How to Stop Anxious Thoughts in 5 Steps

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An Idea (by Ingenious Piece)

6 min readSep 25, 2020

It’s happening again. Your mind is racing with anxious thoughts. These negative and intrusive thoughts are probably holding you back in some way. They’re probably keeping you up at night as it sometimes does for me. The thought “how to stop anxious thoughts” barely makes its way into your growing anxiety spiral. So what can be done to stop worrying and restore the relative calm we enjoyed shortly before?

First, you perform a slow breathing exercise to quickly reduce stress and anxiety. Next, you engage in a 3 step process called Thought Challenging. This involves identifying intrusive anxious thoughts, comparing them with objectively true information, then countering them with more realistic thoughts. The final step is what I call Thought Surfing in which you use the truth to placate anxious thoughts and encourage them to leave your mind. Read on for my elaboration of these 5 steps below.

Calm Your Mind Through a Slow Breathing Exercise

There is countless research indicating that slow breathing reduces stress and anxiety. Likewise, there are seemingly infinite variations of slow breathing exercises to choose from. However, there is one I like the most due to how effective, simple and easy to remember it is.

There are only 2 steps to it:

Slowly inhale while counting to 4.
Slowly exhale while counting to 4.

Repeat until you feel like you have some control over your thoughts and your chest no longer feels like exploding. That’s it.

No putting one hand on your tummy with one leg over and behind your head. No need to inhale while reciting the first 10 digits of pi and exhale counting the Fibonacci sequence backwards from 144.

I prefer to keep it as simple as possible since anxiety is already complex enough as it is.

I learnt about this technique in Sarah Wilson’s fantastic book on anxiety, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful. Although which technique you pick doesn’t matter. Just make sure you do one and repeat it until you feel relatively calm.

How to Stop Anxious Thoughts with Thought Challenging

Good job for wrestling some semblance of bodily and mental autonomy back. Now, for each anxious thought you have, answer the following 3 questions.

1. What is the anxious thought?

What negative unwanted thoughts are thrashing about inside your head. Some examples may include,

“They hate me.”
“I have failed, I’ll never succeed.”.

2. What are the facts?

What information relating to the anxious thought do you know to be objectively true. For example,

They have taken time out of their day to do nice things for me in the past.
Many people have failed multiple times and ultimately succeeded.

3. What is a more realistic thought?

After considering the facts, turn the anxious thought into something more realistic. For example,

They’re usually nice to me so perhaps they’re having a bad day. I should ask them if they are okay.
Failure does not prevent success. I can learn from this failure and come back stronger and better.

Thought Challenging can be written down in a table like this.

Challenge the remainder of your anxious, negative and intrusive thoughts in the same way — Image by Author

You can learn more about Thought Challenging and the research behind it here.

Occasionally you may challenge a thought and realize it is rationale. There’s not much you can do for rationale thoughts besides addressing their root cause (e.g. solving a problem). Usually solving the problem causing a thought will remove that thought as well.

However, in a lot of cases, anxiety is largely fueled by the not so true, worst-case-scenario, irrational thoughts. These we can challenge to fight back against unwanted anxiety-inducing thoughts and regain control of our minds.

Thought Surfing

The last step to stopping anxious thoughts is paradoxically not to stop them. Instead, you simply acknowledge them, remind yourself of the truth if required, and let it leave your mind. A process I call ‘Thought Surfing’.

Hear me out. In real surfing, a surfer stands on a board and rides a moving wave until it subsides.

Ideally, the surfer would remain standing on the board from start to finish. However, even pro surfers occasionally lose balance and wipe out.

Anxious thoughts are mental waves. You can stay in the same position and let waves repeatedly thrash against you (anxiety spiral). Alternatively, you can get on your metaphorical board and ride a wave toward the shore until they’re weaker or disappear altogether.

How to Thought Surf

The first few times an irrational thought appears, counter it by citing its realistic counterpart. This is the mental equivalent of stepping on a board and riding that wave instead of just letting it crash into you. It takes the punch out of the wave.
Afterwards, let the placated thought leave your mind. By doing this, you have effectively ridden that wave closer to the shore where you now experience smaller and more manageable waves. In other words, you’re more resilient against that anxious thought.

*What the first few waves are like —* Photo by guille pozzi on Unsplash

Eventually, when the irrational thought re-enters your mind, it will seem so weak, insignificant and absurd you won’t even feel the need to consciously counter it with fact. At this point, subtly acknowledge the thought and it’s irrationality then let it leave your mind without acknowledging it any further.

What the last few waves are like — Photo by Sonnie Hiles on Unsplash

Why Thought Surfing Works

After countering an anxious thought with fact, subconsciously you will know that the thought was irrational. You will also know that acting on an irrational thought (e.g. exacting revenge, giving up) is also irrational and generally leads to bad outcomes. Alternatively, acting on what you know to be true generally has more positive outcomes (e.g. sympathize, learn, persevere).

Here’s another way to think about this. We can’t always control what happens to us (e.g. what people say, how people act, being stuck in a bad situation). But we can always control how we perceive it then respond to it. Hence perceiving it by ignoring irrational thoughts and acting only on realistic thoughts is basically what thought surfing is. On the other hand, not taking any active effort to deal with anxious thoughts is what leads to a seemingly never-ending anxiety spiral.

Which path will you take? — Photo by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash

So how to stop anxious thoughts is a matter of meditating?

In a way yes. In practice, thought surfing changes your mindset to make it easier for irrational thoughts to leave your mind without causing too much damage first. You can thought surf in complete silence or a busy, hectic and distraction-rich environment. Experiment with either and see what works best for you.

I find that after some practice, I can effectively thought surf in either.

Anxious thoughts will inevitably come and go many many times. In no way am I saying Thought Surfing is easy. However, I know for sure that it gets easier over time.

Takeaways

Ultimately, with enough repetition and practice of the above steps, you too can be free of the waves. Or at least, respond to them more positively and productively than before.