Responding strategically to uncertainty
Strategic thinking means starting with acknowledging what is going well and reinforcing it with curiosity, compassion, and courage.
Understanding post-event processing
If you treat yourself with compassion after you challenge your suffering, no matter the outcome, you will reduce your future anticipatory anxiety and it will be easier to see these challenging experiences as an opportunity rather than a threat.
Strive for experiences, not episodes
You're in it for the long-haul with yourself. Giving up is demoralizing and will increase your suffering. Demanding perfection isn't sustainable and will create a secondary self-critical loop that makes recovery harder. Commit to yourself and your own process. Even before you recover, you'll find that you like yourself when you own and appreciate your own journey. You have hope because you have you.
How experiences of distress become episodes of suffering
Everyone has underlying biological processes that make mental illness more or less likely. Lately, environmental stress is making those who aren’t particularly biologically vulnerable more vulnerable. Whether your emotional distress or impairment is primarily biological or environmental or a combination or the two, responding to yourself with courage, curiosity, and compassion is the key to responding well.
Tricked into listening to dread
The more triggers you have, the more likely you are to feel dread about how you will respond. But then again, the more triggers you have, the more opportunities you have to practice.
The role of anticipatory anxiety
Doing nothing to resist it or make it go away is a powerful and intentional stance. Just like other parts of the anxious pattern, every time you label and actively accept what you’re experiencing, your mind is less likely to associate that experience as something to fear. The anticipatory anxiety may not dissipate in this moment, but you’re setting yourself up for success in future moments.
Predict thoughts, sensations, and interpretations
When you try this new approach, it will be uncomfortable at first, but eventually your anxious moment becomes an opportunity for courage, empowerment, and self-trust.
Emotion-driven behavior
The urge to either over-control or under-control your feelings under these conditions is very common. Many people have a combination of both. Over-control of emotion includes suppression, withdrawal, compulsions, and perfectionistic control behaviors of your thoughts, feelings, and body (examples: compulsive exercise or restrictive diets). Under-control of emotion includes anger outbursts, self-medicating with alcohol and drug use, and problematic interpersonal strategies like passive aggression. In general, anxiety disorders can be seen as disorders of over-control. It's common for people to have both problematic over-control emotion regulation strategies and problematic under-control emotion regulation strategies.
Rule-based behavior
You might not be avoiding what you value altogether, but you might be experientially avoiding all the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that arise when you follow your values. Notice how many opportunities for happiness open up when you give yourself permission be present in your actual life rather than trying to figure out whether that is the right decision.
Compulsions
The nature of obsessive thoughts is that they are unwanted and intrusive. They arrive with a spike of anxiety or uncertainty and the urge to do something that makes them stop. Behavior that you feel compelled to perform, against your conscious wishes, with the sole intention of ending a thought, feeling or sensation is a compulsion.
Somatic avoidance
When you are in your head trying to figure something out or distracting or numbing yourself out from what is happening in your body, you are engaging in somatic avoidance.
Emotional avoidance
The opposite of emotional avoidance is staying with emotions. Don’t just do something, sit there! When you choose to bring attention to and stay with emotion, you can know that you are on the right track if you can feel the emotion pass within a minute or two.
Experiential avoidance
Emotions are evolutionarily adaptive states that motivate behavior. Every emotion has or has had some utility in the evolutionary past. After the initial surge of emotion, you can choose whether you want to keep the thoughts associated with that feeling going. Your thoughts will retrigger the sensations to keep that emotion going.
Situational avoidance
Avoidance isn’t a moral failing, a willpower problem, or a failure of character. Most likely, you are getting tricked by anticipatory anxiety. You might also have very high anxiety sensitivity, making situational anxiety very challenging to tolerate. You probably also have critical post-event processing, which undermines that natural euphoria that usually comes after overcoming a challenge.
An introduction to avoidance
Avoidance not only reinforces anxiety, but it also undermines potential.
Using metaphors to help remember your strategy
As we’re striving to accept and embrace uncomfortable emotional experiences, we want to use metaphors to facilitate our personal internalization of relevant ideas, frameworks, and concepts. While the concept of going towards our internal experiences is theoretically simple, it isn’t easy to do and there are numerous nuances to it that can make it hard to remember. Metaphors fall into two major categories: identifying symptoms through personification and metaphors to help you remember effective processes.
Incidental practice
Your incidental exposure is your real life. You're in your real life and you get triggered. What do you do? Run after the bus. That is, let yourself feel anxious and embarrassed and do what you value anyway. Do the thing that's hard even if your anxiety tells you not to do it. And, if the hard thing is to stop running, just stand there.
Intentional practice - Part II
A major difference between intentional practice and incidental practice is creativity. Intentional practice is our creative attempt to trigger what you fear on purpose so that you have the exact opportunity you need to face your fear. We don’t have to be creative for incidental practice because life gives it to us.
Intentional practice - Part I
Exposure is putting your body in a feared situation, letting yourself feel scared, and staying in the experience while feeling scared. Response prevention is refraining from physical or mental compulsions, reassurance seeking, or avoidance of any form after the exposure.
An introduction to willing exposure practice
Exposure is the willing act of putting yourself in psychological and physical situations that induce fear and anxiety. Willing exposure is challenging in the moment of anxiety, but in the long-term it decreases anxiety.