The problem: We worry for a reason. We are trying to escape from an uncomfortable thought. (Obviously, if the thought were not creating discomfort, we wouldn’t be worried!)
The answer: We have to stop trying to escape from the thought.
There is a well-established technique called Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), that works well for these worrisome thoughts, and it involves facing the thought, rather than trying to get rid of it. Anxiety, fear and worry always decrease if we practice facing our fears.
The procedure:
To stop worrying, you can try the following strategy.
Get relaxed and breathe as gently as you can for about 5 minutes.
Next, choose a particular worrisome thought. Something not too scary to begin with.
Now focus on that thought for the next 15 minutes. Do not try to escape from that disturbing thought. If the thought fades, keep chasing it. Don’t let the thought escape.
It is very important to stay relaxed and very still during the whole 15 minutes of exposure.
Repeat at least once a day until the thought gets absolutely boring.
Now repeat this strategy with other worrisome thoughts.
What to expect:
The fear may get worse for the first two or three trials.
But within about 10-20 repetitions, you will find yourself getting bored.
More importantly, when the thought appears spontaneously, it also feels boring, which is opposite to worrying.
As you work with several thoughts this way, you will notice that your thoughts in general get less worrying.
The Reason Why This Works:
What your brain is doing in this process is teaching your primitive fear mechanism, (fight or flight) mechanism not to be so reactive to thoughts.
This method is sometimes called Imaginal Flooding, or Progressive Exposure.
It is very effective, if practiced diligently, with the most troublesome of thoughts.
Bottom Line:
Anxiety, Worry, Fear. These emotions, whether triggered by external events, or by thoughts, can be conquered by steadily facing them, rather than trying to escape.
It seems such a waste of time to worry about ridiculous things, but it’s amazing how many people get trapped in this vicious cycle. It falls into the category of irrational fears. If you want to stop this type of worrying, you need to know how worry works in our heads.
I have worked with hundreds of worriers over the years, with a variety of techniques. I get the best results using an exposure technique where I get people to stop trying to come up with an answer , and learn to live with the doubt. You say to yourself “Maybe I didn’t go to my singing lesson, but it’s not the end of the world”. We get into trouble when we demand certainty, and the peace of mind that it temporary brings. And then comes the next thing to worry about!
The more we demand certainty, the more we fill ourselves with anxiety. Life will always be full of uncertainties. The more we practice tolerating uncertainty, the sooner we can shrug our shoulders when we get these trivial doubts.
This technique may sound counter-intuitive, but it is a well-researched and has been used in Behavior Therapy for at least 30 years. It is also used with people suffering from OCD and who are having severe ruminative thoughts. It’s officially called Graded Exposure and Response Prevention. A helpful, very practical, book about this problem is call “The Imp of the Mind,” by Lee Baer, PhD.
I used to worry about dying when I was quite young. All I know is that my worrying about death has decreased over the years, even though I am obviously closer to death now than earlier. Many people don’t seem to be unduly worried about death, while others are absolutely terrified about it. There is a way of learning how to not to be so worried about it.
You can stop worrying about death once you understand how the “worry mechanism” works.
Let me explain.
Worry is part of our survival mechanism found in all people. Worry, anxiety, fear and panic are all tied together in a primitive part of the brain.
This mechanism is constantly on guard, watching what you do, and it becomes very active when you perceive danger in your world.
It helps you escape from danger, and remembers all your past defensive responses. so that it can prepare you to defend yourself in similar future dangerous situations.
Worry is quite useful for helping to make rational decisions about long term goals, such as looking for a good paying job, trying to choose the right partner to live with, choosing the right vacation, and hundreds of other things where we have to plan for the future.
However, worry gets us in serious trouble if you give it an unsolvable task, such as finding out what happens when you die.
Your worry mechanism will not stop looking for an answer, as long as you demand an answer.
If you want to stop the worrying, you have to stop demanding an answer!
The only way to stop demanding an answer is by practicing facing the fear that you will never know the answer.
Eventually, you can get peace by accepting the uncertainty of life and death.
How do you tell this “worry mechanism” to stop looking for an answer?
First, need to look at how this primitive worry mechanism works.
This mechanism is so simplistic that it can’t tell the difference between a thought and reality.
It simply watches what your do, and if it sees you trying to escape from a thought, it will activate all sorts of escape mechanisms to help you to literally run away.
But you can’t run away from a thought!
The panic mechanism eventually gets exhausted, and subsides.
But the next time you get the thought, the survival mechanism remembers what you did the last time, and repeats the whole process.
Repeat this process enough times , and before long you are suffering from a phobia.
So how do you stop this vicious cycle?
Remember, the worry remembers what you did in the past, and helps you to try to escape again.
So if you begin to act as if you are not in immediate danger, (which you are not), your worry mechanism will fight you initially.
But if you DO survive, ( which you will), the worry mechanism is surprised and a bit confused.
If you keep letting the thought be there and NOT escaping, the worry will learn that a thought is not dangerous, and give up trying to protect you.
