Thinking Repetitively About Future And Past Painful Feelings, Events And Failures Archives - Page 5 Of 8

On Love, Overthinking, and Behavioral Science

by Dr. Z. | Thinking repetitively about future and past painful feelings, events and failures, Overanalyzing, doubting, & indecisiveness, Searching for certainty, predictability, & re-assurance, Taking my thoughts too seriously

Reading Time: 8 minutes

D espite what most people think, behavioral science is not an abstract concept or a theoretical model reserved for academicians or the bookshelves of a library.

Behavioral science, to me, is a world’s philosophy for understanding our day-to-day interactions.

Every conversation, every thought, every struggle, every moment of joy, and, basically, every experience we have, can be appreciated, seen, and understood through the lens of behavioral science. The reality is that behavioral science – and Acceptance and Commitment skills as a direct application of behavioral science – are part of our lives, from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep.

Inspired by the series Modern Love, I’m sharing with you a contemporary love story and with it, I’m also sharing how skills derived from behavioral science can help you to navigate romantic encounters.

Think about it, as our lives unfold, our quest for purpose and meaning also unfold—and also our quest for love. Who doesn’t want to love and be loved?

We do experience love in so many ways in our lives, and if we’re fortunate, we experience a special type of love: romantic.

Part I: The Dating Story

He and she met after the click of a mouse and the swipe of a screen on their cell phones and in the midst of online dating companies creating a paradox of choice that keeps us chasing the illusion of what love is and perpetuates questions like, Why should I settle for someone who falls short of my expectations when there are other options [just a click away]? Why should I settle for less when there are many more people to meet [just a click away]?

They liked each other’s profiles, and for ten days exchanged texts daily. They agreed to meet on a Sunday morning.

On their first date, they wandered around by the bay; they shared parts of their lives, their backgrounds, and family jokes. They laughed, enjoyed the nice weather, and, after six hours, ended their date by sharing an octopus dish, a salad, and a glass of wine.

On their second date, they went for a hike: They walked through the trees and felt the contrast of the temperature in the shadows and under the sun. They laughed about their weeks, shared their relationship pasts with one another, laughed about being lost, and finished their hike eating octopus and a small salad. They started their date at 10:00 a.m., and by the time they said goodbye, it was 6:00 p.m.

On their third date, a week later, he was sick and had been coughing the whole week, but didn’t want to cancel their date. Their date was in the middle of the week, so he made sure to take a nap before seeing her. They went to dinner, and while sharing a soup, ceviche, a glass of white wine, and a cup of chamomile tea, he discovered her passion for research and she discovered his curious mind. They were the last people to leave the restaurant and finished the night by sharing a good laugh.

After their third date, she didn’t contact him.

He didn’t know what happened.

He felt sad and confused and didn’t know what to do. All he remembered was having fun conversations, sharing laughs, enjoying one another’s company, wandering the streets together, and always looking forward to the next gathering. He didn’t want to bother her or come across as “needy.” After ten days, he decided to call her:

Him: Hi, is this a good time? Can we chat?
Her: Yes, of course. So great to hear from you.
Him: How have you been?
Her: I’ve been doing well, thank you. Busy with work.
Him: I know you were dealing with a stressful situation. Did you guys solve it?
Her: Yes, that got solved, and it’s all good now.
Him: Glad to hear that. Can I ask a question?
Her: Yes, of course.
Him: I was surprised I didn’t hear from you; I was surprised you didn’t reach out these last ten days. I thought we were having fun.
Her: I thought you didn’t like me.
Him: . . . I’m confused. . . . Of course I like you. Every date has been fun, and I didn’t notice the time flying by. I was surprised not to hear from you.
Her: I really thought you didn’t like me. I don’t know how I arrived at that conclusion. At our last dinner, I thought that maybe you were just being nice to me.
Him: No, I was excited to see you. I made sure to take a nap so I could hang out with you.
Her: I’m so glad you reached out and that we’re talking because I do want to see you again. I enjoyed your company a lot.

On their fourth date, they went for a bike ride, took a break in a park, laid down on the grass, held hands, and then spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the streets of a metropolitan city, grabbing a cocktail at a marroqui bar close to 10:00 p.m. When they said goodbye to each other, they kissed for the first time.

