Rethinking anxiety: Learning to face fear | Dawn Huebner | TEDxAmoskeagMillyardWomen

Translator: Denise RQ Reviewer: Robert Deliman A little

anxiety

is a good thing. I kept telling myself that in the lead up to today, but a little

anxiety

is good. It sharpens our senses and prepares us to

face

challenges. A lot of anxiety is another story, it is more of a hindrance than a help. Too much anxiety makes it difficult to take productive action, it triggers a primitive response deep in our brain, the old fight or flight response that actually has a third part: freezing. All three are protective mechanisms with important evolutionary advantages when we

face

danger, but anxieties about perceived danger are very different from actual danger, and in the case of anxiety, fighting, flight, and freezing are all problematic that cause us pain. , they prevent us from moving forward, making our world small.

I became a psychologist in 1987 and had my first and only child several years later. Before you too worry too much about him, "Poor kid! A psychologist mother who stands up and talks about him on a TEDx stage" (Laughter), know that he is now an adult and that he has given me permission to tell this history. Anyway, when he was little, Eli was anxious. He was afraid of scary characters, Disney movies, haircuts, injections, splinters and bees, seemingly normal

fear

s, although there were quite a few. At first we did what most parents do: reassure him, and when that didn't work, we helped him avoid the things he was afraid of: we stopped going to the movies, we let his hair grow shaggy, we stayed away from flowers ...by the bees, and the rough wood by the splinters, but like a strange monster, his

fear

level continued to grow.

He began to panic every time he needed to go outside for fear of encountering a bee, and found it difficult to touch anything made of wood. Life happened as it is and Eli was fascinated by the story. When he was about 10 years old, we decided to go to Fort Ticonderoga, a wooden fort with a lot of splintering potential. We did a lot of planning: he would wear shoes, closed-toe shoes, long-sleeved shirt, long pants, no exposed skin. We promised him that he wouldn't need to touch anything and, in fact, he was very excited to go. The day we went was a beautiful 90 degree day.

We walked around the fort for hours until we were exhausted. My husband and I plopped down on a bench to rest, a wooden bench, a wooden bench. Eli couldn't sit up or get close enough to sit on one of our laps because he could still touch the bench. He couldn't sit on the floor of the fort because it was a wooden floor or leaning against a wall—a wooden wall—so he stood up; Rivers of sweat running down his face, completely exhausted, completely defeated by his fears. He stood up because he couldn't do anything else. He stood up and sobbed.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that we let things go too far, but somehow, the view from the inside was different. We didn't realize how bad things had gotten, how debilitating his fears had become, until that moment, that crucial moment, when it became abundantly clear that we needed help. I took Eli to a therapist who quickly deduced that he is 10 years old; he is afraid of splinters, shots and bees; Long, sharp objects that sting. Clearly, this was a fear of penetration related to—prepare for Freud-Oedipal issues—his desire to overthrow his father in order to have possession of me. (Laughter) I stood there listening to this respected psychologist think about how this could help us, and the answer was no.

So I began a determined search to find a way to help my son. I came to cognitive behavioral therapy, also known as CBT, a treatment approach based on the premise that we all have an internal triangle based on our thoughts, feelings, and actions. The idea is that they are all interrelated: our thoughts influence our feelings, thoughts and feelings drive our actions, actions are linked to what we think and believe, etc. So the way to change a problematic feeling like crippling anxiety is to change the associated thoughts and actions. That made sense and was specific; he gave us something to work on instead of continuing to help him avoid the things he was afraid of.

We needed Eli to change what he was doing, to pay attention to the action part of the triangle. We needed him to go to the movies, to go out, to knock on wood, for him to see that he could do those things without getting hurt. Changing what he was doing would help change what he thought and his feelings would change from there. We decided to start with the bees and started a campaign to get Eli out. He may be 11 years old right now, and it's no exaggeration to say that his life revolved around Legos: big sets, complicated castles, forts, islands and ships.

