I’m here too. In work tonight.
I still have this once in a while but it used to be very bad. I found asmr videos on YouTube helped. You could give it a try.
Another strategy I learned from a book, can’t remember which one, was to see the thoughts like waves and let them wash over you like a surfer would as they swam out to catch a bigger one. Or treat the thoughts like shooting stars. They will come into your mind. Visual them as stars and send them packing.
It’s how much attention you give them that causes the increase in anxiety.
During the day we’re busy. Lots of things to do and we have thousands of thoughts without acknowledging them. If I asked you how many individual thoughts you had yesterday and could you recite them all to me, you couldn’t because we never catch them. They’re like shooting stars.
At night we’re not busy. We’re free to ‘see’ the thought and give it consideration. If you can manage to tell yourself to bat it away or imagine it zipping across a night sky and out of sight I promise it will help. You could imagine ducking under the thought as though it were a wave and don’t look back.
Another method is to set aside a time to worry or be fearful. Sounds mad but it’s worth a go and has worked for me. You tell yourself you have a box beside you. It’s your worry box and you’re going to deal with whatever is in the box at 10am tomorrow (you pick a time that suits). Every time you catch yourself having a bad thought you visualise grabbing hold of it or writing it down and putting it in the box to be dealt with tomorrow. Every time! Pay no attention to any thought and say, out loud if you have to “no, I’m not thinking about that now so I’ll pop it in the box and I can address it tomorrow”. This works because a lot of time our anxious minds want to think something through to a solution. We can’t settle until we’ve thought it through but we can postpone and our brains are okay with that. Simply saying “no, I’m not thinking about that” doesn’t work because our anxious brain panics that we haven’t finished worrying.
Brains are funny!
Hope something there might help.