On their fifth date, he said, “I like you and would like to date you exclusively.”

She replied, “I like you a lot too, and it has been so exciting and refreshing to meet you. But I don’t know how things will go between us. I need to know more. I need to know that things will be fine.”

Part II: The Overthinking Problem

We all have been taught to understand things with our minds, to make sense of everything and everyone around us with our thoughts, and to think through things and situations carefully. We have also learned to think of our minds as these omnipotent organs that know what is true at all times.

She responded in a way that felt natural to her brain.

It’s so tricky.

She deeply wanted to develop romantic intimacy in her life. She deeply wanted to be seen and to see another person through caring and passionate eyes. She deeply wanted to develop a romantic relationship and grow together with another person.

Yet, despite being clear on how romantic relationships are important to her and making the commitment to go on dates, her mind was overthinking.

Overthinking patterns have many variations, colors, and shapes, and everyone overthinks. But interestingly, we don’t tend to overthink good outcomes, compliments, or positive scenarios. We overthinking about negative outcomes, things we don’t have control of, what-if scenarios, embarrassing moments and much more.

You may go on a date and, for a long time after, replay in your mind what the other person said, how you responded, how the other person responded. If you’re running late to a gathering, you may have thoughts like, I’m the worst friend ever; they’re going to be disappointed in me. I cannot do anything right.

Does that sound familiar?

Going back to one of the main characters in this dating story, her mind was overthinking in two particular ways:

Searching for certainty about the future of the relationship.
Wanting to “know more” – meaning she wanted to learn more about the possibilities of that relationship by thinking about it.

Let’s take a look at each one of these thinking patterns:

(a) Searching for certainty

We all have a need to make sense of the unknowns that show up in our lives for instance, when you go to a new restaurant and don’t know how the food is going to taste, or when you go on a date and don’t know if your date is going to like you or if you’re going to enjoy their company.

Our experience dealing with confusing situations is unique to each one of us; there are no two people that feel ambiguity the same way and with the same intensity. Intolerance of uncertainty feels different from situation to situation, and we can react differently to it from one moment to the next.

Some of us are more sensitive to uncertainty than others, and our reactions can go from extreme aversion to even extreme attraction. When we feel an extreme aversion to confusing situations, we may experience high levels of fear, rejection, and emotional negativity; on the other hand, when we feel extreme attraction toward an ambiguous situation, we may be curious, we might welcome the challenge, and we may even enjoy the process.

The mind of our main character has a low tolerance for uncertainty and organized a thinking pattern of committing to the possibility of exploring how the relationship will go only if she knew it would go well – a tricky business.

(b) Wanting to know more

The human mind also tends to try to understand, analyze, and collect endless data, as if it is a 100 percent reliable organ and everything needs to be filtered through it.

Let’s unpack this a bit: Our brains have been protecting us since the beginning of humanity. Our ancestors’ minds developed survival functions that kept them alive – anticipating potential enemies, remembering old threats, and considering all of the what-if possibilities of wild animals and enemies.

As time passed, and we moved from prehistory all the way to the industrial revolution and the information age, our minds – as sophisticated as they are – didn’t have a chance to catch up with all those changes. So these days, each of us is walking around with a brain designed in prehistoric times, and with protective functions that equipped us for those times, not necessarily for our current situations.

In other words, our minds never got the opportunity to be upgraded to our current living conditions, or to the environment we live in now, and, as a result, we’re more prone to thinking errors than ever before.

Daniel Kahneman (2011) has described this phenomenon in detail when describing slow thinking and fast thinking, and Eastern philosophies have recognized for years our minds’ limitations.

In our dating story, our main character’s mind had four direct experiences of fun, exciting, and rich dates, and yet, her mind wanted to “know more,” as if having more thinking data would help her make the right choice, and as if her mind somehow had the truth about how to effectively handle that situation.

Part III: The Consequences

There is experiential knowledge, and there is the hope that responding to thinking with more thinking will give us all the information and certainty we need to make a decision.

Once again, it’s a tricky business.

