The 4 R's of Anxiety - Video Transcript

Hey everyone, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist and today I'm going to be talking about greeting your anxiety with the four R's. We often like to attempt to avoid anxiety and that doesn't really work out so well, so the point of this exercise is to um create some distance between ourselves and that anxiety spiral and then slow down our response to that anxiety.

So the first r stands for relabel. Typically when we're feeling anxious, it's because we're having a negative thought or a powerful urge and so what we want to do is just label that we want to identify, okay, am I having um sort of an irrational or negative thought right now, or is my anxiety causing me to have a powerful urge to do something?

Like text my ex for example, so once we figure that out then we want to re attribute that anxiety. So a lot of times we'll get into this this pattern of negative self talk, so our brain might be screaming at us that you know, you're under prepared, you're incompetent, you're weak, you're unlovable, all sorts of negative things.

And so we want to separate that out and recognize that it's due to the anxiety and it's not sort of um something inherently wrong with us or part of our character or personality, then we want to refocus so we want to spend about 15 minutes doing something else so that we're not creating the space for ourselves to go down that rabbit hole and for that anxiety to continue spiraling and sort of picking apart every negative aspect of our life choices.

So this can take a lot of forms. You know, you can spend 15 minutes maybe meditating or going for a walk or journaling. Um you can spend 15 minutes planning a fun night out with your best friend or catching up on emails. Basically. What we want to do is cope with the anxiety as opposed to allowing it to continue spiraling and we can do this by sort of shifting our attention to something else for a little bit.

Once we've done that, the emotional component of the situation will have hopefully calmed down a little bit and we'll have more access to our logical brain. So then we want to sort of reflect and re value um the situation. So we want to see how accurate were my thoughts and urges. Is there any evidence to support the accuracy of them or or to to is there any truth to them basically?

And then what would happen if I gave into them? Right? What would be the consequences? And then finally what would I like to do now? So um typically you will have a different response after going through this process than doing something um impulsive and purely based off of emotion that you may have done if you hadn't gone through this process.

So I hope this was helpful as always leave a comment or ask a question if there's anything that comes up for you and be sure to follow me on social media at cathartic space counseling and visit my website to learn more about how I can help. That's w w w dot cathartic space counseling dot com. I put out new videos every week, so stay tuned for more content on anxiety and have a great weekend.