CBT and Anxiety-Driven Anger
When you have an anxiety problem that looks like an anger problem, you’re probably told you need to calm down… a lot.
And calming down is super important, but it’s only half the battle!
You need to be building some skills, and those skills should focus on strategies rooted in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT).
CBT helps manage your issues with anxiety and with anger.
CBT focuses on the cognitive triangle, which is composed of three pieces: your thoughts, your feelings, and your behaviors. What you think impacts how you feel, and that impacts how you react. The cool thing is, you can change your thoughts, change your feelings, or change your behavioral reactions, and it will impact all the other points on that triangle, too.
(Learn more about the cognitive triangle in Kelsey’s book, When Anxiety Makes You Angry!)
The cognitive triangle includes your thoughts, your feelings, and your behaviors, and explores how each one impacts the other.
What you tell yourself impacts how you feel, and that impacts how you react.
But, the cool thing is, you can change any point of that triangle, and it will impact the others, leading to a totally different outcome.
Tip #1: Change your thoughts
Thoughts pop into our head all the time - but that doesn’t always make them true. We might tell ourself a thought like, “they’re laughing at me,” or “they must hate me,” and while that could be going on, it might not be.
Take a step back and look at what you’re telling yourself about the situation, rather than just expecting it to be fact. And then, figure out what you can tell yourself instead. Maybe instead of laughing at you, they’re laughing at something totally unrelated. Maybe instead of hating you, they’re focused on a stressful thing totally unrelated to what’s going on. Who knows?
Tip #2: Change your feelings
The first step to changing your feelings is to notice them. Really figure out if you’re feeling anxious or angry, or something else, in the moment. You can dig into your emotional experience by using a body clues activity (detailed more in the book), and finding where you experience your emotions in your body. How does your body tell you that you’re feeling angry? How does it tell you that you’re feeling anxious or stressed?
Sometimes, anger and anxiety overlap because of that fight/flight/freeze reaction. When your brain tells you you’re in danger, it activates your nervous response. Your heart starts pumping, muscles tense, and breathing speeds up or feels like it stops entirely.
Your job is to figure out what you’re really feeling, and then build in ways to lower your emotions elevator and really handle it. What can you do to calm down in the moment? What coping skills do you have in your toolkit?
Tip #3: Change your behaviors
In any stressful situation, you can really benefit yourself by using some coping skills to calm down before reacting. Calming down behaviors will help you have calmer thoughts, and calmer emotions. Super important!
You can also change your behaviors by doing something totally different from what your normal reaction would be. If you normally get upset and then punch the wall, what if you just petted the wall instead. Pretty silly, right? But it breaks that pattern of behavior you typically show and gets you out of the classic response you have (that probably gets you into trouble).
What if instead of yelling at your mom and dad, you went on a walk? What if instead of shouting at your teacher, you asked to get a cold drink of water instead? What’s a way to take yourself out of the situation and use a behavior that helps you INSTEAD of getting you into more trouble?
CBT for anxiety helps with your thoughts, your feelings, and your behaviors by teaching you that YOU’RE in charge of how you think, feel, and react.
You get to decide what to do and how to do it. It may be challenging to totally change what’s going on - but you’re not alone.
Our therapist work with kids, teens and college students who have anxiety and anger issues and we help coach you through how to integrate CBT techniques to really help.
If you want some guidance on how to change your thoughts, feelings, or reactions - you’re totally not alone.
We’re here and we’re ready to help!
Kelsey Torgerson Dunn, LCSW is the author of When Anxiety Makes You Angry.