Both overthinking patterns – searching for certainty and wanting to know more – while helpful at times, can keep us stuck in our own heads and can feed into our rabbit hole of worry.

When applied to dating, these overthinking patterns may reinforce serial dating behaviors – moving from one person to another, searching for a long-lasting feeling of excitement, avoiding commitment, and confusing lust for love.

But what’s worse is that these patterns can keep a person from one of the most transformative experiences we can hope for – true love – and the intimacy and connection that comes from being with a partner.

Part IV: Key Questions to Undo Those Overthinking Patterns

Few people know that thoughts are letters and words together that our minds come up with and that we can choose how to respond to them. Acceptance and commitment skills invite you to learn how your mind does its own minding and how it has a life of its own.

And, when you learn to choose how to respond to your thoughts, everything changes. This is when you take charge of your actions (instead of being bossed around by your mind and letting it take you in the opposite direction from where you want to go.)

(a) If you’re dealing with a low tolerance for uncertainty:

Stop battling against those uncertain thoughts.
Ask yourself: Am I willing to go on from here, carrying all these uncertain thoughts wherever I go, noticing how they come and then simply having them?
Do not assume something is wrong when you feel uncertain.
Observe those uncertain thoughts as though they were printed letters on a page.
Make a decision to feel the uncertainty, even if it’s uncomfortable.
Check the consequences of your actions when you’re being driven by uncertainty or reacting quickly to it.

(b) If you’re dealing with a reliance on your mind as the arbiter of truth:

And this is pushing you to respond to doubt with yet more thinking, ask yourself:

What am I going to trust: my experience or my mind’s desire to know more?
What am I going to act on: my wish to know more or my knowledge gained from direct experience?

Behavioral science deals with all of our behaviors – private and public – and while there is much more to say about this dating narrative, and there are different lenses through which we can look at it, I can only speak to and reference my areas of expertise.

Final words

And if you’ve made it to the end of this article, I would like to share two more thoughts with you:

I’m not a thinking renegade, but I’m all about a thinking revolution.
To be loved and to love, we need the awareness and the courage that behavioral science can help us find in the busyness of our minds.

I leave you with this quote:

“I want to know if you are willing to live day by day with the consequence of love.”

– David Whyte

Don’t trust your gut feelings… when making important decisions

by Dr. Z. | Thinking repetitively about future and past painful feelings, events and failures, Taking my thoughts too seriously

Reading Time: 3 minutes

When having to make important decisions – e.g. should I apply for this new job? Should I marry this person? Should I buy this property? Should I continue dating this person? What school should I enroll my kid in? Should I move to another city? Some very popular advice that most people give us, is “trust your gut feelings.”

This is a hot topic every time I discuss it because I radically disagree with it when it’s presented as an absolute without taking into consideration a person’s situation, context, and history. Most importantly, the popular advice of “trust your feelings” is not congruent with what we know these days in decision theory, social psychology, and organizational psychology.

What D. Kahneman and Tversky taught us about gut feelings and decisions?

Here is a summary of the key ideas from two scholars: Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982) who were interested in “heuristics and biases.” They were curious about how people make mistakes, how people learn, and how people make knwoledge-based decisions. After spending hours analyzing complex cognitive processes, they identified two types of systems to understand how the mind operates:

System 1 is effortless, quick, automatic, and of associative nature.
System 2 is controlled, effortful, logical, and rule-governed. Intuition is considered to be a part of System 1, and like other cognitive processes, only sees what it wants and expects to see.

Any new idea that doesn’t fit what is supposed to be – according to our mind and based on previous associations in system 1 – is ambiguous and therefore, is quickly dismissed. Then, our mind pushes us to believe that we “know this already” and we end up missing opportunities for learning by experience or deeper examinations of that new data.

Our mind doesn’t like ambiguity and prefers to hold on with white knuckles to familiar interpretations. Scary, right?

Kahneman’s findings have been applied to organizational psychology, in particular, to understand decision-making processes. In 2003, Harvard Business Review magazine conducted a survey of executives from a private firm about gut feelings. Their findings revealed that 45 percent of the executives relied more on them than on the data when making decisions about their businesses. An interesting finding, right? This is perhaps another reflection of the advice “trust your gut feeling.”

