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Hi, welcome back once again. Good to have you with me again today. We are going to talk about a strategy today, which is really crucial to have in your toolbox of strategies, and it is the strategy of approaching your anxiety. I'm talking about approaching your anxiety in contrast to avoiding your anxiety.
Remember last time in our episode where we talked about managing your dopamine budget, and we brought up a really important paradox in the way that our brains work. And we talked about how the relentless pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain leads to pain. So this applies directly to avoiding the discomfort, the pain of anxiety. Now in our modern day, we enjoy an unprecedented level of physical comfort, especially if you're going to compare it to our environment of evolutionary adaptation that we've talked about many times in other episodes, our environment where we were spent most of our time as humans, as hunter gatherers compared to that environment nowadays, we have an extreme level of comfort.
But it's really interesting what happens as a result of this. And this is examined in a book called The Upside of Your Dark Side. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. But the authors of this book talk about how the comfort that we enjoy in modern life leads us to increasingly view discomfort as toxic, unmanageable and intolerable.
So this relates directly back to that quote we just talked about from last time where the resent the relentless pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain leads to pain. We could rephrase that in terms of comfort. The relentless pursuit of comfort and avoidance of discomfort leads to pain leads to increased discomfort.
So this applies both to our physical comfort and to our emotional comfort. So the authors of this book, The Upside of Your Dark Side, point out that most of our problems, our psychological problems, arise not from distressing thoughts and feelings and emotions, but from an unwillingness to approach them. So, interesting, right? That our anxiety, Our problems with anxiety could actually arise from our unwillingness to approach our anxiety And our tendency to want to avoid the discomfort of uncomfortable or what we might call negative emotions. We do this in many different ways. We do it by escaping when we have uncomfortable or negative emotions, escaping into different addictive behaviors, by simply resisting. the emotions, trying to push against them or suppress them or push them away.
But all of these types of avoidance research shows us actually magnify the problem. If we try to deal with anxiety by resisting it, then we will just add to it. more layers of negative emotion on top of that anxiety. For example, we might end up feeling anxious that we're feeling anxious. We might end up feeling angry at our anxiety or frustrated with our anxiety or sad at our anxiety, but that just piles more negative emotion on top of the anxiety itself.
If we can have the fortitude to simply approach our anxiety instead of trying to resist it, we can. master it. We can manage it. Management of anxiety is not accomplished through avoiding it. Researchers actually call avoidance a toxic Self regulatory strategy. It's a, it's a strategy that leads to intensify the negative emotions in question. So the more we avoid our anxiety, the more we try and escape it, the more we resist it, the more we will magnify it, the more we will intensify it. It's actually maintained. by trying to avoid it. We did bring this up in a previous episode that when we are trying to keep anxiety low, that is often what keeps it high. That if we can get to the point where we can just approach it, instead of trying to run away from it, instead of trying to fight it, that we can actually reduce and deal with and manage and even master our anxiety.
So let me explain the three steps in learning how to approach your anxiety in a healthy way, in a way that will help you to actually gain some control and mastery over it. so our modern lifestyle we talked about a minute ago is so comfortable that this actually paradoxically makes us less able to tolerate discomfort, both physical and emotional of any kind. It makes us more sensitive to discomfort. It makes us more reactionary to any kind of pain. We have an instinctive tendency to want to regulate our emotions. based on what is going to be most comfortable. So when we have an uncomfortable or a negative emotion come up like anxiety, we tend to want to immediately try and find a solution that will make us more comfortable. This is kind of our default, our instinct, right?
Because we like to be comfortable. Comfort is a pleasurable emotion and we are wired to seek for pleasure, right? But we need to be a little bit more mindful about this default wiring that we have that leads us to flee from any kind of discomfort and always try and regulate discomfort toward comfort because when we simply end up regulating instinctively to try and be more comfortable in the short term whenever we face some kind of physical or emotional discomfort, then we will end up doing things that are not adaptive.
