[agent008t]

There is another way to approach this: just don't engage with the anxiety-causing thoughts. Thoughts are just thoughts and people get all kinds of weird thoughts all the time. Most times they just come and go, never to return. But when you have an emotional response to a thought (e.g. anxiety), the thought can appear important, and will keep coming back. Engaging with it just gives it more weight.

As an example, trying to come up with reasons why the thought does not apply or is stupid is engaging with it. Trying to reason with the thought is engaging with it. Asking "how likely is this really?" is also engaging with it. Your anxious mind will always tend to fire new arguments at you, new doubts, and you'll just be giving the pointless thought more weight by ruminating on it. Just let the thought come and go, and then sit with the feeling of anxiety until it goes.

The book "Overcoming unwanted intrusive thoughts" by Seif and Winston is a very nice book about this approach to dealing with anxiety.

[quikacct]

This is an EXCELLENT comment. Learning not to engage with the anxiety is a really important skill. To get there, you've got to get in the habit of labeling those thoughts as anxiety so that you can recognize them easily.

And you're right -- trying to evaluate how likely the feared event is can be a form of engaging with the anxiety. You can even start cultivating satellite fears about whether you've got the right read on the situation and so forth.

Nevertheless, I would caution against a blanket rule that says "never touch an anxious thought." Sometimes, you need to make a decision. Let's say you're feeling feverish, and you think: "maybe I have COVID-19!" It is appropriate to fetch the thermometer from the medicine cabinet and check your temperature -- once. If the reading is normal, and you have the impulse to check again 30 minutes later, that would a good time to simply label the anxious thought and refrain from responding to it.