Eliminate Anxiety: Stop Imaginary Conversations

Eliminate Anxiety: Stop Imaginary Conversations

I do have a large number of posts coming up this week but it is best never to neglect the Self Help posts for those of us looking to eliminate anxiety from our lives.
This week features a very simple and yet highly effective way to reduce a significant cause of anxiety - the ‘would-be’ conversation. This is the dialogue you run in your mind of either a previous conversation or, more often, a potential one.
Example: Laying in bed you are almost subconsciously imagining what you might say to your boss the next morning. The various scenarios play out like film vignettes and you are, in essence, rehearsing what you will say, what his reactions might be, and the resulting consequences. The same pattern repeats whether the dialogue is between family, friends, romantic partners, or authority figures - a continuous loop of what could happen IF.
Simply begin observing your thoughts and note how often you are projecting would-be conversations. Notice how often you do this on nights where you cannot get to sleep. Notice how often you feel angry or agitated shortly after having these sorts of ‘trial’ dialogues in your mind. Once you realise that these are unhelpful thoughts and do not actually prepare you for any real conversations, you can stop them. This is simply a technique whereby you actively cut them off as soon as you realise you are having them. If helpful, distract your mind by humming a tune, thinking up a math equation or, if you are attempting to sleep, count sheep (I’m serious).
By training yourself to arrest these ‘rehearsal’ conversations or ‘what if’ conversations you will be amazed at how much anxiety disappears from your life. Even more amazingly, you may even perform better when a real-life spontaneous or planned conversation does occur. Better.
This is another one of those Tips that is seemingly so simple or trite that too many people miss the tremendous rewards it can give you.