Right? So this is where you end up having addictions and compulsive habits that you wish you could stop, but you have a hard time stopping, like eating every time you feel anxious or any other kind of addictive behavior because it helps you to immediately feel a little bit more comfortable in the short term, right?
So we're seeking to avoid that. that discomfort, but the problem is that it simply magnifies the anxiety. And I'll put a couple of links in the show notes to articles that discuss how this magnification happens if any of you are interested in understanding better how that works, what the mechanism is behind it, why it is that avoiding and resisting our emotions actually magnifies them.
The solution that the research points to is actually learning to approach. So instead of instinctively regulating for comfort, we need to learn to regulate based on what is actually more important to us than short term comfort. So this takes us back to the couple of episodes that we had a few months ago where we talked about find your why.
There were two episodes. I'll put links to them in the show For any of you who would like to review those or who didn't have enough time to really go through and develop and figure out what it is that is most important to you, I encourage you to do that because these are really foundational strategies.
And this is foundational here as well in being able to approach your anxiety. Because it is important, it's crucial to figure out what it is that is most valuable to you in the long term. So, for example, someone who has social anxiety Who also feels a lot of loneliness may identify through doing this process of finding their purpose, finding their why. They may identify that it is very important to them long term as a life goal to forge and establish some really meaningful, close relationships. relationships. And so this may entail them actually having to face and tolerate their social anxiety. So what happens when you identify your purpose, your goal, what is most valuable to you is that you increase your ability to tolerate distress.
And we talked about this in the Find Your Why episodes as well. But we increase our ability to tolerate pain and tolerate discomfort. So we talked about this, this irony that the more that we seek comfort, the more this leads to discomfort because we become more and more sensitive to any kind of uncomfortable feeling, any kind of pain, the more we seek pleasure and comfort. Conversely, when instead you're not prioritizing comfort as your top priority, but instead prioritizing what's actually even more valuable to you, like the example of the person with social anxiety who would like to forge some meaningful, deep social relationships with people, the person who identifies that they would like to do this then becomes more willing to deal with the difficulty and the discomfort of pursuing this goal, even if it means that they have to go out and face some situations in which they feel social anxiety. So identifying what's most important to you helps you be able to tolerate pain to not be afraid of pain for its own sake. It helps us to be more willing to experience something uncomfortable because when you don't have a reason to experience pain, then, then pain is very distressing. Pain is very upsetting. But when you have a reason, when you're doing something that you value, and you know that this is important, that it's serving a good purpose, that this pain is actually getting you closer to something which is really important to you. then that pain loses its scare value. It becomes more purposeful. Roy Harris, who's a therapist, talks about how this is the process of turning off the struggle switch when you don't resist these unpleasant emotions anymore because you're doing something that's important to you. So you're no longer labeling the pain as. threatening or harmful or aversive.
Instead, you are realizing that it's something that is just a temporary negative emotion that you're willing to experience in service of something that is important to you. So turning off the struggle switch is what Roy Harris calls it. it's a matter of learning that you can withstand psychological discomfort just like you can withstand the physical discomfort of going for a walk in the rain.
You know, it may not be what you prefer, you may not enjoy it, but you can do it, right? So we can learn that we can handle these physical discomforts. uncomfortable emotional states, even though we may not like them, we can handle it. We can handle them and it is possible to handle them when we have a reason.
Remember that quote from Nietzsche that he who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how. So having that why will allow you to bear with with almost any discomfort in the service of that Y. So figure out what it is that is really important to you. Go back to those episodes if you missed them and do that step as a first preliminary part of being able to approach your anxiety because it makes you able to tolerate the distress, the uncomfortable part of approaching your anxiety, of having to feel some social anxiety in the service of being able to forge some important relationships.
So that's the first step. The second step in approaching your anxiety is learning to be able to defuse from that uncomfortable emotion. We referred in past episodes to the idea that you are the sky and that the emotions are clouds that pass through your sky. And we talked about learning how to describe them, but it's really about practicing this capacity to perceive that your pain that you're experiencing right now, whether it's emotional, whether it's physical, is not the sum total of your whole experience. It's part of you. It's not all of you. And there is a part of you that is able to observe that pain and actually describe it.
