Your colleague gets a compliment about the quality of her work. A guy at a bar mentions how pretty your friend is. You overhear your mom telling your sister how smart she is. You know these things are normal and that everyone deserves to be praised. But for some reason, these types of situations sting. Maybe a little more than they should. You might begin to wonder whether your own work is high quality enough or whether you are pretty or smart too. Because, ultimately, when other people excel or are praised, you can’t shake the question- Am I good enough?
I have written about the intolerance of uncertainty many times. Why? Because it is such an integral part of all types of anxiety disorders and is highly associated with excessive worry- a key factor in generalized anxiety. The more you worry, the more likely it would be that you would have high levels of intolerance of uncertainty.
We all have deeply held beliefs about ourselves that we may or may not be aware of. From a cognitive therapist’s perspective, these are known as core beliefs. Core beliefs originate and develop throughout our childhood and then are continuously reinforced in adulthood. Some core beliefs are healthy and accurate and some are inaccurate. Research shows that people with anxiety tend to have inaccurate core beliefs about themselves that fall into 1 (or more) of three main categories.
In part two of this three-part series, we discussed cognitive strategies to improve the Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) and, ultimately, reduce worry in your life. Recall that IU can have a negative impact on your ability to enjoy life. There is simply no way to escape the inevitability of uncertainty in life and, thus, it is in your best interest to learn how to embrace it. In the last post, we talked about cognitive strategies that can help you become more comfortable with uncertainty. In this post, we will discuss behavioral strategies.
In the last post, we discussed the role of Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) in the worry process. IU, which involves one having particular difficulty with uncertainty, can have a negative impact on one’s functioning in life. Why? Because we live in an uncertain world. As hard as it may be for all of us at times, uncertainty is an inevitable part of life! We aren’t doing ourselves any favors by trying to cling to some notion of certainty, whether it be through spending endless hours ruminating over different options, excessive lists, planning, overpreparing or the like.
Those who have generalized anxiety tend to worry about multiple different things in their life. Hours are spent analyzing past events and ruminating over potential future threats. If you have this type of anxiety, I don’t need to tell you just how exhausting it can be. In this three-part series, I will be talking about how to understand and improve debilitating worry.
There are several types of anxiety disorders or anxiety-related disorders. Some features of anxiety are consistent across all types of anxiety. However, each anxiety disorder is comprised of elements that are unique in some ways. In this post I briefly review some of the key components of Generalized Anxiety Disorder or GAD.
The cognitive model for GAD details four major components of generalized anxiety. These include (1) intolerance of uncertainty; (2) beliefs about worry; (3) poor problem orientation; and (4) cognitive and emotional avoidance. Each will be discussed separately.
Intolerance of Uncertainty or IU is an actual thing. It is a construct in the anxiety empirical literature that has been studied extensively. IU is considered to be “transdiagnostic,” meaning that it is seen across a wide range of mental health disorders. However, it is most commonly experienced by those with generalized anxiety because of its high association with worry. Worry is a key characteristic of people with more generalized type of anxiety.
Anxiety is complex in that we all experience different types of anxious thoughts, feelings and behaviors to different degrees and for very different reasons.
However, although the anxiety experienced from person to person varies greatly in many ways, there are many underlying features of anxiety that are similar for anxious people of all sorts.
Generally speaking, there are four main aspects of anxious thinking:
