4 Ways that Anxiety Lies to You | Ep. 398

In this episode, you’ll learn how to recognize and counter the deceptive tricks anxiety uses to take control of your thoughts and actions.

• • Uncover the four major lies anxiety tells and how they can impact your daily life.

• Get practical strategies to outsmart anxiety’s manipulation and reclaim your peace of mind.
• Learn why anxiety often exaggerates situations and how to stay grounded in reality.
• Discover the power of self-compassion in silencing anxiety’s critical and harsh inner voice.
• Find out how to stop treating anxiety as urgent and start focusing on what truly matters.

Hello, my name is Kimberley Quinlan. I’m an anxiety specialist, and toda, I’m going to talk to you about the four ways that anxiety lies to you. 

If there is one huge liar in your life, it is likely to be anxiety, one down from maybe depression, because depression lies too. But today, what I want to do is help you identify the specific ways that anxiety does lie to you so you can be more aware of it and be able to catch it before it takes you to a place you do not want to go. 

As we know, and I talk about all the time here on Your Anxiety Toolkit, the more you can catch anxiety sooner, the less you respond to it in ways that are ineffective, unhealthy, and not helpful for you, the more we can actually prevent anxiety from taking over your life. A lot of the work I do personally from my own anxiety revolves around that awareness, being able to catch it, being really early in the game so that you can create a strategy and jump into strategy, skills, tools, and kindness as soon as possible. Let’s get going with the four ways anxiety lies to you.

#1 Way that Anxiety Lies to you: “You cannot handle this.” 

The first way that anxiety lies to you is it tells you you cannot handle this. Of all of the ways it lies and convinces you, it’s this. So often, when we experience anxiety, I get it; it’s not comfortable. It’s not fun. However, it’s not dangerous. Just because you have anxiety doesn’t mean there’s danger. It doesn’t mean you need to respond. But what anxiety often does is tell you this sneaky lie and say, “You can’t handle this.” If you don’t go ahead and run and respond in this very urgent way, you are not going to be able to handle this, so you better nip it in the bud. 

Often, when I’m talking with my clients about anxiety, they’ll say, “Even if I know it’s irrational, as it’s starting to climb that wave—and it does. It’s a wave, it goes high, and then it goes low. But as it’s starting to climb the wave of anxiety, it’s reaching a higher level.” At some point, anxiety says, “You can’t handle this,” which is often why we avoid or wrestle with it, or we do mental compulsions, or we do other behaviors that are very, very unhelpful and take you away from your values. We have to identify this fear, this specific lie, or, as we could call it, what it is, which is it’s just a thought. 

Here’s the thing to remember: Just because you have the thought that you can’t handle it does not mean it’s a fact that you can’t handle it because the fact is, humans have been existing for a very long time, and they’ve been handling very strong waves of anxiety, panic, distress, or pain for millions of years. This is not more special than that. We don’t want to treat anxiety like it’s special because it’s not. What we want to do is treat ourselves like we’re special, but not with anxiety. We want to reinforce that there is no anxiety that can hurt me, that it’s not dangerous, and that I can handle it because you have handled it. 

A lot of times, we discount the fact that you’ve handled anxiety before. Sometimes, when you are unable to do behaviors, whether you’re in public, at school, at work, or at home with your kids, you weren’t able to do the behavior to get rid of it, but you handled it. You handled it 100% of the time. You survived it 100% of the time. We want to keep an eye on that specific lie. 

#2 Way that Anxiety Lies to You: Catastrophization 

The second way anxiety lies to you is it catastrophizes. For me, anxiety is such a drama queen. I can’t often laugh about my anxiety, and I’ll be like, “Okay, anxiety, you’re being a little dramatic though, don’t you think?” Because anxiety will always over-exaggerate over-evaluate the risk and the danger. It catastrophizes. It goes to the worst-case scenario instead of considering the more reasonable, logical, and rational logical experience. 

What we want to identify is when anxiety is being catastrophic. When it’s outrageous in what it’s telling you, chances are that lie is catching you, and that is a lie that anxiety’s telling you. When I check in with my patients on what their fear is saying, we can usually check the facts and see, actually, that’s not as risky as we think. 

We don’t want to overuse that skill because that can become a compulsion in and of itself. But it’s very helpful in this awareness stage of recognizing that my anxiety or my anxiety disorder is a drama queen. It goes to the catastrophe. It jumps to conclusions. It always assumes the worst. Could I use that as a little red flag that it’s telling me lies? 

