When was the last time you felt anxious, worried, or scared? How did it feel?

Feeling anxious is not your fault; anxiety just happens and although it feels super-uncomfortable, it’s a natural, adaptive, and healthy reaction we experience to a potential threat.

You may be wondering, if anxiety is natural, why it feels awful and why for some people it’s like living in hell.

The answer is in how you respond to your anxious feelings when they show up! What do you do when feeling anxious? How do you handle that anxious state?

There are two variables that differentiate an effective response from an ineffective response when dealing with fear-based reactions:

(a) The way you think of fear-based reactions.
(b) The way you respond to fear-based reactions.

Let’s dive into these two variables:

(a) The way you think of fear-based reactions

When feeling scared, anxious, afraid, or in panic, you may have learned to look at those experiences in ways with a negative lens and take all those thoughts as the absolute truth with capital T.

Popular thoughts about fear-based reactions are:

• Thinking of fear-based reactions as “bad.” E.g. I shouldn’t be feeling afraid.
• Thinking of fear-based reactions as “a sign that you’re in danger.” E.g. When noticing that your heart is beating fast, you may have thoughts that it is a sign that you may have a heart attack.
• Underestimating your ability to handle those feelings E.g. I won’t be able to manage my anxiety.
• Overestimating a catastrophic ending E.g. it will be really bad, terribly bad.

Quick clarifications:

• I’m not saying that fear-based reactions are fun, easy to have, and enjoyable; I know they suck and yet, we’re wired to have them.
• There are times in which we’re definitely surrounded by threat – e.g. someone pointing a gun at us, someone stealing our purse, etc. – but most of the time, the degree of threat our mind perceives – perceived threat – is related to how we interpret a feeling, thought, sensation, or a situation.
• The tricky part with how you’re thinking of fear is that Instead of acknowledging that your mind is trying to protect you, as it usually does, you get consumed with those thoughts and act accordingly: you avoid whatever is starting a fear-based reaction.

(b) The way you respond to fear-based reactions

Humans, we don’t like to be in discomfort, struggle, or basically being in pain. So, naturally, we run away, minimize, and do everything we can to get out of an uncomfortable situation. A common response to anxiety is experiential avoidance.

Experiential avoidance refers to all the things we do to avoid unpleasant feelings resulting in short-term relief but making things worse in the long term. There are five basic types of avoidant behaviors:

With this form of avoidance, you stay away from anything that triggers fear-based reactions like:

• People
  E.g. you avoid your new manager, mother-in-law, or police officers
• Places
  E.g. elevators, trains, and planes
• Animals
  E.g. spiders, rats.
• Objects
  E.g. knives, plastic bags, needles.
• Activities
  E.g. eye contact, public speaking, asking a question in a group, large parties.

Cognitive Avoidance

Cognitive avoidance refers to all the thinking strategies you do privately in your mind to avoid any form of anxiety. There are different forms of cognitive avoidance:

• Suppression
  Actually saying to yourself, “don’t think about that. Just don’t go there.”
• Worrying
  Thinking about all potential what-if scenarios in the future.
• Rumination
  Thinking about past scenarios and running them over and over in your mind.
• Replacing thoughts
  Sometimes, people attempt to replace one distressing thought, image, or memory with positive content.
• Mental rituals
  You may pray in a specific way as a way to protect yourself from something bad happening, but if for whatever reason you don’t do so, you cannot move on with your day.

Somatic Avoidance

When dealing with somatic avoidance, you do your best to not experience internal physical sensations associated with fear. For example, you may be hypervigilant if you experience shortness of breath, feeling hot, feeling fatigued, and so on.

Emotional Avoidance

With this particular form of avoidance, you intentionally try to minimize, suppress, & get rid of uncomfortable emotions. An example is Harold, who struggled with not knowing if he made a bad decision at work so, when feeling uncertain, he began drinking in an effort to avoid this feeling.

Preventive avoidance

S. Hoffman & A. Hay (2018) in a review of different types of avoidant behaviors, identified what is called “preventive avoidance.” Preventive avoidance is all those actions that you do to prevent your experiencing fear-based responses either before or after a triggering situation. For example, if you’re intensely afraid of making a mistake, you may check the task you’re working on multiple times; or after sending an email, you may call the person who received it to make sure you didn’t say anything offensive.

As you can see, avoidance has so many shades; sometimes you may be engaging in one specific form of it or a combination of them. The reality is that these types of avoidances co-exist with each other and don’t show up in isolation. I only broke down the concept of experiential avoidance to help you to consider how you’re responding to a triggering situation and how – without knowing – you may be feeding into the cycle of anxiety.

Just to clarify, while avoidance makes things worse when dealing with worries, fears, anxieties, and obsessions, it’s not a dirty word. Sometimes, avoidance can be adaptive; for instance, when dealing with a problem at work, you may have this urge to talk to others about it because you feel very anxious and receiving emotional support makes those feelings go away and doesn’t interrupt your day-to-day life; pretty adaptive, right?

