Demystifying Anxiety Part 3: Unhelpful Strategies
In our last article, we explored the common beliefs and factors that lead to the habits of anxiety. Today, let’s look closer at the unhelpful strategies that can stem from these beliefs, creating a negative habit loop towards fear that can lead to anxiety over time.
Avoidance
Avoidance is one of the chief strategies that leads to chronic anxiety. Avoidance often occurs when we mistakenly assign a high level of perceived danger to common occurrences. Each time we avoid the subject of our fear, we receive the reward of reduced fear in the moment. Since we do nothing to either change the subject or address whether our fear is accurate, we also increase our fear reaction long term. Each cycle of feeling fear, avoiding the subject of our fear, and then feeling temporarily reduced fear teaches us that our fear must be correct and that our course of action is working. Consider this habit loop when applied to social anxiety.
Trigger: Feeling nervous about going to a gathering.
Behaviour: Stay home and avoid the gathering.
Reward: Feel temporarily reduced fear (internal)
Downside: You never learn the party wasn’t actually that scary after the initial few minutes, you increase your fear of future gatherings.
Suppression
Another common strategy is to suppress our anxiety, often through chemical means. Again, this strategy involves fighting the feeling of fear, rather than addressing the belief or situation the fear is about. A common example of this strategy involves drinking at social occasions. We turn up at a venue, party, gathering or date and feel initially nervous. Because we have been taught/taught ourselves that feeling nervous is a bad thing, we drink alcohol to suppress our fear. After a drink, we feel reduced fear and then start interacting in earnest.
Trigger: Feeling nervous when you first enter a social occasion.
Behaviour: Get a drink to suppress your nerves.
Reward: Feel reduced fear (internal). Start interacting with other people with more ease (external)
Downside: Cost, hangovers, health effects, increased anxiety over time due to both the effects of alcohol and teaching yourself that your
In reality, a feeling of nervousness when meeting new people or entering a complicated social environment is perfectly normal and healthy. Instead of attempting to suppress the feeling, if one were to start interacting while accepting the feeling of nervousness, you would begin to feel more at ease in around the same time as it would take to purchase a drink and consume it.
Rejection
The third strategy we often apply to fear is to reject it entirely. Either by rejecting it in our internal monologue, by refusing to acknowledge the feelings we feel as fear, or by covering it up with another emotion, such as anger. This is a common strategy when we are raised in a social or cultural environment that stigmatises fear as ‘weakness’.
Trigger: Feeling fear of being embarrassed in a social situation.
Behaviour: Refuse to acknowledge or accept fear, replace fear with anger.
Reward: Feel reduced fear in the moment, not have to feel ‘weak’ due to accepting a stigmatised emotion. Potentially feeling powerful instead.
Downside: Harming others emotionally and physically, making other people scared of you, being generally unpleasant to be around. Long term health costs of hostility.
Distraction
The final strategy that’s commonly used is distraction. Distraction can sometimes be a healthy strategy when the feeling you’re experiencing is too overwhelming in the moment to process and accept. Temporarily distracting yourself allows the peak of the experience to subside until you can then apply other strategies.
Trigger: Feeling a currently unbearable level of fear.
Behaviour: Distract yourself with naming objects, focusing on your breathing, watching a relaxing show, listening to music or playing a game until the level of fear subsides to a bearable amount.
Reward: Fear is reduced to an acceptable level that long term strategies can be applied.
However, this strategy becomes a problem if you use it too often, too long, or as your chief and primary strategy for feelings. This can lead to never developing the ability to process and handle our feelings, as we constantly distract ourselves to avoid feeling them.
A common example of an unhelpful use of this strategy is procrastination. Procrastination is not, as some people claim, an example of laziness. Procrastination almost always stems from a fear of failure or doing poorly at a task. We become overwhelmed with the prospect of not performing the task correctly or the feeling that we don’t know how to do the task, and instead engage in distractions to soothe ourselves or grant us a reward in the moment.
Trigger: Feeling fear of failure at a task.
Behaviour: Distract yourself with a more pleasant or easier task (procrastinate)
Reward: Reduced fear of failing the task in the moment.
Downside: More likely to actually fail the task in the long run, increased feelings of fear of failure.
So there you have it, the four most common strategies that can lead to anxiety. These are by no means the only four, as we are incredibly complex creatures living in a complex environment, but these four are some of the most commonly deployed. In general, when thinking of your strategies towards fear, or any unpleasant feeling, a helpful way to figure out how helpful your strategy is can be to ask yourself two questions.
Is this strategy intended to reduce fear only in the short term, without ever challenging my beliefs around the fear, changing the situation or improving my skills to deal with fear?
Is this strategy my chief or only strategy, rather than me developing a wide variety of ways to relate to this feeling?
If the answer to one or both is yes, it’s time to look into developing new and different strategies to break yourself out of the anxiety cycle.
Next article, we’ll be looking at what some of these helpful strategies can be. So tune in then to find out.