And the technique of describing the pain Describing your pain, describing your discomfort is in itself a very powerful strategy which has been tested over and over again. Let me explain. So again, this is from the book The Upside of Your Dark Side. The authors describe a study that was done at UCLA where they were trying to help people who had a fear of spiders. And they were comparing different Um, coping and management mechanisms, and they trained some people to just have positive thinking in relation to their fear.
Other people were trained to avoid their fear. And then a third group was trained to label their emotions, was trained to very specifically describe all the different aspects of what they feel. feel in their fear of spiders. so all three of these groups were exposed to spiders. All of these people were afraid of spiders. All three of these groups were exposed to spiders, but the difference between the three groups was that they each were trained in different coping mechanisms. The positive thinking, the avoidance, and the labeling.
The emotion labeling, which is a method of defusing from your emotion, of being able to feel, I am the sky and the emotion is the cloud. So interestingly enough, those who were trained to cope with positive thinking and those who are trained to cope with avoiding. were they actually experienced a worsening of their fear of spiders.
However, those who were trained to be able to label with a lot of nuance and a lot of specificity, their fear and their feelings about the spiders improved. They had less fear, less physiological reactivity, so less Signs in their body of the fear of the spiders and they were able to switch from a threat mindset to an opportunity mindset.
So basically they were able to switch from this avoidance motivation to an approach motivation to feel that they could approach this stressor that it wasn't too overwhelming for them. And that takes us back to the episode where we talked about how our brains appraise stress and how there's two different ways.
There's two different. directions we can go. We can have a challenge appraisal or a threat appraisal. And threat appraisals throw us into anxiety and avoidance and hampered cognitive performance. And conversely, the challenge response helps us to rise physiologically to meet the stressor and actually enhances our cognitive performance.
So it's interesting that with this labeling, this technique of being able to express with a lot of detail what they were feeling, they were able to switch from that threat to the challenge mindset. So the researchers actually taught the people to tell about all of the different aspects of their fear of spiders, to talk about their sense of disgust of the hairiness of the spider and the fear that the spider might crawl on them or bite them and this mixture of curiosity and disgust at how the spider can just cling to the walls.
So they taught them to be able to express all of these different aspects and sides of their fear So it went way beyond just simply saying that they felt good or bad. It was really about describing with as many words possible, as many aspects possible of the emotion that it helped these people to be able to improve over time in their fear of spiders. So how we relate to and describe and distinguish our emotions really matters because this is the mechanism through which we can learn to defuse from our emotions and be able to exercise that observing part of our brain that's able to observe our emotions where we can really identify with being the sky and having the emotion being the cloud that simply passes through us.
Thanks. So a couple more studies that were brought up in this book that talk about the effectiveness of being able to label our emotions with a lot of specificity. Um, people who can describe what they're feeling in a really nuanced way, end up consuming 40 percent less alcohol when they go to a bar or head to a party than people who have difficulty clarifying what they feel.
They also Those who are able to describe with nuance are less, uh, verbally and physically aggressive when they're around someone who pushes their buttons than people who can't describe that. And also in situations when people are rejected, those who are able to talk about their feelings, uh, show less activity in brain regions tied to physical and emotional pain than those who are not able to talk about it in a lot of detail.
So. So, what all of these studies show is that people who can clarify and differentiate their emotions and really describe what's going on with a lot of different words are less emotionally reactive. They just show more of an even keel than those who don't. are not able to describe with a lot of nuance.
And so shows how you're able to defuse and observe your emotions when you can describe them and how this makes you able to not be overpowered by your emotions, but have more choice. And so this is a really important step in being able to approach your anxiety Because this is illustrating how approaching actually minimizes your anxiety rather than intensifying it. It actually makes your anxiety more bearable, more tolerable. If you can describe it with a lot of nuance. So that's the second thing that you can do as you're approaching your anxiety. First was find your value that is going to help you to give you a reason to tolerate distress.
