The many shades of avoidance, dirty words, & powerful moves

by Dr. Z. | Procrastinating, postponing and delaying, Disengaging and using safety crutches, Overanalyzing, doubting, & indecisiveness, Thinking repetitively about future and past painful feelings, events and failures

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 it’s 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:

Situational Avoidance

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 are 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.

At the end of this long newsletter, I want to leave you with three questions for you to ponder about any avoidant behaviors you’re doing right now.

– 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 you can start practicing.

Do you want to get unstuck from wrestling with worries, fears, anxieties, obsessions, and ineffective playing-it-safe actions?

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Learn research-based skills and actionable steps to make better decisions, adjust to uncertain situations, make bold moves, and do more of what matters to you.

How curiosity works, why it is important, and how you can foster it!

by Dr. Z.

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2 questions to distinguish productive and unproductive worry

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

A couple of weeks ago I was going over old pictures and saw a picture of when I was in my twenties wearing one of my favorite pairs of jeans at that time. I remember the hassle of buying them, and in particular, I remember all the questions and worry thoughts I had when talking to the salesperson:

Would you rather them slim fit, easy fit, loose fit, or relaxed fit?
Do you like button fly or zipper fly more?
Do you want a boot cut, tapered cut, straight cut, or slim cut?
Do you like them in natural, black, or white color?

I was so overwhelmed with all those choices that I couldn’t make a decision right away and was too lazy to try the 101 options of jeans this person was putting in front of me. My mom was patiently smiling; I was just overwhelmed!

My mind was overwhelmed too: what if that cut doesn’t look good on me? Would I fit in those jeans? What if I don’t find any jeans that work for me? It’s hard to find jeans that fit me because of my height, what if they don’t have the color I like? Would my classmates make fun of me with this pair of slim jeans? What if I look weird in these jeans?

Two hours later, I left the store with empty hands. As I reflect on this memory about buying jeans, I think that it’s not different from how our minds work, like a salesperson, when coming up with 101 worries.

We all worry about all types of things. Shell Silverstein, an American poet and illustrator, catches the essence of our worries in his poem Whatif:

Last night, while I lay thinking here,
Some Whatifs crawled inside my ear
And pranced and partied all night long
And sang their same old Whatif song:
Whatif I’m dumb in school?
Whatif they’ve closed the swimming pol?
Whatif I get beat up?
Whatif there’s poison in my cup?
Whatif I start to cry?
Whatif I get sick and die?
Whatif I flunk that test?
Whatif green hair grows on my chest?
Whatif nobody likes me?
Whatif a bolt of lightning strikes me?

Who doesn’t worry about all types of stuff? We all do.

Worry is defined as “a chain of thoughts and images, negatively affect-laden and relatively uncontrollable. Worrying is an attempt of our minds to solve an issue whose outcome is uncertain but it contains the possibility of one or more negative outcomes. That’s how worry relates closely to the fear processes and fear-based responses.” (Borkovec, Robinson, Pruzinsky, & DePree, 1983).

In our day-to-day life, worry shows up as what-if thoughts, a collection of them, with a strong pull to dwell on them, we feel exhausted, tired, and fatigued, and instead of taking action, we stay in our heads.

Going back to the memory of buying jeans, when having all those what-if thoughts, it may have looked as if I was solving a problem: deciding what type of jeans I should buy based on the many options I had in front of me. However, while my mind was coming up with all those thoughts about the future, I felt saturated and ended up not buying any of them.

It makes sense that our mind comes up with all those worry thoughts – focused on potential future unknown scenarios – because that’s how our brain helped our ancestors to survive.

When anticipating a risky situation, our ancestors handled their anxiety by running various what-if scenarios over and over in their minds in the hope that constant vigilance would somehow prevent anything bad from happening. They needed to be on the lookout to survive!

If you’re dealing with a laundry list of what-if thoughts, here is a key distinction to make:

Productive worry vs. unproductive productive worry

Let’s say that I start to worry about you -my reader – not liking this article useful. What if it’s not actionable? What if it’s missing academic references? What if readers don’t find it

First scenario: I set an internal deadline for myself, re-read it, made sure that I included specific actionable skills, shared it with a colleague/friend of mine to get their feedback, and then published it.
Second scenario: I call my friend to share my worries, wonder about written mistakes I have made in the past, wonder about this article being shared with other people and my professional reputation being compromised, and remember all those times when I found typos on an article on my website. 4 hours have passed by and I didn’t finish writing the article and didn’t publish it.

The first scenario is usually described as “productive worry,” and the second one reflects “unproductive worry.” (Leahy, 2006)

Productive worry prompts you into action.
Unproductive worry asks the same “what-if” questions and creates new problems for you or new unknown scenarios that need to be solved; it focuses on long-distance problems that you have little control over or ability to influence; makes it hard for you to accept any solution because none of them guarantee you 100% success or anxiety free.

Some psychologists would clarify that “there is nothing productive about worry and that worry by nature is an unproductive emotional state.” While this is true, given that most people struggle to break the cycles of worry, the differentiation between productive and unproductive worry is helpful to see how you can move from worry into productive or effective problem-solving.

I’ve found that once you understand the difference between productive and unproductive worry is key to managing anxiety effectively and building a joyful life.

Here are two questions for you:

Are you staying in your head for hours?
Are you defining the problem, setting an internal deadline, identifying actionable steps to take, and taking them?

Worry simulators, worries, and our old friend

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

Dan Gilbert, a Harvard Psychologist, gave a TED talk on “synthesized happiness.”

In this talk, Dan reminds us of a powerful quality of our brain:

“Pilots practice in flight simulators so that they don’t make real mistakes in planes. Human beings have this marvelous adaptation that they can actually have experiences in their heads before they try them out in real life. This is a trick that our ancestors could do, and that no other animal can do quite like we can. It’s a marvelous adaptation.” (TED talk, February, 2004)

The idea of thinking of our mind as an experience simulator resonates so strongly with me, all the way. It’s reminder that our mind is a content-generating machine that is creating all types content on and on. It’s a reminder that our mind is pattern-making machine that is constantly coming up with thinking-patterns, action-patterns, meaning-patterns, relating-patterns and many more. It’s a reminder that our mind also has this incredible capacity to create experiences as if they’re happening right now, right here, based on past ones.

Think about these two scenarios:

Scenario 1: Let’s say that on a sunny day, you’re walking in the streets of your neighborhood and you see a mom & pop book store. You decide to take a peek at it; so you walk, smile at the person at the front desk, start wandering through the bookshelves and see the classic sections – cooking, gardening, personal growth, business… And then you see a tiny section on traveling. You walk fast towards that aisle – because it reminds you of your upcoming vacation. You grab a book that looks interesting because of all the colors on its cover; turns out, it’s a book about Bolivia. You flip through the pages, read about Salar de Uyuni, the Bolivian flat salts, and see the many shades of blue, pink, red, and white in every picture. You read about the high temperature during the summer, the different types of birds you will see, the hotels made of salt that are around, the types of vans that are driven in that area, the best restaurants in which to have local food.
Scenario 2: I bump into you, we haven’t seen each other in a while, so we’re catching up about our families, work, projects, and much more; and as the conversation unfolds, I share with you that I’m trying a new recipe for dinner blending dry cat food and chicken!

Any reactions? Did you get an impression of how it may feel to be in the Salar de Uyuni? Did you make a face when thinking about putting together dry cat food and chicken?

There is no right or wrong way to react to these images; each one of us will have a unique experience of them.

However, regardless of the intensity and type of reaction you had when reading about those scenarios, your mind was doing something that it naturally does: simulating an experience based on previous information – how it feels to be under the sun, how different colors look like, old news about South America, the texture of cat dry food, the flavor of chicken, and so on.

Even though you weren’t in the Salar de Uyuni or have never tried dry cat food and chicken, your brain foresee, anticipate, and predict how those experiences would be. Isn’t it fascinating how our brain works?

Our brain not only is a content-generating, pattern-making machine, but it’s also an experience-creating machine.

This is exactly what happens when worry kicks in; our brain – like a worry simulator – comes up with a laundry list of gloom-and-doom scenarios. Naturally, we play-it-safe by anticipating, predicting, and imagining all negative possibilities and next thing we know, we organize our behavior accordingly.

For instance, Gemma was applying for a summer internship; she worked very hard on her application essays, asked her mentors to read them, prepared supplemental questions, and researched carefully the agencies she was applying to. Gemma couldn’t stop thinking, “I probably won’t get any position, people won’t read my essays, I won’t get a decent job, and I’ll never be independent; The more that she thought about these possibilities, the more she asked others to review her application.