Interestingly, and a large body of research has established that there is no relationship between an effective decision a person makes based on trusting their gut feelings and the outcome of it unless a person has expertise in a particular topic.

Are gut reactions ever helpful to make decisions?

Basically, gut reactions are extremely helpful only when expertise goes along with them (Dane, Rockmann, & Pratt, 2012). For instance, a firefighter, after participating in more than fifty rescue operations, has the expertise to trust his gut feelings, whereas a firefighter who is participating in an operation for the first time may have gut feelings pulling him in all directions and opening the possibility of making the wrong decision.

How to make skillful decisions?

So, when facing a decision, and listening to the words “trust your gut feeling,” I invite you to step back and distinguish emotional noise from true awareness.

Gut feelings usually come with a sensation in our body (such as butterflies in our stomach), and strong judgment thoughts or problem-solving thoughts about what to do right away, right now. It’s like a very loud and demanding soundtrack.
True emotional awareness, on the other hand, has a different quality. Instead of demanding immediate action, it’s more like having a soft soundtrack that points out what matters.

Lastly, just to clarify, I’m not saying that paying attention to our feelings is not important, of course, it is. I’m saying that taking the advice of “trusting your gut feelings” without looking at the uniqueness of your situation and your experience can lead you to problematic situations. For instance, meeting someone for the first time and getting a strong feeling that they’re the one you want to spend the rest of your life with, without taking the time to get to know them.

Emotions are to be felt; some emotions are to keep and learn from, and other emotions – perhaps a lot – are to be noticed and then, tossed.

Semi-annual values-based review

by Dr. Z. | Accepting negative stories about myself and questioning my abilities, Criticizing, judging, & attacking yourself, Disengaging and using safety crutches, Doing things right, perfect & precisely: perfectionism, Overanalyzing, doubting, & indecisiveness, Procrastinating, postponing and delaying, Searching for certainty, predictability, & re-assurance, Taking my thoughts too seriously, Thinking repetitively about future and past painful feelings, events and failures

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Most people use the end of the year as a time for reflection, planning, and assessing how things have been for them. I personally like to set mini-quarterly reviews on my schedule along with reset time and spend more time in a mid-year review. I very much welcome a moment to pause, reflect on what has happened, what’s next, and how I want to live my life.

So, instead of looking strictly at goals or accomplishments, I like to reflect on the:

The actions I took – whether they took me closer to or further away from my values
Internal struggles I had with some ways of thinking and feeling
Learnings I had in different areas of my life.
Check any themes that have emerged

That’s why I called this process “values-based year review,” and you can do it any time that works for you. More than having a specific time to complete this review, it is more important to reflect on how you have been living your life, what makes it challenging, what happens under your skin when pursuing what matters, and what you need to do next to be the person you want to be.

If you want to do your own values-based mid-year review, here is a 21-page template you can use; it includes a description of 9 areas, a values thesaurus, a values dashboard and reflective prompts for each area in your life.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD YOUR VALUES-BASED REVIEW TEMPLATE

As I reflected in the last couple of moments, below are the theme, highlights, and key learnings that emerged for me.

Chaos and connection

2020 and the beginning of 2021 were very challenging times. The pandemic unfolded, Black Lives Movement, a presidential election in the United States, unexpectedly losing close friends, and my health being affected made it one of the hardest years and also, one of the most compassionate ones.

You see, as a full-time psychologist, specialized in fear-based struggles – I’m sure many of my colleagues relate to this – we breathe and live situations related to all types of fears every single day. But, when you have an insurmountable amount of stressors around you, those experiences augment exponentially.

Yet, for over 12 months we all did our best to show up to the people we work with and care about while acknowledging our vulnerabilities, limitations, and common humanity. If you’re a provider in mental health reading this newsletter, my sincere appreciation for all that you did the last couple of months!

In the midst of all the political, environmental, social, cultural, and economic chaos we went through, in one way or another, my connections with others were also reinforced, for the most part, revitalized in some cases, and renewed in others. It was in those catching-up moments that I realized, once again, that life is all about connecting with others and creating memories with the ones we love. It was in those moments that I experienced “chaos and connection” co-existing next to each other.

