Ditch Unwanted Habits
Four-Step Program: Unwanted Habits
When Challenges Happen
Anxiety: Addressing the Fear
Anxious thinking is driven by fear. Fear of the situation, fear of success or failure, fears for the future. Some people are very conscious of the fear and so they can work directly to reduce the level of fear and to get the fear in proportion. By reducing or removing the fear, the whole cycle of thought collapses and the anxiety, stress, and driven state will pass.
The fear can addressed in many ways, including these:
Truth-telling: Just as above, tell the absolute truth about the fear and likelihood of that fear becoming true. This approach may not work when the fear comes from a recent trauma or is associated with a long-term issue (see below) but often is a useful start on reducing the fear.
Put it in its place: Most fears are about the future, and most fears only have a relatively small probability of coming true. We can handle many by simply making a conscious and firm choice to not worry in advance about something that may or may not happen in the future, we can choose to handle it when it happens. Repeating this conscious choice over a period of time can re-train our mind to not get into useless worry; to abandon our anxious approach to life.
Worst case scenario: Sometimes we simply don't want to face the fear, so we don't challenge it. We can ask ourselves what would happen if the worst that we feared came true? How would we cope? What would we do? Sometimes this combination of exploring the worst case and identifying alternative ways of handling it will be enough to allow the fear to subside.
Break associations: Often we can have fear and anxiety that is linked in our mind to a past event or events. In this case our mind tends to continue to relive the past by making warnings about the future ("It will happen again") and by attaching feelings from the past to our experience of the present. This is a simple function of memory and learning but it can become troublesome if it is unchecked or if the anxiety that it generates is out of proportion. These associations can be weakened and even broken by simply bringing the original events to mind and saying something along these lines: "That was the past and I experienced what I experienced. I am different now and I can experience things differently".
There are additional more complex processes of visioning and re-experiencing past situations that can be used with the support of an appropriate therapist to reduce trauma, anxiety, and some types of phobia.
De-sensitisation: Some people can successfully reduce feelings of anxiety and fear through a supported process of de-sensitisation. This basically involves imagining or actually going into situations where the fear is triggered but controlled, and gradually building up experiences of being OK with those situations. This experiencing challenges the fear and builds a resistance to it. Again there are advanced and sophisticated versions of this used by therapists to deal with more tenacious phobias and anxieties.
Fear of the fear: There is an additional layer of preconscious control that some people can develop over time to protect themselves from an underlying fear which can keep us from dealing healthily with our core fears. When we develop a fear of even recognising our own fears this puts an additional layer of protection in place so that we avoid situations where our core fear might surface. The problem is that our core fears are not clearly recognised not dealt with and we lose out on some aspects of normal life.
The key to progress here is to start by recognising that we have become habitually afraid to face our deeper fears. Only by choosing to step through this layer of protection can we then choose how to deal with our deeper fears. Start with simply exploring memories of different situations where you have held back but you are not sure why. Did you experience anxiety without knowing what the anxiety was about? Was your behaviour a clear avoidance at a time when you actually wanted to join in? Then, mentally test for deeper fears by asking yourself the question "What was I actually afraid of, and why?"