Make anxiety work for you: How to use 'overthinking to your advantage

New research suggests that an anxious nature can also be an advantage – but only if you have the tools to manage it effectively. Here, Dr Alice Boyes, author of a new anxiety 'manual' explains how.

Those of us who live with anxiety know all too well what it feels like. "Overthinking” every decision in life, leading to a paralysing inability to take action. Always expecting the worse has, or indeed will, happen: a child home late leading to terrifying visions of them lying injured in the street. Feeling a total failure if our performance – whether as a worker, parent, friend or lover – is less than perfect.

We seem to be in the midst of an anxiety epidemic, or perhaps we are just getting better at admitting how destructive anxiety can be. In the UK, anxiety disorders – which can take the form of panic attacks, phobias, social anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder, as well as “free-floating” anxiety - are thought to affect up to one in ten people during their lifetime.

Many more people, while not diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, are still prone to this debilitating emotion: a YouGov survey of 2,300 people carried out last year revealed that almost one in five respondents reported feeling anxious all or a lot of the time, and four out of ten employed people experienced anxiety about their work.

But surprisingly, an anxious nature can also be an advantage in life – as long as it isn’t out of control. It’s only recently that mainstream psychology has recognized the value of so-called “negative” emotions, which have evolved for a purpose. Our capacity to feel shame warns us against doing things that would lead to being socially excluded, for example, while anger can prompt us to stick up for ourselves and others. In the same way, anxiety functions as a hypervigilance system that prompts us to scan our lives for potential risks, big and small.

Many anxious people have had a lifetime of others telling them “Don’t worry, be happy”, but this does nothing more than make them feel worse. In fact, studies have found that despite endless exhortations to think positively, the upside to imagining the worst case scenario – so-called “defensive pessimism” – is that it can actually motivate you to prepare better and try harder.

So, given reducing feelings of anxiety to zero is neither possible nor desirable, the key is clearly to accept and work with your nature, rather than to fight it. Problems only occur when anxiety gets to the point where it’s paralysing and you become stuck in a rut. I think of these bottlenecks as anxiety “traps”, which have affected virtually all of the anxious clients I’ve worked with. Here are the five most common - and how to address them, so you can rebalance your thinking to experience the benefits of anxiety, without the costs