Key learnings

Savouring every moment that comes my way allows me to find new rhythms
Life is much more manageable when I’m around people that get me
Showing up to my friends as the best I could is essential to growing my friendships.
Being flexible when unexpected things happen is fundamental to keep doing what matters.
I undeniably have a low tolerance for bureaucracy and institutional fakeness.
Being self-employed is one of the best things I have ever done in my life.
Being real with people is fundamental to building long-lasting relationships

Highlights

My thirst for creating resources and owning my content has grown tremendously. Here are the highlights from the last 6 months and some from 2020 – 2021:

I discovered Ness Labs and for the first time, got exposed to a group of kind, bright, and incredible collaborative people from all over the world, interested in science-based ideas and related fields. It was absolutely mind-blowing and still is, that this group is non-hierarchical and non-clicky by nature; it’s 100% collaborative.It doesn’t matter which school you went through, who you’re associated with, who you collaborated with, what’s your expertise, or who is in charge.Ness Labs is a culture of collaboration.You know something that could be helpful to another person, you offer it; you have an idea that could be helpful to another person you offer it. You don’t know something, you ask for it. You don’t need to be the expert but a co-creator of knowledge. And trust me when I say that this was mind-blowing to me, I mean it. While I’m not an academician, I have been part of academic and professional environments that, as nice as they are, all are structures around hierarchy, seniority, and under-spoken clickiness.
My book Living beyond OCD got published and with it, a comprehensive resource to tackle Obsessive Compulsive Disorder using Acceptance and Commitment Skills.
Co-authored a book on process-based therapy that will be released in 2022.
Finished a manuscript for people prone to high achieving and perfectionistic actions.
Collaborated in two research projects looking at the effectiveness of the interventions described in two of my books (papers have been submitted already, yay).
Got a bike – a lifesaver and mood buster.
Hosted many zoom calls with friends all over.

Playing-it-Safe: A project from the heart:

The question of “how can we get unstuck from ineffective playing-it-safe moves so we can live a meaningful, fulfilling, and purposeful life?” is fundamental in my work, and my thirst for answering it has grown significantly.

Playing-it-safe has been one of the highlights of what has been a weird year.

In 2020, I launched the Playing-it-Safe newsletter and the Playing-it-Safe podcast without knowing how these projects were going to be received. For the last few months, I’ve sent out this newsletter every Wednesday in an effort to share research-based skills derived from behavioral science, Acceptance and Commitment ‘Therapy, reflections, and resources related to fear-based struggles.

You have witnessed the evolution of my style in the podcast as it’s a new way of creating resources for me and have heard me trying different formats. Little by little, right?

The response from all of you to these resources has been bigger and much better than I could have expected. Thank you for keeping in mind these resources!

It’s my goal that Playing-it-safe continues to grow and get better in the next months. I have some exciting plans in the works for it. Stay tuned!!!

Thank you for spending some time with me each week.

I think learning to relate skillfully to fear-based emotions is a very important topic and I’m excited to continue creating more resources about it in the coming months. What am I missing? Is there something that you’d like to see me write about in the future? If so, please send me an email at doctorz@thisisidoctorz.com.

As always, if you think a friend of yours would be interested in fear-based reactions, please share this newsletter with them!

3 questions to organize your day, do less, & have more in life

by Dr. Z. | Thinking repetitively about future and past painful feelings, events and failures

What does your week look like? Do you have a lot of stuff to do? Are you taking time off? Do you have errands to run? How do you organize what you have to do for the day?

Maybe you’re using an app (e.g. Todoist, Apple calendar, Trello, Evernote, Google calendar), a paper & pencil organizer, or maybe you rely on a mental to-do list in your head.

There are so many ways to organize our day; there are even Time Coaches that help you to make the best of your day. So many systems have developed around these ideas (e.g. Getting Things Done, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Deep Work, The 4-hour Workweek). And these days, artificial intelligence may even answer questions about how to set tasks for our day.