Gemma’s playing-it-safe move was over-preparing for a potential failure, bad outcomes, and other awful things, that despite all her efforts, it was keeping her stuck in her head.

You may tell yourself that by paying attention to potential negative outcomes you’re protecting yourself from painful surprises, but you might actually miss seeing the entirety of a situation with all its layers, colors, and shapes

So, at the end of this post, I want to invite you to try a couple of things:

Remember to see your thoughts as thoughts, not as inevitable truths of what’s happening next.
Do your best to stay in the present as it is and as it’s happening, not as your mind is telling you it is.
Remember that your mind is an old device and acts more like a content-generating, pattern-making, and experience-creating machine, not as a source of 100% truth.

Sweet connections, rough conversations, & fearful moments

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

A couple of months ago, I didn’t have a choice other than having a complicated conversation with a friend. Four nights before having the conversation, I couldn’t sleep, was worried about the impact it would have on our friendship, future collaborations, and felt sad about having to sit and discuss something that could potentially make things hard for us to continue our friendship. I was scared!

Relationships are a messy business, period!

A life well lived has strong connections with the people we love. The reality is that we have survived as a species not only because of biological adaptation, but also because of our connections with others. Our ancestors learned very early on that in order to survive they required the group, and to be part of the group they needed to learn to foster different types of relationships.

I honestly think that building connections with others is one of the most precious things we can do in life; without these connections, we are vulnerable to suffering, loneliness, and isolation.

But relationships are not just like flowers and butterflies; they are difficult to look after, maintain, and be in. I think that most of us go through life using a trial-and-error approach to creating healthy, caring, and fulfilling connections with others. But do we really know what we are doing all of the time? Probably not.

Creating a relationship from scratch is not an easy project; it’s actually a complex undertaking because, as fun as relationships are, we also get hurt, disappointed, frustrated, and discouraged at times. And every time there is a rupture, there we are again: covered in visible or invisible tears, trying to pull ourselves together in the midst of the emotional turmoil and simply surviving from moment to moment.

In my case, I was scared about losing the connection with a person I love, care about, and cherish in life.

My fears, worries, and anxieties about this upcoming conversation came with images of us fighting, arguing, and crying; thoughts of “it won’t go well; What if everything ends here? How would it look when we are at the same party and still disconnected? Would this person speak badly about me? How awkward would that be? What if other friends have to choose who they continue in a friendship with? Would they choose me? Would this affect my work?”

My mind was quite busy anticipating what would happen, what would happen if this or that, and generating all types of hypotheses about a potential outcome, as it was supposed to do. My mind was working fast, quickly, at the speed of light, and doing the best it could to protect me from any hurt related to this friendship and soon-to-have conversation, all driven by fear.

But my fear – and all the thoughts that came along with it – was taking me away from asking myself key questions to handle this clashing moment:

What’s my value in this relationship?

How do I want to show up to this moment of fear that is consistent with who I want to be?

How do I want to respond to the distress that a person I care about is going through?

Our fears take us into all types of future scenarios, negative outcomes, and gloom-doom outlines; but the good news is that, instead of going along with all those thoughts, by bringing ourselves back to the present and checking what sort of relationships we want to build, we can learn to approach conflict as a source of growth, connection, and even as an act of love!

Sweet connections, rough conversations, & fearful moments can happen all at once, and all together can be opportunities to live our interpersonal values.

Living our interpersonal values is about discovering how we want to be within each relationship we have – especially when having a contentious moment – and while making room for our fears, worries, and anxieties as they come.

It’s not what you think it is!

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

Because of Covid-19, many of the conferences I usually attend were done remotely. So, thousands of people were able to attend from the comfort of their home and without having to deal with the hassle of traveling. I was one of those people, with the caveat that, I was presenting at some of these conferences.

Webinars are such an interesting format for delivering a presentation; they’re trendy these days, they’re raw, and they’re real. They’re definitely different than what I’m used to. When I’m teaching, I have students to discuss, analyze, and unpack ideas. When I’m doing therapy or coaching, I have clients that I’m interacting with.

