Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness.
We are continuing with cognitive distortions based on Dr. Greenwald's Etzot V’Hadrachot based on letters from the Steipler.
The next cognitive distortion is the thought that, “The dangers and diseases that are all around the world force us to be in a constant state of fear and therefore, we have to always think and be worried that maybe these things might happen to us or to our loved ones.”
Again, this a mistake. There's no way that a person can function properly if he's constantly in fear and anxiety. There's no room in his heart to serve Hashem. He can't love or fear Hashem. When a person is in a state of anxiety and fear, not only is he not able to properly assess the situation to have a reasonable balance and ability to check if there is a danger, but this constant anxiety and fear causes him to exaggerate and make situations more severe than they really are.
This then goes from an intellectual, concern to a stage when the person becomes what he calls a Pachdan B’Etzem He becomes an inherently fearful person and he starts to worry about things that aren't even there to worry about. He starts worrying about things that are the fruit of his imagination.
Somebody who is not under these cognitive distortions knows that he is supposed to rely on Hashem, and that Hashem is full of kindness and you do what you have to do. You thank Hashem for the past, you pray to Him for the future, and you realize that, quite often, the fears that a person has are unfounded. Furthermore, these fears and anxieties cause problems that never would've been there to begin with.
More than that, they cause greater problems than the problem you worried about. And the time that you spend with worry is just a waste. He goes on to quote a letter from the Steipler that says, “In truth, there is no room for worry because whatever has passed has passed and what's going to be, you don't know. All of those images that you project about the future are just imagination, without any reality.
Quite often, it comes to be that it never was there, and all that you're left with is the depression and anxiety- and that's what breaks the man. And whatever you're worried about works out in the end.
And one should always hope for the good because Hashem’s salvation is like a blink of the eye. He quotes a statement from the Gemara, “Don't worry today about tomorrow's problem.” He says, this is not some kind of prophecy. He says this is a reality, that there really is nothing to worry about. God is controlling the world. It's all for the good. There is nothing to worry about.
It's just, as we said, one big cognitive distortion.
Of course, anxiety is something that God created. We need to have anxiety. If you didn’t worry at all about anything, you wouldn't take care of yourself. If you had a severe pain and weren't a little concerned, you wouldn't go to the emergency room. People would say, “Oh, it's not a heart attack. It's just must be some muscle strain.” Well, it might be muscle strain. But if it's severe and continues, it's worth checking out What makes you check it out? A little bit of anxiety. So, anxiety is necessary, but it becomes a distortion when it's exaggerated, when you have this cognitive distortion in your head that says Life is full of disasters, life is full of tragedies.
A therapist told me a great line, ‘It's possible, but it's not probable.’
In our religion, we go with majority, and most of the time people get from point A to point B without an accident. Most of the time people do not have diseases.
The majority is good. That's an important rule to remember, to undo this cognitive distortion that we have to constantly be worried to protect ourselves from the disasters of the world -imagination and a cognitive distortion.
Have a wonderful day.