I don’t know if this has ever happened to you but more than once I have woken up with an anxiety attack. I am not sure what my brain is doing while I am asleep. I guess it is making a list of all the things I am not doing as well as I should.
When I have anxiety attacks I try to figure out what it is that I have been thinking about. This helps a lot to deal with the anxiety during the day, because I can combat the negative thinking. It doesn’t help so much when I wake up with an anxiety attack. The problem is I don’t know what my brain has been focusing on so I can’t fight back against the negative thoughts.
Sunday morning when I woke up with the anxiety attack I laid there for a while trying to figure out what caused the anxiety. The more time I spent trying to figure it out the worse the anxiety became. I knew that I hadn’t been taking care of myself. When I exercise, eat well and rest I have fewer problems with anxiety.
So I started to use the fact that I hadn’t been doing these things to beat myself up. Then I started to think about all of the things I felt I wasn’t doing well. And the anxiety attack got worst. I finally realized that I need to just stop. My brain had been going too fast before I woke. I couldn’t fight back against the negative thoughts because I couldn’t remember what I had been focusing on.
Sometimes the best way to deal with an anxiety attack is to stop thinking. I just had to quit focusing so much on what I was thinking. I couldn’t fix this anxiety attack by fighting back against the negative thoughts. So instead I got up and got busy. I distracted myself so that I wasn’t focusing so much on what I thought I was doing wrong.
Not thinking can be the best way to deal with anxiety.
