Thinking about something until you get into a state of extreme anxiety is a way of avoiding the feeling associated with that thing. If you stay in your head and cut off your feelings and your body, you don't need to deal with the difficult feelings that are happening in your body. If you can reframe the difficult feelings as 'just' feelings; anger no different than happiness is no different than grief is no different than joy. These are all the spectrum of human experience anxietythreads