4 Best Ways To Cope With Dread
Dread is a common human exerience. All too frequent, actually. I feel it. You feel it. It sucks. It’s brought up often in therapy. So, here are my top four strategies that I share with my patients and clients for how to cope with dread.
When we feel dread, we are usually focused on the thing that we think is, or might be, coming at some point in the future. And, we are already reacting as though it’s happening and we’re feeling the worst parts of that experience. We aren’t focused on our capacities to cope with it. Read on to learn four very effective ways to counteract how we get fused into the catastrophe of a dreaded future experience.
It is important to understand that dread functions in our bodies and minds as a chronic stressor. Chronic stressors are different than short-term stressors like havinga near auto-accident or getting into an argument with our roommate. Chronic stressors are unremitting once they become stressful for us to notice. Once they turn on, they don’t turn off until something resolves. For example, a person might experience unremitting job stress with no breaks until they quit the job. The most harmful part of chronic stress comes from this constant effect. For one thing, overall stress can be seen as stress amount times time. So, a chronic stressor never stops loading stress on us. Another aspect of chronic stress is that we get emotionally, psychological fatigued from the fact that it keeps going on and we have no respite from it. So, stress is really: stress times time times the fatigue factor because the more worn out we get from something, the more stressful each ongoing moment will seem.
Strategy Number One: Find a way to take a mental break from the dread.
Distraction is worth a lot (especially distraction that is relaxing) where your body is relaxed and your mind is focused on anything other than the dread. You might not be thinking that you are doing anything valuable but, even though engaging in something distracting won’t solve the issue you’re dreading, your body and brain get time to get some recovery from the mounting psychological fatigue that I mentioned above. Even short breaks reverse the fatigue effects. Your task is to find something to get your brain to unhook from the dread though this is often going to be a bit of a challenge due to the parts of the brain that get active when we’re stressed and which provide a mental glue to attach our focus on a stress target. If you are finding it challenging to change your focus off the target of your dread, try Concrete Thinking (watch the video below to understand how to use this technique).
Strategy Number Two: Schedule time sometime later to set aside five minutes to actively engage in the dread.
Then, stop engaging in the dread in the meantime. Our brains often react to lower the strength of our focus when something is going to happen later. It a thing is not positioned in time (say, this afternoon at 3:00 p.m.), then it is at all times (since it can’t be no time as our brains think it’s imporant enough to not let go). I don’t suggest stretching it out too far (as in, scheduling it a week from now) but try telling yourself you can get to your fretting sometime later today to see if that helps you unhook in the meantime.
Strategy Number Three: identify your capacities and strengths that relate to
how you likely will need to cope with the thing you are dreading.
I mean that if you are worried about losing your job, then take a minute to think how you can write (or already have written) your resume. Think about how you know where to search for available jobs or that you know how to turn in an application. For any dreaded future situation, you need to cope and you will need to cope using specific capacities. I doubt that everyone reading this post actually lacks all the capacities to cope. But, high-level and sustained stress cause the parts of our brain that natural are in touch with our capacities to shut down. Let me repeat: our brains lose touch with our strengths as our stress and sense of not being in control get higher. So, counteract that by taking a minute to survey your self-awareness and tell yourself about the strengths and capacities that you know you have that are relevant to how you will need to cope with the situation you are dreading.
Strategy Number Four: Get specific about what you think might happen and what you think you are going to do about it.
Again, using the dread of loss of a job…you want to shif yourself from just thinking “Oh my God! I might lose my job!” to getting specific and, perhaps, saying to yourself “Oh my God! I might lose my job!….And, then, I am going to look for another job and that will mean writing a resume then finding places to apply, applying, then going to interviews.” If we land in the vague place and stay there, our brains will take that vague dread and spread it out to the horizon and there won’t be any natural resolution because we are framing it in that super negative way with no real definition to threaten the negativity. But, if you look back at the more specific narrative, it contains the catastrophe in the beginning but follows with specific neutral and positive elements. The specific and more positive elements threaten AND LIMIT the pervasive dread. Vagueness will support limitness negativity with no perception of hope for positive resolution. Specific neural and positive narratives limit that all-encomassing negativity. Try it!
I hope you experiment with these techniques because dread sucks.
And also because I have seen them work for so many people with whom I have been blessed to work over the past twenty-five years. It’s also true that I’m a human being just like you and my patients and I use these strategies for the same reasons you might. And, that’s how I really know they work.
If you want to check out a video covering these four strategies, watch below:
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