106 Don’t Let A nxiety Run Your Life
individuals, people who experience panic attacks tend to
have more negative beliefs about the uncontrollability and
danger of worry and feel a greater need to be in control of
their worry. This has important implications. Attempts to
exercise more control over one’s worry, and beliefs that one’s
thoughts are uncontrollable, create a disastrous cycle of con-
f lict. Often people’s motives for using maladaptive emotion
regulation strategies lead to unintended consequences that
end up causing more harm than good. By feeling the need to
exercise more control over worry, people will try to rigidly
suppress worrying, which actually backfires by causing
more negative thoughts and anxiety.
Repetitive Negative Thinking and Major
Depressive Disorder (MDD)Though not an anxiety disorder, MDD is often comor-
bid with anxiety. In fact, comorbidity between anxiety and
depressive disorders is the rule rather than the exception.
Because of this, several researchers have investigated repeti-
tive negative thinking across both of these disorders and
amassed a large body of evidence that supports repetitive
negative thinking as the process that links them. In one
study (Drost et al. 2014), people diagnosed with anxiety and
depressive disorders were assessed for several years. The
researchers measured such things as symptoms of anxiety,
symptoms of low mood and depression, rumination, and
worry. Their pattern of results provided a very consistent
picture of how MDD interacts with anxiety disorders. In
short, they found that repetitive negative thinking was the
reason why people with high levels of depression experience