He would do almost anything for money for Legos. You can probably guess where this is going: I bribed him. "Just get out," I said, "they're not going to bite you. And if you do, I'll give you ten dollars." I'm going to pause the story for a moment. (Laughter) I made two important mistakes with that intervention: the first was telling him, definitively, that they were not going to bite him. How crazy is that? How can I tell if he itches or not? What I should have told him is that a sting was unlikely, which would have been more accurate and also more helpful because an important part of overcoming anxiety is

learning

to take risks, to act even when you feel insecure, to be nervous and not to do it. . something anyway.

My other mistake was offering a reward for the bad thing that happened. What I should have rewarded was the part of the CBT triangle I wanted him to pay attention to: the action for which he should have rewarded his exit. He could have bought him the Lego set he wanted and given him a single piece every time he went out. That would have rewarded his bravery, his willingness to face his fear, to face uncertainty, not the bee sting. But I didn't know then what I know now, so I did the wrong thing, although I did do something important: getting it out.

My husband was on the same page, dangling the same carrot, a bigger carrot. "If you go out," he said, "and get stung, I'll give you 20 dollars." (Laughter) So Eli went out in great fear but driven by the possibility of a reward, and he got stung, about five minutes after we told him he wouldn't do it. He handled the sting pretty well, which is what usually happens. The possibility of something bad happening is often worse than the actual problem, and he was delighted that we now had to shell out more than $30; Back then, that was half a Lego ship, money well spent as far as we were concerned because he saw that he could survive the sting.

After that, he went out with more gusto, nervous but enjoying the financial gain, and gradually his fears subsided. He wasn't the perfect cure, although he overcame his fear of long, sharp, sharp objects enough to practice fencing (Laughs), which was enough to push me further toward CBT as a theoretical orientation. I learned more about how to use cognitive-behavioral strategies without bribes, and that transformed the way I worked with children, anxious children, who improved, so much so that I decided to write a self-help book to take these skills to a higher level. broader audience. My first book was for anxious kids about what to do when you worry too much, and it took off.

Sales were higher than my publisher and I expected, and then I wrote another book and another, all teaching cognitive-behavioral strategies directly to children, empowering them to help themselves. I began to be contacted by national media, parent groups, and professional groups who wanted me to come speak, but strangely enough, I was never available. The timing of a lecture wasn't quite right, I had other plans, I couldn't take time off from my practice. These were the excuses I made one after another as I declined invitation after invitation: "I'm sorry. I just can't make it." I turned down invitations to speak publicly for two years.

I was aware on some level of what I was doing. I knew I was afraid of failing, of being speechless, of not being interesting or funny enough. I told myself that public speaking wasn't my thing and that was okay. But finally, the irony of this particular fear jumped out and slapped me in the face. (Laughter) Here I was: a psychologist with a best-selling book on anxiety, a national expert on anxiety treatment; Anxiety: What was stopping me from getting up and talking about it, I wish I could tell you that my first thought was, "Great, this will be an opportunity to practice all those skills I've been teaching." ", but I would be lying. (Laughs) My first thought was, "If I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror, I need to do something about it." One of the main cognitive-behavioral interventions for dealing with anxiety is exposure with the goal of desensitize ourselves to what we fear.

Let's imagine that we are putting together a toolbox; exposure is our first tool. How does it work? Well, think about jumping into a pool; or to play, or whatever, very soon you feel fine; you have become desensitized. The water is as cold as when you first immersed yourself, but you no longer notice the cold, you have become accustomed to it. called flooding, it's like steroid exposure, the literal equivalent of jumping into a cold pool, all at once, "Just deal with it." Afraid of spiders? Dip your hand in a jar of them. ? Go to the pediatrician's office, touch all the toys in the waiting room, rub your face with your hands.

The technique really works if you can do it, but flooding is not the way most people choose to face their fears. It's a little hard. Fortunately, there is another version of exposure, a more gradual method, the equivalent of slowly diving into the pool, taking one step and letting your feet get used to it, and then taking another step and another. It was this gradual exposure, this step-by-step method that I decided to use. I established a hierarchy for myself and started small: dipping my toes in the water, raising my hand at conferences, commenting during group meetings, eventually agreeing to give a short talk to a smaller group, writing everything down, holding my script, Reading it word for word, I forced myself to look up (that was a triumph) and slowly, painstakingly but tenaciously worked my way through this hierarchy of challenges: larger groups, letting go of the script, culminating in this. (Applause) So there is hope not only for me but for all of us because we are all programmed to stay away from things that could harm us.