All those approaches, in general, are focused on accomplishing goals and checking tasks off from a to-do list. But, is our life all about getting things done? Is our life centered around productivity?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely necessary to complete tasks, and we definitely need to keep track of them, I just don’t think it’s everything. A well-lived, rich, and intentional life is also about creating meaning and purpose in different areas of our lives and nurturing ourselves as we move forward.

So, here is one of the ways I approach my day when things get ultra-busy:

I choose a value-based activity for the day
There are different areas of our lives that we care about – relationships, career, personal growth, spirituality, health – and nurturing them allow us to have richer, fulfilling, and expansive lives.

I choose one instrumental activity I have to do
There are all types of errands we have to do – paying bills, doing laundry, mopping the floor, mailing stuff, and many more. And as much as we may not like them, not doing them may be a relief in the moment, but later on, is a recipe for stress.

I choose one self-care activity that is soothing
Our lives also require fun, enjoyable, pleasurable stuff to reset our brain, recharge, and replenish our energy.

So, putting this approach into action, looks like this:

One value-based activity for the day
Nurturing my relationships is important, so I choose to call a friend in my home country, Bolivia.

One instrumental activity I have to do.
Doing grocery shopping.

One self-care activity that is soothing
Being close to the ocean has always been soothing for me; so a bike ride close to the water allows me to feel the smells, appreciate the view, move my body and disconnect a bit.

This is not the perfect way to organize your day, but one way that maybe helpful when feeling overwhelmed looking at the long list of things you have to do. I sometimes use this approach for day-to-day life and use other platforms for large projects.

Nice to meet you!

by Dr. Z. | Thinking repetitively about future and past painful feelings, events and failures

As I was attending a virtual gathering, I got introduced over zoom to another person. In response, I naturally said “nice to meet you.”

Oh boy with the virtual gatherings, and yet, that’s the time we’re living in these days!

There are many variations to say welcome to someone. Google suggests: please to meet you; a pleasure to meet you; lovely to meet you; how do you do?

What’s your greeting when meeting a new person?

We say “nice to meet you” even though we don’t know how the conversation is going to go, whether we may enjoy this person’s company or not, but we do it to be polite at the moment.

Yet, is that what we tell ourselves when feeling uncomfortable, anxious, or panicky?

Seriously, what do you tell yourself when experiencing discomfort?

Quite unlikely we say “nice to meet you to that annoying feeling, right?

It’s hard to remember that “any uncomfortable experience you have, is not your enemy or the assassin of your day.”

It’s hard to remember that “the more you pretend not to have a feeling, the more that the feeling stays present with you, and the less you do with your life in those moments.”

It’s hard to remember that “tolerating discomfort” is no different than frowning firmly until your wrinkles hurt (at least in my case).

It’s hard to remember that “those uncomfortable experiences can be watched, observed, and noticed without becoming a puppet of them.

It’s hard to remember that “those yucky experiences” don’t need to be the recipients of your energy, efforts, and enthusiasm of the day.

So, if you don’t want to sink along with those unbearable experiences, you may want to consider:

To intentionally choose to have an uncomfortable experience – accepting it for as it is without rushing into solving it, fixing it, or replacing it.
To intentionally accept those annoying experiences without necessarily liking them.
To intentionally make room for that discomfort without judging it.
To intentionally lean into those experiences as they are, without rushing there – action land.
To intentionally say yes – willingness – to those experiences and then allowing them to be there.

This may sound like nice words, as it did for one of my former students when he asked me: “Patricia, is it really going to help to just notice uncomfortable experiences and do nothing?” In case your mind pops up with a thought along these lines, here is what we know so far about acceptance and willingness:

Let’s go back in time to 2003, when a pioneering study conducted by Georg Eifert and Michelle Heffner was looking at the effects of acceptance versus control for people prone to anxiety. In this study, participants were asked to breathe air with slightly elevated levels of carbon dioxide, and were then randomly assigned to two groups: one group was instructed to practice breathing techniques and the second was instructed to practice acceptance exercises.

Keep in mind that participants in both groups were basically breathing carbon dioxide enriched air, which will naturally evoke involuntary, uncontrollable, and uncomfortable physiological sensations.