The challenge is when using experiential avoidance as your go-to response to anxiety-provoking situations; in the short-term, avoidant behaviors help you to avoid an unpleasant moment, but tomorrow you must face the likelihood of the same uncomfortable situation welling up again and again. It’s like the depth and height of what you do is limited by your day-after-day attempts to avoid bad experiences that are, ultimately, unavoidable.

Now that you’re familiar with particular ways of thinking about fear-based reactions and different types of avoidances, I hope you can see how both variables can lead you from experiencing anxiety as a natural emotional state – that we all experience – to a problem that needs to be solved.

– What am I avoiding that I want to approach?

– What do I want to do that I’m afraid of?

– What’s the fear holding me back from?

– How is this affecting my day-to-day life?

Learning to make room for any fear-based reactions, without letting them take over our life is possible. And it all starts with dissecting our fears. Awareness is one of the most powerful moves we can start practicing.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

A month ago I saw a post about a 1-hour webinar on how to overcome blockages that hold us back; the description seemed interesting, I was curious, so decided to attend. The webinar started with a nice review of how our brain is a “memory bank” and as such is constantly connecting, relating, and organizing memories one after another. And then, an interesting argument was presented: when considering doing something new, our brain doesn’t have a previous memory to use it as a reference, so we have to create new data for the brain about our future, and one way to do that is by creating “visualizations” of our future self: your goals. Moments later, other provoking ideas were introduced as suggestions to to handle our mental blocks: we just need to “trust ourselves and then you will make things happen for you.” Here is why these two suggestions are poor advice:

About visualizations of your goals

Nir Eyal, an organization psychologist, has done extensive research on this area; after reading his book, his articles, and attending his talks, here is a clear finding that I relate to: visualizing your goals doesn’t work if you get strongly attached to them. Think about it, let’s say for example, my goal is to own a home in Mexico, and I imagine the exterior of the home, the hardwood floor, the tile in the kitchen, the large dining table, the touches of blue on the walls, the types of plants that will go on the patio, the smell of bread from the oven and the sounds of the dog running all over. It’s a nice image, I relate to it, I like it a lot, but what happens when I make that image my goal, when I rely on this image to feel a particular way that is suppose to motivate me, or what happens when I compare everything I do with that image and my mind tells me it’s not enough?

“According to researchers at New York University, visualizing a goal creates an emotion similar to having already accomplished it. The researchers believe this may de-motivate you to actually do the hard work since it temporarily provides the positive sensation you seek.” (written by Todd Snyder, guest post in Nir Eyal’s website)

I love that image, but I don’t have control of making it happen; I only have control of the steps I need to take towards creating my life. So, despite what folk psychology tells us, it’s time to deconstruct this myth and instead of attaching strongly to those goals or visualizations of the future, let’s visualize the steps we need to take towards a particular aspiration of us (which as it turns out, is much more effective 🙂

Link to an article: https://www.nirandfar.com/visualizing/

Trust yourself, tell yourself you can do it, and then you will see you can do it.

When starting a new project, thinking about switching careers, taking sabbatical time, and so on, we may struggle with doubts, hesitancy, and indecision. In response to all of those thoughts, pop psychology tells us “trust yourself, and then you will be able to take action.”

The advice of trusting yourself & then taking actions, has so many variations, the most popular ones I have heard are:

Tell yourself “mind over matter”

List those characteristics you want to embrace “I’m strong, smart, capable”

Ask someone to tell you your strengths!

These are just examples of how the idea that “changing how you see yourself, how you think about yourself” is a prerequisite to start doing fun and important things you care about.

Here is an example: I’m not a talented cook. I do enjoy the process of cooking at times, like chopping veggies, smelling the different ingredients, chatting and cooking, sprinkling salt on top of the salads but I think my food is a bit plain. So, going along with pop psychology, I should tell myself “I’m a good cook or I can cook” and then when I can relate to that thought, assume that my cooking will improve?

“In one camp, you have people who believe improving self-esteem is of paramount importance. On the other side of the fence are those who feel the whole concept of self-esteem is overrated and that it’s more critical to develop realistic perceptions about oneself. But what if we’ve been asking the wrong questions all along? What if the self-esteem discussion is like the proverbial finger pointing at the moon?” (Steve Hayes, personal blog, 2014).

There is a difference between having willingness to take steps needed with determination, commitment, and diligence but that doesn’t mean that the thoughts about myself (self-esteem, self-concept) have to change to do so. Going back to my example above, taking a cooking class, trying new recipes, or watching cooking shows (actionable steps) could improve my cooking, while still having the thought, I’m not a good cook.

As you know, I do have a bias towards action, for hundreds of reasons, but at the core of my bias is that over and over, different studies and personal experiences, have shown that taking action towards what we care about, the instrumental stuff we have to do and the fun stuff, not only takes us further but also allow us to experience ourselves differently and it may even shift our thinking.

Link to an article: https://stevenchayes.com/is-self-compassion-more-important-than-self-esteem/

I finish this write up wondering if I have become a renegade of pop-psychology, pondering why I get cranky with pseudo-science, and why sentences like “research says” and “studies have shown” are not necessarily indicators of solid science but a prompt for our curious eyes to unpack those studies and critically analyze them.