All We Fear Is Fear Itself

Hey everyone, I want to talk about fear; anxiety. Why we have it, why we can’t get rid of it, and how to get rid of it. But first, I need to get a little scientific to find where it comes from. Shoutout to my mom for sharing her thoughts on this with me and suggesting I write about it.

I need to talk a little about habituation first. This term, roughly defined, refers to the fact that nervous system arousal decreases on repeated exposure of the same stimulus. In layman’s terms, familiar things get boring. This is hardwired into our genetic code. It has clear adaptive values. Habituation  allows more energy to be used for more novel stimuli, hence increasing odds of survival. 

Scientists have tested this with infants and changing colors. Infants can’t report on whether or not the color red turned to blue. But you can habituated infants to one color, and then switch to the other. If infant dishabituates (shows physiological arousal), then you know they saw the switch. A good example of this is marriage counseling. Therapists will often tell couples struggling with passion to “try something new.” This works because the novel stimulus dishabituates the nervous system, causing arousal. That arousal can then be mined for more satisfying experiences.

Okay, I hope all the science jargon didn’t confuse you too much because now it’s time for the really interesting stuff: anxiety.

The experience of anxiety involves nervous system arousal. If you’re nervous system isn’t aroused, then you can’t have anxiety. Understandably, and unfortunately, people try to cope with their feelings of anxiety by avoiding the causes. Avoidance, though, keeps your nervous system from habituating. Therefore, avoidance basically guarantees the feared object will remain novel, thus constantly aroused, and thus anxiety-provoking. Moreover, anxiety tends to generalize over time. Let’s say, you avoid the elevator at work because you’re afraid it might fall. So, you avoid just that one, but soon it evolves into avoiding all elevators, and then the buildings that house them, etc. Eventually, you’ll be living in a prison of your own anxieties.

So, avoiding anxiety only maintains and magnifies it. To get rid of anxiety you need to capitalize on the habituation principle of “exposure.” In psychology terms, exposure is the most potent medicine. It is responsible, directly or indirectly, for most positive improvement achieved in thereapy-any therapy, but particularly the treatment of anxiety. Exposure entails you facing your fears, which makes it aversive in the short term, but many long term goals worth anything follow short term discomfort. Exposure seems counter-intuitive, but many truths are the same. It scares people, but a lot of scary things aren’t dangerous (think roller rollercoasters or horror movies). Exposure is scary because most people expect their fear to escalate indefinitely in the presence of a feared object or situation. But nothing rises indefinitely, and fear, if you face it, will soon begin to subside as you habituate.

Thus with anxiety, the best way out is through. If you’re anxious about spiders, then you need to handle spiders. If you’re afraid of elevators, then you need to ride the elevator repeatedly. If you dread talking in class (me), then you need to start talking in class. This is not easy to do, since confronting your fear will produce a lot of initial anxiety. You will have to stay in feared situation and stay with the heightened fear response until it begins to subside, which it will.

On the behavioral level, confronting your fear repeatedly helps develop skills and mastery. Mastery decreases the chance of failure and therefore reduces the need to worry. 

Finally, exposure is particularly useful on the emotional level. It turns out that many (perhaps all) anxiety problems are at their core a “fear of fear.” Most of the people that fear spiders, elevators, and public speaking know these things aren’t dangerous. What they fear are the sensations of fear itself.

Exposure isn’t easy, however, living in the prison of avoidance isn’t easy either. Not much of a life. The short-term discomfort of exposure is the price we must pay to purchase a valuable, and long-term  mastery of your life. 

I hope you all enjoyed that. I was just going to skim some websites and jot some stuff down, but reading into the subject was too interesting. I feel like I have a stronger understanding of myself and the anxieties I have.

What scares you all? I hope you can walk away from this post with confidence to continue (or fight) your fight against anxiety. I’ll see you all tomorrow.

Buh-bye.