More About How To Handle Stresssful Thoughts Using Exposure-Exercises

Here continues a summary of my posts on how to recover as quickly as possible from more serious stress and exhaustion symptoms.

This post continues with how to handle stressful thoughts, such as anxiety and rumination, as it is crucial to learn to steer one’s thoughts in order to reduce the stress level and create conditions for recovery.

Today’s post continues with exposure, a commonly used technique in traditional CBT therapy to make worrying thoughts more manageable.

Note that you should only try to do this after practising how to calm yourself. If you feel insecure, uncomfortable or fragile, you should only do this with a licensed psychologist or psychotherapist.

Continue with the visualization exercise described in previous posts until you have visualized all the worst-case scenarios you can imagine.

You will probably realize after this that the worst-case scenario, although hypothetically terrible (they probably won’t happen), did not create the horrible reactions or consequences you feared, but instead the anxiety and fear lost their grip on you.

Remember that if your level of discomfort is 8 or higher on a 10-degree scale, focus on the stress management methods suggested in previous posts.

More about how to handle stress next week.