On Love, Overthinking, and Behavioral Science

On Love, Overthinking, and Behavioral Science

by | 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

Semi-annual values-based review

Semi-annual values-based review

by | 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:

  1. The actions I took – whether they took me closer to or further away from my values
  2. Internal struggles I had with some ways of thinking and feeling
  3. Learnings I had in different areas of my life. 
  4. 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!

8 Principles to make solid values-based decisions

8 Principles to make solid values-based decisions

by | Overanalyzing, doubting, & indecisiveness, Doing things right, perfect & precisely: perfectionism, Procrastinating, postponing and delaying

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Choice 1: searching through more than one hundred dating profiles

Choice 2: looking at the menu at an Italian restaurant

Choice 3: scanning through countless types of nails to hang a painting at home

Choice 4: researching hundreds of types of mattresses

Choice 5: exploring the destination for your next vacation

Choice 6: deciding who to invite to your birthday party

Choice 7: choosing a name for your baby

Choice 100: . . .

Choice nnnnnnnnn

How often do you have to make choices, decisions, and solve problems in your day? 

Quite likely, it’s very often because that’s the time we’re living in. How do you handle those deciding moments?

  • Do you spend hours playing out in your mind the best choices, smartest decisions, and most efficient ways to complete a task?
  • Do you play out in your head all kinds of what-if scenarios about things that could go wrong to help you make the best decision?
  • Do you check all the best resources before making a choice?
  • Are you afraid that a better option might come your way after you’ve made a decision?
  • Do you second – (or third-) guess yourself when having to make a choice? 

If you answered yes to three or more of these questions, you may be dealing with decision-phobia—also referred to as decidophobia, decision paralysis, or indecision paralysis.

Decision-paralysis is a very common struggle for high-achievers, go-getters, anxious procrastinators, or people struggling with perfectionism, procrastination, or chronic worry.

The bottom line is that it’s hard for you to make choices, from the simple ones, like what type of tea to buy, to the complex ones, like whom you should marry.

Why is it hard for you to make decisions?

What are the things your mind tells you that cause you to dwell on decisions?

Our human minds do human things. And our minds are vulnerable to the coherence trap that says, If I don’t carefully think this through, then bad things will happen, and I’ll regret it later. So your mind will often come up with reasons to think and think and think again, all the way through. And yet, where does it lead you?

Think about the times you’ve gone to a store and, after hours of investigating and examining a particular product, you left without buying anything. 

You need to get to the root of your difficulty with making decisions. Here are some reasons why decision-making might be hard for you: 

(1) You’re afraid of screwing things up.

(2) You’re afraid of missing a better choice later on.

(3) You’re afraid of the feelings of regret, sorrow, and remorse that may come with a given choice. 

(4) You’re holding on to thoughts about a decision representing who you are or what you’re worth.

Which one of these reasons applies to you?

It’s possible that over time, you have developed a particular decision-making style that makes decisions easier or harder for you. Let’s dive into it.

What is your decision-making style?

Barry Schwartz (2004), an organizational psychologist, has described two types of decision-makers: maximizers and satisficers.

  • Maximizers strive to make the best decision possible, so they collect and optimize all the information needed with that purpose in mind.
  • Satisficers consider their gains and losses in a given situation, evaluate their options, and make a decision.

Which one describes you? Do you like to gather as much information as possible about your options so you can make the optimal decision? Or do you make a decision when you find a suitable “good-enough” option and move on? 

Keep in mind that despite what most people might think about maximizers making better decisions, Schwartz’s research demonstrated that creating many choices impedes our ability to make decisions, triggers excessive searching, and, in fact, leads us to make worse choices (Schwartz, 2004; Yang and Chiou, 2010).

 

What if you deeply care about a decision?

In general, it’s annoying to make a bad decision—but it is much more bothersome when you are genuinely invested in that choice and what it means to you.

In fact, when people care deeply about things, they get very fearful of making wrong, poor, and thoughtless choices, so, as a result, they spend countless hours analyzing, mulling over, and scrutinizing every potential path they could take.

Do you know what I mean? 

Think about it: When something is important to you, don’t you want to make the best decision possible? Don’t you want to exhaust all the possibilities and make sure you have all the information needed to make an optimal decision? And then, do you go on and on, searching, researching, and acquiring as much information as possible to the point that it’s overwhelming?

There is also another important variable to consider in decision-making: your emotions.

How do your emotions influence your decisions?

A study conducted by Lerner, J. S., & Keltner, D. (2000) found that “fearful people made pessimistic judgments of future events whereas angry people made optimistic judgments.”

These researchers explain how every emotion we experience comes along with a perception of what’s in front of us in ways (appraisals) and influences our choices. Whenever we are making a decision, our emotions tell us how to judge the situation and what to do about it.

How to make values-based decisions

Because we have to make decisions every day in every area of our lives, it’s important to approach them in a way that expands and nourishes our lives.

You certainly need to be aware of your decision-style, your fears, and the emotional state you’re in when considering a choice. You also need a framework to approach all the choices you have to make.

I want to invite you to consider the following principles to approach when facing a decision:

  • Ask yourself: What’s my mind guarding me from if I don’t make the best choice?
  • Watch out for your decision style: maximizer or satisficer.
  • Check your values: ask yourself, what really matters to me in this situation?
  • Ask yourself, what’s the feeling that is going to be hard for me to make room for?
  • Set a time limit for searching for information.
  • Set a deadline for any decision you have to make. 
  • Set which variables or factors will help determine your choice (instead of dealing with countless criteria).  
  • Approach each decision as a process (not as a life-and-death situation).

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

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

by | 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:

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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.

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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.
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– 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?
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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?

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.

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2 questions to distinguish productive and unproductive worry

2 questions to distinguish productive and unproductive worry

by | 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

Worry simulators, worries, and our old friend

by | 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.

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