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 anxiety is 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:
Table of Contents
(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:
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 is 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.
– 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 we can start practicing.
