Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

     I worry about my anxiety a lot, particularly during the months of June and July. It seems like I catch myself monitoring my anxiety more often during those warm months. I catch myself saying first thing in the morning, "I hope my anxiety isn't too high today." If we go out somewhere, I catch myself thinking, "I hope it isn't too loud or crowded so my anxiety doesn't get too high." If I feel my anxiety start to rise I'll think, "Oh no! I hope this doesn't get out of hand."
     Checking in with yourself about your mental health is a good thing. Worrying about your mental health condition, however, is not a good thing. Worrying about my anxiety actually has a negative effect on my well-being. By worrying about it, I'm creating a space for it to creep in and take over. By worrying about it, I'm constantly thinking about it and guarding against it, and that makes me hyper-aware of any symptoms of anxiety that might show up. That's pretty much just asking for the anxiety to show up since I'm thinking about it so much and being wary of it at the same time.
     My therapist explained it this way: She watched a TED talk on stress and the body. There were two groups of people involved in a study (longitudinal study is my guess). One group thought that stress didn't negatively impact the body. The second group thought stress negatively impacted the body. After time passed, the group that didn't think about stress hurting their body were still mostly fine. The people that worried about the impact of stress on their body had more health problems. She explained that the same idea applied to worrying about anxiety as well. The more you worry about something like anxiety, the more likely it is to happen.
     Basically, just like the people that worry about the effect of stress on their body, by worrying about my anxiety, I created my own self-fulfilling prophecy. By worrying about my anxiety, I invited it in for a visit because I kept it on my mind. The same thing happens with panic attacks. Worrying about and fearing a panic attack often causes one to happen.
     The simple solution would be not to worry about the anxiety and panic attacks, but that is more difficult than it sounds. It takes quite a bit of effort to move your mind away from something scary. I'm sure we were all confronted with something scary, like a medical test, that we just couldn't stop thinking and worrying about. It's not something that you can just stop thinking about because it's always there, floating around in your mind somewhere.
     At the first sign of worrying too much about my anxiety, I start changing the way I think about the things. I'm always worried that I'll be as anxious as I was when I was forced into treatment, and I'm always worried that I'll let my anxiety ruin my birthday. I always start to worry about that in June. So, now, I try to talk to myself differently about my anxiety. Instead of the negative, worrying statements, I say, "You know you're anxiety might be higher right now, but that's fine. You're in a different place than you were a couple of years ago, and you have no reason to think the anxiety is going to spiral again. You are doing better, and you can continue to do better."
     I also try to change the pictures I have in my mind. Instead of picturing myself so anxious that I cry and have a hard time functioning, I picture myself as content and busy with cleaning and writing and playing with my cat. I don't picture the anxiety as part of my day. I wake up in the morning, and instead of worrying about my anxiety immediately, I think about the things I planned to do that day. I picture myself doing them instead of being frozen in anxiety. In other words, I try to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of fun productivity instead of anxiety. I find that doing this one thing helps me to  manage my anxiety throughout the day. (However, this doesn't make the anxiety go away, because some days are just anxious days no matter what you're thinking and planning, but this is a management tool for the days when I'm more in control.)
     I'll end with this: Sometimes, we create the way we feel by the way we think.  Worrying about anxiety and panic symptoms will likely bring on the symptoms, just like worrying about stress hurting your body leads to stress hurting your body. Picturing a good day, or at least a busy day without picturing the anxiety, doesn't leave as much room for an anxiety invasion, which (at least for me) makes the anxiety more manageable.