How to regulate cognitive perceptual disruption anxiety
Does your mind sometimes go blank mid sentence, for seemingly no reason? Does your vision sometimes distort during conversations, or do you have other odd perceptual occurrences such as sudden tinnitus? Do you sometimes have difficulty thinking, or finding your words? Do you sometimes not feel real?
When anxiety goes very high, it goes into the mind and stops us being able to think, or perceive things accurately. This is called ‘cognitive perceptual disruption,’ (CPD).
It can be disconcerting because it can seem unpredictable, as if it’s something that happens outside of your control. The good news is, it is actually something that can be overcome. In therapy, you can learn how to regulate cognitive perceptual disruption anxiety, which is how we start the journey to overcome it.
In this blog I will explain more about what CPD is and the different ways it can show up, and the steps you can take to regulate it, and overcome it.
What is cognitive perceptual disruption anxiety (CPD)?
To know how to regulate cognitive perceptual disruption anxiety, you first have to understand what it is, so that you can recognise it when it happens to you.
If we have unprocessed, unconscious feelings within us, related to early attachment traumas, then these can get triggered at any time. It could be during conversations with friends, loved ones, when we have to deal with people in general, or even when we are alone with our thoughts.
Cognitive perceptual disruption is anxiety that has escalated into your mind and perceptual capacities, so that you can no longer think straight. It is triggered when we go over threshold- this means, when we feel something that seems overwhelming.
When the anxiety gets to this stage, it is likely that it has gone unnoticed and unregulated when it was in the striated or smooth muscles. And as we know, if we don’t regulate it, it escalates.
When we find ourselves suddenly going blank, zoning out or having difficulty retrieving our thoughts, or if our perceptual capacities are compromised, being able to pause and identify this as cognitive perceptual disruption (CPD), is the first step towards regulating it.
Cognitive perceptual disruption anxiety symptoms
One patient of mine would see our chairs zoom closer together, the space between us shrinking, when his anxiety went up. Other symptoms include:
Tunnel vision, blurred vision
Visual disturbances
Sudden change in visual perception
Hearing alterations, tinnitus
Going blank, blanking out of thoughts
Zoning out
Foggy thinking
Confusion
Derealisation
Depersonalisation
What to know
Cognitive perceptual disruption is a message from your unconscious, that unprocessed feelings have emerged, and your body perceives them as a threat. Usually because you didn’t learn to regulate them as a child, or your feelings were perceived as a threat to your main caregiver. Your feelings connected to these attachment traumas of neglect or abuse are stored in the unconscious, unprocessed, and are what causes us to get triggered.
Regulating anxiety is how we start to restructure our brains, and heal. Later on in therapy, we can help you to process these historical feelings, so that you can be free of the past, and more equipped to process any feelings that arise in relation to your current life.
How to regulate cognitive perceptual disruption anxiety
Once you can identify when you go into cognitive perceptual disruption, then cognitive recapping and grounding techniques are how to regulate it.
Step 1: identify
Recognise the symptoms, and which ones might be your pattern. Start to pay attention to yourself. When you blank out, or notice you’re so confused that you can’t think - identify that you are experiencing cognitive perceptual disruption anxiety.
Step 2: Engage your will and motivation to get better
Identifying that you’re in cognitive perceptual disruption means you have the choice to do something about it: would you like to help yourself by regulating your anxiety? Would you like to free yourself of what might seem out of your control? It’s your choice. If you don’t want to put the work in, then that’s OK, but it means that nothing will change and you will continue to suffer.
Step 3: Choose how to regulate: cognitive recap, or grounding technique
Use the cognitive recap for symptoms that affect your perceptual awareness and thinking, and use grounding techniques for symptoms of dissociation, derealisation and depersonalisation. You can read about grounding techniques for dissociation in my blog here.
Step 4: How to regulate cognitive perceptual disruption anxiety: the cognitive recap
Think about and retrace in your mind what just happened. For example: “my boss was giving me feedback on how I can improve on a mistake I’ve made. I find it painful to get things wrong as I am a perfectionist. This is the moment I went blank”.
Then, if you can, make a link to why this might trigger unconscious feelings and anxiety:
Example: “This reminds me of my critical father and how I could never get anything right. I tried so hard to get things right and it was never enough”.
This is enough for now. Later, when you have more ego strength, we can start to explore what the underlying feelings might be that are being triggered. You might have felt grief and anger when you tried so hard and nothing was good enough for the parent you loved and wanted the approval of.
This process should restore your capacity to think clearly, and will build your capacity to use the higher level defence of intellectualisation, so that eventually you won’t go over threshold anymore.
Conclusion
I hope this blog has helped you to feel hopeful and empowered, and to understand that your cognitive perceptual disruption is not something unpredictable that comes out of nowhere, but rather more something your body is communication to you, that you can do something about. We’ve looked at what cognitive perceptual disruption anxiety is, what the symptoms are, and how to engage your will in order to help yourself. I’ve described how to regulate cognitive perceptual disruption anxiety and given an example of what this might look like.
If you can relate, would you like some help?
If you’d like professional help then I’d be happy to hear from you. Contact me here and we can arrange a free, 15-minute telephone consultation to think about how I can support you.