This technique is called Imaginal Flooding, the most powerful technique for getting rid of phobic thoughts.
If you can work with someone well-versed in the technique, I would strongly recommend it. But if you are left to your own devices, here are the basic steps.
Lie down and get relaxed for about 5 minutes.
Now bring to mind one of less scary thoughts about death.
Keep the thought in mind as vividly as possible, feeling the fear.
But stay completely relaxed and breathe very gently as you feel the fear. It is extremely important that you show as little physical reaction as possible.
( If you can’t stay still, try the process again with a less scary thought.)
Now keep the thought in mind for 10 minutes.
Take a break for 5 minutes.
Now repeat steps 2, 3, and 4 for another 10 minutes.
Chances are you scared yourself each time, but you gave a message to the worry center that you no longer run away from this type of thought. That is the major point of this exercise.
Now, each day:
Repeat the above procedure, but simply do everything in one 20 minute session, staying completely relaxed through the whole time while trying to scare yourself by making the thought as vivid as possible.
You will find that the thought gets less and less scary each day. As it becomes less scary, try to introduce other more scary thoughts, scaring yourself as much as possible, while staying relaxed.
In a couple of weeks, you will begin to find is more and more difficult to scare yourself. And with further exposure, you will begin to get bored with the whole process.
It is living with the mismatch of feeling scared, but refusing to run away from the thought, that teaches the worry mechanism that these thoughts are not dangerous.
We can’t completely stop being afraid if we want to survive in this world. If we had no fear, we would be as careless as a two year old playing with a loaded gun.
Without this primitive defensive mechanism, we would not last very long. We use it automatically every time we cross the street, when we avoid dark alleys late at night, when we startle to a loud noise, or when we accidentally fall.
Fear is our most powerful emotion:
It takes dominance over hunger, thirst , sex, and anger.
It is our tireless bodyguard who is constantly on the alert, except when we happen to fall asleep.
Even then, it is likely to arouse us if some unexpected noise occurs.
There is no way we can just turn off fear the way we can turn off the water from a dripping faucet.
It is not under our direct voluntary control.
Fear is all about staying alive.
This fear mechanism has been around for ever, and it is found in the simplest of animals. All animals have some sort of fight or flight mechanism deep inside their brains.
In human beings, it is fully developed even before we are born!
It remembers from the beginning all these little insults to our comfort, so that the next time we are in similar situations, it remembers what we did in the past, and it tries to escape before the insult happens again.
Well before we have anything that vaguely looks like intellegence, this primitive system has developed an enormous catalogue of what to approach, and especially what to avoid.
This system is absolutely wonderful for surviving in a world of anarchy and chaos. And most animals still live in such a world. Most of the world is still a very brutal place, where many animals need to kill other animals in order to survive. Developing good escape and avoidance skills is absolutely essential.
This modern world is fortunately not as dangerous as complete anarchy.
In this modern world, and with the addition of a very sophisticated cerebral cortex which takes the first 20 years life to fully develop, we have partly left that chaotic world of being a small fish, who is spending most of its time trying not to be eaten by a bigger fish.
Using our verbal and non-verbal communication skills, we have learned how to get things that we want in life without having to kill our neighbor in the process.
We do not need such a constantly active fear mechanism. And the fear can get in the way of interacting with the world in a more carefree way.
Our fear get out of hand especially in social situations. It was never meant to handle situations where we are afraid of being stupid, or avoiding taking important exams, or being worried about our finances in the future. It was designed to literally run away from physical danger.
So when we literally start avoiding social situations, the fear assumes there must be something life-threatening about that situation. It thinks it’s doing a good job of saving us from certain death. It is too primitive to know any better.
Retraining our Fear Mechanism
So how can we train this fear mechanism to stay alert for some situations, such as crossing streets, but not to be so active in situations where we feel we may appear stupid?
Graded Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is the most efficient way to teach this fear mechanism what we need to avoid, and what risky situations we need to approach in order to survive in this modern world,
Using ERP, we learn to put in new behaviors that are incompatible with what the fear is preparing us to do, which is to run away!
We have to gradually practice walking towards the situations that we really desire to do, and which we know are not life-threatening.
Initially, the fear mechanism will automatically try very hard to get us to run away. That is because we have trained it to run away in the past, and it simply remembers our old instructions.
But if we hold our ground, the fear will be very surprised at the result, (Hey, we are still alive!), and will gradually learn through further trials that the situation is not life-threatening.
It is essential that we start of with easy confrontations. If we try to face too much fear at any one time, the fear will win, we will run way, and we have made our fear little stronger.
The main point to remember is that fear is a slave to our past escape responses.
As you stop escaping from non-life threatening tasks, the fear has no choice but to change to match our new non-defensive behaviors.
But we have to be prepared to face the mismatch of living with increased fear for a while, before the fear gets the message that social situations are not life threatening.
And the more often you take these risks, and occasionally feel embarrassed, the sooner the fear will begin to go to sleep.
