Rewire Your Anxious Brain With Reality Testing
Another way to change our thoughts, and therefore rewire our brain, is by testing them - A.K.A Reality Testing
For those of us who struggle with anxiety, testing our anxious thoughts through reality testing can be especially helpful because our brain’s fear center actually learns through experiences. If you have ever heard of exposure therapy, this is the foundational concept behind that. So, if you are interested in working with your brain rather than always trying to fight and struggle with your anxiety, then keep on reading to learn more about this CBT skill!
The technique I am hinting at is called reality testing and you can thank Mr. Sigmund Freud for this one. Now I know Freud’s work has been controversial, but this technique really can be quite beneficial when we struggle with unhelpful, anxious thoughts.
Reality Testing is one of many Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) skills. The basic concept of Reality Testing is to distinguish between our internal world (our perceptions, predictions, self-talk, etc.) from our external world (what is actually happening around us). This practice helps us to zoom out from our internal world and more easily identify when our thoughts are not being helpful for us.
Reality Testing is especially useful when we find ourselves assuming bad things will happen or if we are predicting how others will respond to us (A.K.A when we are jumping to conclusions). This thought pattern happens a lot for those of us with anxious thoughts. Which makes sense, right? Anxiety likes to be prepared so it thinks about the future, comes up with scenarios, it imagines all of the possible bad things that could happen because it’s trying so very hard to protect us from harm. So when we are practicing Reality Testing we are acknowledging that maybe our thoughts aren’t being helpful for us and we test those not so helpful thoughts through our actions.
Here is a break down of how to practice Reality Testing. If you’d like to hear an example, you can find one in this video.
Step 1) Write down this unhelpful thought or expectation.
Step 2) Come up with a way to test this expectation.
Step 3) Make a prediction of how you think this experiment is going to go and how you expect you’ll feel after going through with it.
Step 4) Go through with the planned experiment.
Step 5) Write down what actually happened and how you felt afterwards.
Step 6) Reflect on this experiment and acknowledge any new evidence that has surfaced. Look at all of the evidence.
There are so many different possibilities or outcomes for any situation. For some reason, our brain decides that the outcome it predicts is the only possible outcome. So when we can test our unhelpful, anxious thoughts in this way, we are actively showing our amygdala (the brain’s fear center) that we can go through with these situations while remaining safe. This CBT skill teaches our brain how to rewire itself by guiding it to acknowledge how many alternative possibilities there are.
Go ahead and choose an anxious thought to challenge this week and see what you notice. The outcome just might surprise you!