That's a good thing: staying away from things that could harm us, as long as we are accurate in our assessment of what is going to harm us and the severity of the harm. But all too often something goes wrong. We lose the ability to measure risk and begin to assume that if we are afraid, we must be in danger even when we are not. Fortunately, there is another tool we can include in our toolbox: we can learn to recognize and correct thinking errors. What is a thinking error? It is a misperception, a misperception that fuels anxiety.

There are three common ones, the first: overestimating the probability. This is what it sounds like: "If something bad could happen, it will happen, I know it, and even though it hasn't happened yet, I'm pretty sure it will happen, and I'm not going to take any chances anyway," which is closely related to the Thinking error number two: catastrophizing. "The bad thing that's going to happen, it's not going to be something small. It's going to be something big, bad, something horrible, the worst thing that's ever happened. I'll never get over it." The last part is actually thinking error number three: doubt. "The bad things that are going to happen are going to be horrible.

I'll never survive, forget it, I'm not going to." Sounds familiar? We all have these thoughts anticipating the worst, imagining failure, underestimating our own resourcefulness, telling ourselves we can't cope, but our thoughts are simply thoughts that are not necessarily helpful, not necessarily true, and when we have a wrong thought, we do not do it. If we need to keep it, we can leave it aside or, better yet, correct it. It helps externalize anxiety, which is actually our third tool. This involves thinking of your worry or fear as a pest, a little creature, whose only goal is to make you feel scared.

Every time you hear that worry, every time you pursue it, it's a rabbit hole and you follow the rules it lays out: "Don't go there," "Don't touch that," "Don't do that." ," every time you listen to your worry, you are feeding it, and every time you feed your worry, you are strengthening it. But when you don't obey your worry, when you respond to it, challenge it, correct it, well, that's a victory for you. In fact, I've presented the tools in reverse order, so I'll reverse them to show you how one person might use them: a child. Let's imagine you're eight years old and you're afraid to go up the stairs just because there might be one of those scary dolls that charge.life, or a ghost, or maybe you're not sure what you're afraid of.

Many of you just don't want to go up there. But let's say you've started to learn this skill set, so first externalize his anxiety: Tell yourself, "That's my concern about talking to me. I don't need to listen." Secondly, he would find his thinking errors incorrect: "The chance of something catching me is very small. I've been up there plenty of times and nothing bad has happened." third, you would remember the pool; you have to enter. You can jump, just go up the stairs in one go, or you can do it gradually: practice going up, little by little.

If your mom can stand at the bottom of the stairs while you go up and down again, and then go up and touch all the doorknobs and go back down, then maybe your mom can get further away while you go up and stay. a little more. The goal, when it comes to facing fear, is to face it without waiting to not feel afraid, without accommodating the fear, without wanting it, or even breathing it. You have to do what you fear while you are afraid to see that your fear is a false alarm. It doesn't give you useful information and you don't have to obey it.

It's a feeling, an uncomfortable feeling but a feeling, and like all feelings, it's temporary. You, your children, anyone can learn to do this to begin treating anxiety as background noise, like a jackhammer exploding outside. Surely you can hear it; You can't help but hear it. But you don't have to mourn or stay frozen in place until it stops; just let it be, direct your attention to something else. That's where deep breathing, mindfulness exercises, and various forms of distraction come in: these are additional tools that are best used not to avoid the things we fear, but to help us calm our minds and bodies so that that internal alarm, that false alarm.

The alarm can calm down and allow us to remember that being afraid is not the same as being in danger. So we have a choice: we can follow our instincts, walk away, capitulate to our fears and stay stagnant or we can face our fears and move towards them. Anxiety is like a Chinese finger trap, that woven tube you stick your fingers into; and the more you pull on it, the more you get stuck. The trick is that you have to relax your hands, stop fighting the tube, move inside it and suddenly you are free. Thank you. (Applause)