Within our minds is a complex cognitive system of core beliefs, underlying assumptions and interpersonal strategies. All of these components work together to make up what is known as our cognitive schemata. We will go through each of these components of cognitive schemata in some detail to provide a picture of how the inner workings of our complex minds can lead us into troublesome thought patterns.

We’ve all heard that age old saying that the first step in making change is recognizing you have a problem. Well, in that same vein, the first step in learning how to regulate your emotions is to recognize your emotions and understand how they are impacting you. This takes practice.

While we can’t free ourselves from experiencing negative emotions, we can learn to cope with them and manage them. In this post, I will introduce you to a few key strategies for how to gain control of your emotions.

The most powerful way people maintain their anxiety is by avoiding whatever it is that makes them anxious. This avoidant behavior can present itself in many different ways:

If you have lived with severe anxiety at some point in your life, you can probably relate to the two pieces of information below:

• An anxious person spends an exorbitant amount of time thinking about the future

• The “future world” created by an anxious person is often filled with an ongoing series of catastrophes

In the last post, we talked about how to expose yourself to your fears by using your imagination. As a refresher, the most powerful way people maintain their anxiety is by avoiding whatever it is that makes them anxious.

So, as we discussed in the last post, what is the answer to all of this? Stop avoiding and engage with the situations that make you anxious.

In previous steps of the Reduce Anxiety Series, we discussed how to (1) challenge your unhelpful thoughts, (2) reduce your emotional tolerance and (3) stop engaging in behaviors that make your anxiety worse. My hope is that one of the key messages you take away from these discussions is that by avoiding your fears, you are actually making your anxiety worse.

Understandably, you might ask, “Well, if I shouldn’t avoid, then what do I do instead? The short answer is: do the exact opposite and engage what makes you anxious.

In step 2, we talked about how boosting our emotional tolerance can help reduce anxiety. If you haven’t read it yet, pop over to step 2 and check it out.

Now we are going to talk about how some of the things we do in order to improve our anxiety are actually making it worse.

In Step 1, we discussed how to recognize and confront our troubling thoughts in order to reduce anxiety. If you haven’t read it yet, start with Step 1. At Step 2, you might be saying, "But what about when my anxious feelings become so overwhelming that it seems inconceivable to sit back and analyze my thoughts?” I hear you! After all, the relationship between our thoughts, feelings and behaviors is not always linear.

Throughout our daily activities, we all experience a continuous flow of quick, evaluative thoughts. These are called automatic thoughts. Automatic thoughts are not a deliberate choice but emerge spontaneously. Our minds are flooded with these thoughts continuously.  

‘Why is this lady talking so loud?’

‘I love this song.’

‘I need to wash my car.’

What is social information processing?

Social information processing is an extremely well-supported psychological theory that describes how we all think when we interact with people. Every time any of us have a social encounter with someone, there are five cognitive steps that are responsible for how we understand that social encounter and how we react to it.

These five steps include:

1. Encoding of social cues: we selectively encode some pieces of information in social situations and ignore other pieces of information