in general, in particular when it comes to social situations. I’ve started to acknowledge that more of these thoughts may be less helpful than I’ve thought, and can be the impetus for a spiral into a panic attack, a thing I’ve had happen to me more often than I’d like in the last year or so. And while I have some tools to deal with panic attacks (thanks Ted Lasso!), I haven’t had any tools to deal with the beginning of a spiral, in part due to not realizing what the start of it can look like.
For me personally, what often happens is I’ll have some concern or worry pop into my head, and I’ll attempt to work through it and consider the validity of the thought. This very easily spirals into negative thoughts, in particular when it’s a situation relating to someone else’s thoughts and feelings about which I have little insight. Not knowing is often the worst thing, and so the tool I’ve found to manage this is that I should assume the outcome that I want.
I found this phrasing first here, in this Hacker News comment on a thread about spiraling. This really resonated with me because it acts both as a heuristic for determining which thoughts are helpful, and as a tool for dismissing the thoughts. The way I’ve used it is that when I have a thought, typically ones related to my standing socially with other people, I consider whether that thought being true is the thing I want. If I’m considering asking my boss a question and my brain is telling me “that’s a dumb question, you’ll look dumb”, I essentially just tell myself that I won’t look dumb and my boss would be enthused to answer the question. In a way this is mentally deceptive in the same way the negative thoughts are, it’s just more helpful to be positive than negative. People tend to respond to the energy you put out, and so if you’re nervous and uncomfortable in talking with them they’ll often likely be the same, also assuming the worst about your perception of them. This ends up as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Now the crucial thing about this is that it doesn’t prevent you from failing, it just prevents you from spiraling. It could very well be the case that your boss isn’t receptive to your question, but that’s a thing you can deal with once it happens rather than stressing initially and potentially not even asking the question. Better to assume the outcome you want and fail once rather than assume the worst and suffer twice.
In this way you can use this to stop a spiral at the start. If you have a thought that doesn’t align with what it is you want, you can simply dismiss it before it has a chance to fester and grow. Aligning my thoughts with what it is I want, and trusting myself to deal with whatever outcome happens, has been a huge boon to my general mood. I’ve personally found in the last little bit this to be revelatory for managing what I’ve come to understand as anxiety, but it does remain to be seen how well this does in the long term.