Jake Burhans explains how anxiety spirals from automatic thoughts into emotional reactions and impulses. By treating thoughts and feelings as objects you observe rather than as yourself, you create space to choose your response instead of reacting on autopilot, drawing on Viktor Frankl's idea of the gap between stimulus and response.
This is why you keep reacting to everything. When you don't create a separation between your awareness and your thoughts and your mental content, what happens is you have a thought and that turns into emotional reaction, behavioral impulse, right? It's like a little cascade, it's like, right, thought, emotional reaction, behavioral impulse. It feels like you are in the middle of a tornado because the default mode network in your brain is designed to just be thinking thoughts all the time. So if you think those thoughts are you, you feel like you have I have no control in life. But by objectifying that thought— oh yeah, there's that thought that I can't do it. Oh yeah, there's that thought that I'm out of money. Oh yeah. Or even your feelings— oh yeah, there's that feeling of anger or of emotion or whatever it is. You create the space to choose. Viktor Frankl in A Man's Search for Meaning, the Jewish prisoner in a Nazi death camp who made it through, he came up with the idea that there is a space between stimulus and response. And we have to understand there's not only external stimuli. Our thoughts are a stimulus, right? Our emotions are a stimulus. If we can observe those things and create separation, we open up space for us to respond to situations instead of flying off the handle every moment.