However, when delivering a webinar, I’m looking at a screen and a chat box, hoping to read all messages so I can interact with the attendees. I cannot see anyone’s face because most of the platforms don’t allow you to see the participants while using another application for your presentation; that’s very tricky for me given that I’m all about engaging with others when presenting.

While these webinars allowed me to connect with so many people all over the world, they also triggered fears of not doing things right and perfect for me – because of the format, the challenge of reading the messages, the technological problems, and so on. From time to time, my mind was shouting at me “oh boy, no one will take me seriously; aughhh I look and sound so informal.”

At the end of each one of those webinars, despite the newness of the format and the background noise my mind was making, I finished excited, revitalized, and amazed by people’s participation; forty-eight hours later, the views of the webinar were much higher than what I anticipated and received very interesting follow-up questions.

So, here is a reflection that I would like to share with you and hope it’s helpful to you in dealing with all the fear-based reactions you may encounter on your way:

-When doing what’s important to us, we naturally feel anxious.

– We feel anxious, because we care about what we’re doing.

– When doing what we care, our mind naturally comes up with thoughts like “it will be bad, terribly bad.”

Our mind is not our enemy, but a very protective device that wants to make sure we don’t mess up. At times, it comes with thoughts about the outcome of a situation with strong focus on what could possibly go wrong, terribly wrong so we are more careful, more cautious, and more intentional about what we do. The challenge is that while those thoughts are a possibility, there is no way for us to know whether they might happen or not, those are just hypothetical thoughts. So, dwelling on them is dwelling on pessimistic hypotheticals, spending time on negative possibilities, and ruminating in unwanted outcomes.

Not everything is, as we think it is.

I want to invite you to check the narrative, thoughts, or stories you’re willing to watch – and make room for – when doing what you care about this week.

It’s Raw, It’s Real, It’s a Preview

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

Many times when watching movies we love, reading captivating stories, enjoying pieces of art, eating a delicious dessert, or dancing to an amazing song we see the final version of hundreds of hours of creation. But what’s behind the scenes of each one of those projects? How do they start? How do they evolve?

The reality is that the beginning of all projects is far from what we want them to be. And, even though we may know that, how often do we quit things because they’re not perfect enough? I think we need to radically accept that all those unpolished, messy, and imperfect early attempts to create something, start something, and make something, are just part of the process.

So, here I’m giving myself a permission slip and sharing with you the beginnings of a new project on youtube.

These videos are clip from interviews I’ve had with different podcasters this year; so they weren’t created with Youtube in mind or any other video platform. However, after these interviews, I got contacted by different people asking more questions about some of the ideas I shared in these interviews. Here I am sharing some of the clips that capture those ideas with all of you!

Why add values to your exposure exercises?

Exposure exercises are the front-line treatment to face our fears, worries, anxieties, and obsessions. And even though its effectiveness is well established, facing our fears is hard work. One-size doesn’t fit all and we need alternatives to get unstuck.

Source: Interview with Kimberly Quinlan from Anxiety Toolkit (2020)

Tips for developing a new relationship with your mind

We have been told that thinking defines us, that we need to change our thoughts, that we need to respond to thinking with more thinking. But actually, all those responses can keep us stuck if we don’t check how they work moment-by-moment.

I don’t have a recipe for how you should think, but I can tell you – learning to have a better relationship with your mind – watching what it does – taking it lightly – figuring out how you want to show up every day can lead to amazing moments!

In this clip, I share briefly some of those tips to give you an idea of what I’m referring to.

Source: Interview with Kimberly Quinlan from Anxiety Toolkit (2020)

Using acceptance and commitment skills to face your fears

This is certainly one of my favorite questions to answer, and while it’s short, it may give you an idea of why acceptance and commitment skills can make a difference to liberate ourselves from fear-based struggles and ineffective playing-it-safe actions.

Source: Interview with Adam Lowery from Cognitive Rampage (2020)

What is the fear of the fear?

Being afraid of being afraid is a very common response that hinders us from realizing that experiencing fear is the norm and not the exception. But what is it and how does it develop?

Source: Interview with Adam Lowery from Cognitive Rampage (2020)

Do you want to get unstuck from wrestling with worries, fears, anxieties, obsessions, and ineffective playing-it-safe actions?

Subscribe to the Playing-it-Safe newsletter!

Learn research-based skills and actionable steps to make better decisions, adjust to uncertain situations, make bold moves, and do more of what matters to you.