Dread can be described as a gloomy sense of apprehension that colours one’s perception of the future. It is a powerful emotional state that can feel like an “iron knot” in the stomach, making it difficult to face upcoming situations. This feeling often arises after an individual has assigned a great deal of significance to anxiety or fear.
The Mental Processes Behind Dread
When someone experiences dread, their brain’s threat/self-protection system is likely overactive. This system, which is designed to keep us safe, can sometimes misinterpret situations, leading to intense feelings of anxiety. The amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for processing emotions, particularly fear, is highly involved. When this system is triggered it can:
- Turn off positive emotion systems and turn up threat-based ones.
- Create powerful feelings that lead to a sense that one’s life is in danger.
- Cause an inability to override the feelings, leading to action based on the dread.
Dread often involves a negative thinking style, such as always dismissing positives or exaggerating potential negative outcomes. This pessimistic outlook can reinforce the feeling of dread. Worry, in the form of repetitive, unmanaged thoughts and emotions, often contributes to this cycle. Individuals experiencing dread may also engage in experiential avoidance, which is the attempt to control and avoid unwanted thoughts and feelings. This avoidance, rather than reducing the distress, can actually exacerbate it.
Self-Help Interventions to Alleviate Dread
It is important to understand that you are not alone and that there are many self-help interventions that can help break free from the grip of dread. These strategies work by targeting different aspects of the mental processes involved in dread and offer options for both immediate relief and longer term changes.
- Shifting Perspective: Instead of viewing dread as an inescapable emotion, try to approach it as an attitude that you can change. Make a conscious effort to replace the feeling of dread with excitement or care. This is a radical shift, but even partial success can free up energy and change perception. The idea is to start with the attitude of your heart and then act from that place.
- Mindfulness and Acceptance:
- Mindfulness techniques help you observe your thoughts and feelings without getting caught up in them. This can create space between you and the dread, reducing its power.
- Acceptance is about acknowledging and allowing the anxiety to be there, without fighting it. This reduces the internal struggle and allows you to experience the feeling without escalating it.
- Mindful breathing exercises, focusing on the breath, helps you to stay in the present moment and break the cycle of worrying thoughts.
- Self-Havening: Havening techniques can help to soothe and reduce the distress associated with anxiety, fears and traumatic memories. These techniques help to change the brain’s response to triggers by using a gentle touch.
- CPR for the Amygdala: This technique uses breath work to distract the mind from distressing thoughts. Checking in with what’s happening in the mind and body followed by slow deep breaths, which act as a form of distraction, can provide relief and reduce the body’s stress response.
- Defusion Techniques:
- Defusion helps create distance from thoughts, recognising them as just thoughts and not facts. For example, prefix evaluative statements with, “I am having the thought that…”.
- Personifying thoughts or using metaphors for the thinking process can shift focus from the content of the thoughts, reducing their intensity.
- Labelling thoughts as non-productive can help step back from them.
- NLP Submodality Changes: Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) techniques can help to alter how your brain processes information and your emotional responses. Altering submodalities (the qualities of experience) via the Swish technique or Timeline therapy techniques can be used to change how negative experiences are stored.
- Journaling: Writing down your thoughts and feelings can provide an outlet, clarify patterns and help you identify negative thoughts that contribute to dread. It may also bring some clarity to your values, which can be obscured during periods of dread.
- Focus on Values: Identifying what really matters to you can provide a sense of purpose and motivation, reducing the influence of anxiety in your life. Taking actions toward your values, even when it is uncomfortable, can reduce suffering and lead to a more fulfilling life.
- Challenge Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs): When feeling anxious or tense, identify and write down automatic thoughts. Then dispute these thoughts and replace them with a more realistic and balanced perspective. Ask yourself questions like:
- Have you had any experiences that show this thought is not completely true all of the time?
- If my friend or loved one was having this thought, what would I tell them?
- Reframe Worry into Planning: Worry can lead to repetitive cycles of negative thinking, that can lead to feeling overwhelmed. Instead, redirect that energy to find a solution, which can help to create a positive focus.
Summary: Taking the Next Step
Dread is a difficult emotion to experience and can be incredibly crippling, but it can be overcome by changing the processes in the brain that produce and maintain it. If you are experiencing perpetual feelings of dread, consider trying the following:
- Start with small shifts in perspective: Approach dread as an attitude that can be changed and replace it with more positive feelings.
- Use mindfulness and breathing techniques: To help stay in the present and create a distance between yourself and negative feelings.
- Explore Havening and CPR for the Amygdala: To help calm the nervous system and reduce the intensity of feelings of dread.
- Practise defusion techniques: To help create distance from your thoughts and recognise them as just thoughts.
- Use NLP techniques: To alter the way your brain processes and responds to difficult emotions.
- Identify your values: To help move toward what is important to you, thereby reducing the power of dread.
- Engage in journaling: To help identify patterns of negative thinking, find potential solutions and provide an outlet for feelings.
- Challenge negative thoughts: By looking for evidence that counters the negative thinking patterns.
- Change worry into planning: By redirecting negative thinking into a search for solutions.
Remember, it’s important to be compassionate with yourself during this process. Choose one or two techniques that resonate with you and begin to implement them. If you find self-help approaches difficult, reach out to a professional for support, recognising that seeking help is an act of compassion.
Tags: dread, anxiety, self-help, mindfulness, acceptance, self-havening, NLP, defusion, emotional regulation, values, mental health, amygdala, thought patterns, overthinking