The second was to be able to describe your distress in detail. The third thing is to be, to learn to be able to expose yourself and become more familiar to those situations that trigger your anxiety in the service of whatever it is that's important to you. So in the example of the person with social anxiety, the idea would be for them to expose themselves to social situations that give them anxiety.
over time so that it becomes more and more familiar. This may sound like a horrible idea if it's something that just terrifies you. But two benefits can come from being exposed over and over again to the thing that triggers you to have it, to becoming more familiar with the thing that causes you discomfort.
So the first is from an article in the journal Anxiety, Stress and Coping. And the, the author's Talk about how familiarity with something, when something becomes more familiar, it becomes less uncertain. And as it becomes more familiar, and that certainty increases, our brains will start to change the way that they relate to this type of situation, and they will start to change the way that they appraise.
So our resources in the situation will start to seem more robust, and the demands in the situation will start to seem less overwhelming. And this is simply from something becoming more familiar. Because as something becomes more familiar, it's more predictable. it's less uncertain. And that in and of itself creates a feeling that your resources are up to the demands. and remember in our episode several months ago where we talked about how our brain appraises stress and that there's these two different ways that we can go. We can go toward challenge. We can go, go toward a thread. But what our brain is really appraising is. The balance between our resources and our demands.
And if our brain feels that the demands are too much for our resources, we will go into threat. and if our brain feels that our resources are up to the demands, then we will go toward challenge. So we're really trying to always Find ways to manipulate our brain's appraisal of our resources and our demands so that we can get ourselves out of threat and toward challenge, right?
So, simply becoming more familiar with something will automatically change the way that your brain appraises it because it becomes less uncertain and your resources start to look stronger and the demands start to look less scary. The second thing that can happen from becoming more familiar, from being exposed to something over and over again, and this comes from a book called The Handbook of Affective Science, a chapter in there called Appraisal Processes in Emotion.
The authors in this chapter talk about how exposure to something, increasing familiarity, and frequently exposing yourself to something, can help you. it will actually increase the intrinsic pleasure of that thing. So the, how inherently pleasant and intrinsically pleasant that thing is will change. It will become more intrinsically pleasant.
The more familiar we are with it, the more familiar something is, the more intrinsically pleasant it becomes to us. So, We not only will change the way that our brain, our brains appraise our resources. in relation to the demands, but we will also change the way that our brains intrinsically evaluate something as pleasant or unpleasant.
The thing will simply start to feel less unpleasant to us. It will start to feel more pleasant just because it is more familiar. So these are two really great hacks that you can have, that you can know about, because we all know just because we want our brains to appraise something in a different way.
Sometimes it can be difficult to figure out how to manipulate that appraisal because a lot of it is unconscious. And so it's really hard to, to access those unconscious parts of our brains. But knowing these two Results these two effects of familiarity that will happen that have been tested and shown in research Your brain will start to feel like you are up to the demands if you'll just become more familiar and it will also Start to feel like whatever aversive situation you're in will start to become less unpleasant The more accustomed you are to it the more familiar you become with it.
