5 Ways To Defuse Anxious Thoughts
A core component of anxiety—be it subclinical anxiety or anxiety that meets the threshold for a generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) diagnosis—is anxious thinking that can at times feel uncontrollable. Psychotherapies for anxiety help people address these thoughts in different ways. In psychodynamic psychotherapy, the roots or underlying (sometimes called unconscious) reasons for anxiety are unearthed. In cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), thoughts are actively challenged or tested by behavioral experiments (for example, doing something that you are anxious about to experientially learn that the outcome will be okay)....