The results of this study were quite interesting. To start, all participants reported physiological reactions like sweating, accelerated heartbeat, heavy breathing, and so on, just like when having a panic attack. Nearly half of the participants that relied on breathing techniques dropped the study and lost control. However, participants who didn’t fight their physiological reactions, and instead accepted them, reported less fear of their physiological sensations and less catastrophic thoughts about their effects.

As the research on acceptance-based processes continued to move forward, there was another variable added to these studies: the frame in which these skills are introduced to a person. Over the years, many studies showed the impact of practicing acceptance.

The construct of acceptance was initially very provocative because it countered all the previous research on control-based responses. These days, however, talking about acceptance-based processes is the norm. In fact, this is maybe one of the most common processes across third wave therapies (more on it in another post).

Acceptance is a core skill when you’re struggling with an emotional switch that goes on and off anytime, anywhere, and you act too soon on it (emotion regulation).
Acceptance is also the core process within exposure-based interventions, whether you’re dealing with a phobic reaction, chronic worry, pesky obsessions, or any other related fear-based struggle because it helps you to be curious about your experiences as they happen.

Going back to my former student’s question: Is it really helpful to sit with yucky experiences that come our way? My answer is yes, it does help. Research has continually shown us that.

But you cannot sit with those troublesome feelings and say “nice to meet you” without saying “yes” to them.

Rabbit holes, worries, and what to do about them

by Dr. Z. | Thinking repetitively about future and past painful feelings, events and failures

Reading Time: 3 minutes

An adult man, in his mid-thirties, walks slowly towards a microphone. He stands up stoically, opens his mouth, his face makes the natural gestures of someone talking, and yet, guttural sounds come out of his mouth followed by awkward silence. No words can be heard from his mouth, only noise.

Have you watched the movie “King’s Speech?” If no, I super-encourage you to do so; of course, only if you’re as into watching movies as I am (as you know by now).

In this film, Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth do an amazing job acting as a psychologist and King George VI of England struggling with the fear of public speaking respectively.

George VI is scared about talking in front of others, stutters occasionally, but stutters much more when feeling anxious, when having to give speeches, when having to hold a microphone or when giving an interview to hundreds of people.

George VI taps into what we know happens when you care about something: all your fears, worries, and anxieties get amplified, maximized, and elevated to a level that it feels like you’re in a rabbit hole.

Richard, a Jewish gay man, was ready to be in a committed relationship, so he enrolled in a Jewish dating service for the gay community. After carefully crafting his profile with touches of his life represented in different pictures, he starts exchanging texts and phone conversations with potential partners. When catching up with his friends, he shared among the people he had been interacting with. Some of them were smokers, others were too fat, others eat pork regularly, others were vegan, others too short, others too tall; others loved to party too much, others seemed too religious; others were not smart enough; others were not financially stable; others were too nerds. Back to his apartment, when sitting in front of his laptop, he thought to himself “what if I don’t ever find a person? What if I made a mistake breaking up with my ex? Would I die alone, old and bold? Would I ever have a family of my own? What if I fall down in my apartment, have a concussion, and there is nobody to help? That night, Richard tried to fall asleep, but his mind kept coming back with thoughts of him being a loser, broken and unlovable. Richard really cares for living a family life, connecting with a partner, and growing together. And yet, his mind was relentless coming up with all types of worries.

When something matters to us we get concerned about messing things up for ourselves and others. We worry about things going south.

What Richard was missing is that behind all those worries, he was afraid of choosing the wrong partner; he was afraid of ending up with an imperfect partner. But, when he took those worries as facts, he ended up feeling bad about himself, hopeless, stopped connecting with potential partners, and visualized how he will end his days.

What’s behind your worries? What are your worries masking?

Can you do an inventory of the worries that are currently showing in your mind as you put your intention into something you deeply care about?

Going back to Richard, is it wrong that he was worried about finding the partner of his dreams? Not necessarily. But, what Richard was missing is a micro-skill: differentiating when going into a rabbit hole could be helpful and when it wasn’t.

Worries are creations of your dynamic minds and not necessarily thoughts to dwell on over and over for hundreds of times. I don’t think you want to spend your life as a dedicated, dutiful, and committed worrier, right?

Next time you find your mind taking you into a rabbit hole, ask yourself these questions:

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