how to outsmart anxiety

3 Simple Steps to Outsmart Anxiety
by Noah Clyman, LCSW-R

Step 1: Label your anxiety as a false alarm
Fear and fight-flight-freeze response are basically good. They were designed to keep you alive. We run into problems when the fight-flight-freeze response misfires. Think of it as being similar to a car alarm: you want the alarm to sound when someone tries to break into your car, but you don’t want the alarm to go off when a strong wind blows or a bird lands on the car’s roof. When your car alarm goes off too easily, it is too sensitive. Yes, it will let you know when someone is trying to steal your car, but it will also go off at the wrong times. So even though in reality there is only a strong wind, the alarm reacts as if someone is breaking into your car.
People who have excessive fears have an internal alarm system–the fight-flight-freeze response that is too sensitive. The object of your fear–whether it is flying, public speaking, dirt, the dark, or something else–is like the strong wind, and your internal alarm system reacts as if it were really threatening. When your car alarm acts this way, it needs to be fixed or recalibrate. Similarly, when your internal alarm–your fight-flight-freeze response–is overly sensitive, you have to retrain it. The first step is noticing it and labeling it as a false alarm.
Step 2: Catch your anxious thoughts
Father of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck, pointed out that people become anxious not merely because of the feared object or situation, but also because of the particular thoughts or beliefs they have about the object or situation. For example, instead of saying, “This airplane flight scares me,” it would be more accurate, according to Beck’s theory, to say, “I feel scared because I am telling myself that this airplane is going to crash.” It is my thought process, not the airplane itself that scares me.
When are beliefs are completely rational and proportional to real danger, the system works just fine. Unfortunately, the cognitive system can sometimes misfire in which case our threat-related thoughts or beliefs tell us than an object or situation is more dangerous than it actually is. When thought processes go wrong, they tend to do so in predictable ways, and fearful people make the same mental errors (which Beck termed cognitive distortions) over and over again. 
Step 3: Recognizes your tendency to probability overestimate and bad outcome.  One common cognitive distortion is probability overestimation: believing a bad outcome or event to be more likely to occur than it actually is. For example, if you had asked me, in the middle of a turbulent flight, what the probability of a plane crashing is, I might have said that there was a 25 percent chance of a crash. Of course, now that I’m off the plane and can think about it a bit more rationally, I realize how illogical my thoughts were: if there was a 25 percent chance of a plane crashing, that would mean one out of every four planes crashes. There would be planes falling out of the sky all over the place! In reality, the odds of being in a plane crash are about 1 in 11 million. So my belief about the likelihood of a plane crash was extremely exaggerated. In fact, if my thought process had been based on actual probabilities, I should have been much more afraid of the drive to the airport than the flight, because the odds of dying in a car crash are a thousand times greater than those of dying in a plane crash. Come to think of it, because the leading causes of death (by a huge margin) are heart disease, stroke, and cancer, maybe I should be most afraid of the burger and fries I had at the airport while waiting for my plane!
Take-home message: When anxious, ask yourself (and write down):

1. Catch it: what upsetting thought or image am I having right now?
2. Check it using helpful questions: am I engaging in the cognitive distortion of probability overestimation? what is the evidence that I am magnifying the likelihood of a bad outcome? what good things might happen?
3. Change your thought: Record the actual probability of your feared scenario, 0-100%? And summarize what you learned.