#3 Way that Anxiety Lies to You: “This is REAL!”

The third way anxiety lies to us is it convinces us that this is real and very important, and we must listen and not take this lightly. You would be a fool not to take this very seriously. I cannot tell you how many times my anxiety has hijacked me by telling me, “This is very, very important; this is very real,” even though when we slow down and we look around, and no one else seems to be reacting as if there’s so much danger, or we’ve shared with someone our own personal obsession or our own personal, intrusive thoughts and they’ve identified like, “That doesn’t make a lot of sense. This doesn’t seem like it’s rational who you are.” Again, we don’t want to overdo that, but when they do, they don’t seem to feel like it’s real. But we experience it as if it’s so real and so important, and it’s as if we have to act that we would be irresponsible not to treat it like it’s important. 

Here’s the fun tip here. One of the most powerful things you will do in your recovery is not to treat anxiety like it’s important, even in a way where you shrug and go, “Okay, good one, OCD,” or “Good one, anxiety,” or “Thanks for coming, anxiety. I see that you’re here.” But we’re actually going to not send to that. We’re actually not going to solve that. We are not going to respond as if you’re so real, so important, and so dangerous. We actually might even dismiss you and go back to doing what we’re doing. So important.

#4 Way that Anxiety Lies to you: It Criticizes You 

This is the last one, but this one is very important. The fourth way anxiety lies to you is it criticizes you. Not only is it telling you about catastrophes and that you can’t handle it and that this is real important and dangerous, so we’ve got to get fixing it; it always puts a thread of criticism and cruelness to it that there’s something wrong with you. You might even hear a difference in my voice. It’s mean, and it’s really cruel—the way that it laces the fear with this critical, mean, nasty tone or words. Some people might say, “No, I don’t use names; I don’t call myself names.” But the tone in which they experience their anxious thoughts is very cruel and judgmental and just horrible. Really just mean and nasty.

What we want to do is catch that. We want to be aware that that’s a way that anxiety is trying to get you to move forward. Just like the last point, it’s trying to tell you it’s real because it wants you to respond. It wants you to act this out. Again, anxiety is just a faulty alarm system. It wants you to get moving, and it often uses cruelty and criticism, whether it’s in the tone or whether it’s actually using mean words. “You idiot. You’re stupid. What’s wrong with you?” Even if it’s using that, it’s trying to get you to propel you into doing compulsive behaviors or safety behaviors to reduce or remove that anxiety. 

There is a functional reason behind it, but again, it’s a lie. I want to say that again. It’s a lie that it tells you. I want you to be able to identify these four lies that anxiety tells you so that you can reduce the amount that you engage in your anxiety.

Now, there are more lies that it tells you. I’m sure you have probably a whole laundry list of lies that anxiety tells you, but these are the four I want you guys to really keep an eye out for. They’re the ones that I see my clients fall into the trap of more times than not, myself included sometimes. I want to really realize and recognize that this is something we all do. This is the foundational nature of anxiety, and so we want to be able to catch it. We want to be able to reframe it. We want to come to ourselves with kindness as we navigate this. We want to be able to call it what it is, which is a lie, fake news, drama, whatever you want to call it. And then ideally—again, we talk about this all the time on the podcast—come back to the thing you value, the thing you want to be doing, the thing you said you would do, the thing that you would do had that anxiety not being here in this experience.

Those are the main pieces I want you to remember. This is one piece of the bigger jigsaw puzzle. This is one component of the skills, steps, and strategies you are going to need to overcome anxiety. 

If you are interested in learning the other steps, what I would encourage you to do is head over to CBTSchool.com. We have an entire course called Overcoming Anxiety and Panic. It will help you go deeper into these techniques, strategies, and skills so that you can have the ability—this tool belt—of having anxiety and working your way so that anxiety doesn’t have control over you so much. You feel completely confident in what you know you need to do, and you can go and live your best life because I know you have big, beautiful plans for your life. 

I am so grateful you’re here. I hope this has been helpful. It is a pleasure. I know that your time is very valuable, and so I’m so grateful that you’re here spending it with me today on this beautiful, almost end-of-summer day. I’m sending you so much love. Please do not forget, it’s a beautiful day to do hard things. I’ll see you next week.