So let's go back to that example of the person with social anxiety who has decided that it is really valuable, it's really important to them long term to forge and to create some enduring, intimate, important social relationships in their life. And so they've decided that they are, there is a good reason for them to approach social situations and feel social anxiety in the service of this goal of having these deep relationships, which is even more important to them than their short term comfort. This person can decide to Incrementally expose themselves to the stresses of social situations and they can start small. It's good to start with something that's a little bit more manageable. So maybe the first goal of this person would be to simply say hi .Look, look two people in the eye today and say hi to them directly, two people that I don't know. Maybe something on the next level would be for them to get a gym membership and start exercising in a gym where they're around other people. They don't have to actually talk to them, but they're making themselves be around other people. Maybe the next step would be for them to go to a work party, and maybe they only will make themselves stay for 30 minutes, but maybe they have a goal to talk with one person at the party. But try to find ways to make it graded, you know, so that the challenge starts out small and it gets a little bit more difficult each time, so that you can become more and more familiar. Organize these graded challenges that increase the degree to which it triggers your social anxiety. Start small and get little by little, harder and harder. These practice social engagements will increase, make the person with social anxiety become more familiar with their typical physical and psychological responses to this kind of stress. So it could be that every time they get into a social situation, their heart starts to beat a lot faster, their face flushes, their hands start to sweat, maybe their hands even start to shake. But The more and more they do this, the more familiar they will become with these typical responses that their body has, and it will start to become predictable and less alarming. So for example, I may already know that my heart will beat faster when I'm trying to engage socially and my hands will start to sweat, but I can already predict that that's going to happen. It's not going to seem so alarming when it starts. It's just going to be something that I know is going to happen, because it's familiar, right? And this will, this familiarity, this exposure, repeated exposure to these social situations will change little by little how unpleasant those seem. Because as it becomes more and more familiar, your brain will start to feel that it is a little bit more intrinsically pleasant over time. But the key is becoming familiar. The key is exposing yourself to this discomfort. You have to have a reason, because if you don't have a reason, it's going to feel overwhelming. The discomfort can feel overwhelming, but if you have a reason, then you can bear, you can bear with almost any how if you have a why. And then you become more accustomed, more familiar with your typical reactions, with what it's going to feel like. It becomes predictable, and it becomes, you start to feel like you have greater resources in these situations. The demands are less crushing, and they start to seem more intrinsically pleasant. And there's another article from the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience that talks about how over time, if you do this type of thing where you're exposing yourself and you're becoming incrementally more and more familiar with the thing that triggers you, then you will go through a process which they call affective learning, affective with an A, or emotional learning. So, whereas before, your brain may have always associated with a certain context, the social interaction context, it may have always felt uncertain and alarming and unpleasant, your brain can learn to update those associations so that what used to always feel uncertain and alarming and unpleasant, now your brain will associate it with different feelings, with something predictable, with something familiar, and with something even over time, a little bit more pleasant. So you'll have affective learning take place. It would be a long term, more permanent level change because your brain will start to associate a different value with the old trigger. It will not feel just automatically associated with uncertainty and unpleasantness and the sense of alarm, but instead, as we said, with predictability, familiarity, and even a little bit of pleasantness.
So this is the power of learning to approach your anxiety. It seems counterintuitive, right? Because we don't naturally like to approach what is uncomfortable, what is painful. But, first, the first principle is to remember is that avoiding and resisting your anxiety will only make it worse. It will pile other emotions on top of it. It will intensify the emotions that you have. Resisting and avoiding your anxiety will make it worse. The solution is to approach and with this threefold strategy, we're going to approach it, right? First, we're going to find a reason, a reason to approach it, right? We're going to find what it is that is even more important to us than short term comfort. We're going to approach it. We will find a why to be able to tolerate the discomfort, because if we have a why, we can bear with almost any how. We will be able to accept and tolerate distress if we have a reason. And the second is that we need to learn to label our emotions with a lot of detail, with a lot of nuance, because this helps us to defuse with the emotion. It helps us to practice that perspective that we are the sky and the emotion is the cloud passing through. To be able to really think about what that emotion is. And then the third thing was learning to expose ourselves to it incrementally, a little bit at a time, so that over time we can change The way that our brain appraises that particular trigger because it becomes more familiar, it becomes predictable.
So I wanted to teach you these counterintuitive truths that research has unearthed for us, that help us to know how to go about managing our anxiety. We're not going to master it by avoiding it, but yes, we will master it by approaching it, by being willing to feel it, by having a reason to feel it, and by finding ways to describe it and finding ways to expose ourselves to it in the service of what it is that is most important to us long term. But thanks for joining me today. Thanks for your focus and your attention and your willingness to listen. Have a good week.