You’ve gotten a tremendous amount of insights and knowledge throughout this book. Use it to observe what’s happening when you feel something strange. You’ll frequently be able to explain why you’re feeling what you’re feeling based on what you’ve learned here.
Like you, I’m not a robot either, so it can happen that I have a strange sensation that I dislike. Here’s how I personally respond to those using the “calling out the name” method:
Vertigo, dizziness, moment of feeling weak, nausea, “OK, I probably ate or smelled something that my body doesn’t like at all, and it’s now reacting to that. That’s fine. Glad to see my defense system still works.”
Vertigo, dizziness, and moments of nausea in a very populated social setting: “OK, my body is picking up on the fact that there is less oxygen here than outdoors. It’s now launching the fight-or-flight system because it wants me to get out of here. It’s wrong. I’m not in any danger. I’m not in a cave or a coal mine where oxygen will actually deplete. I’m staying. Oh and yes, should I now faint, vomit, or make a fool out of myself in any other way, then I totally accept that too, bring it on!” This is one I’ve had to use often, because I have a very sensitive “low oxygen” alarm in my body. But since I no longer run for safety, those sensations go away after a couple of minutes.
Pounding heart/rapid heartbeat: “I probably ate something I’m allergic to or my body’s fighting with a virus. Glad to see my immune system is still functioning. Keep it up!”
So what I do is that I calmly explain some of the possibilities with thoughts other than “You’re about to die!” or “People will start to reject me soon because of this.”
I simply observe and choose to not freak out. Plus, when I can, I add a little layer of ridiculous humor, just to play with my negative voice.
But the most important aspect of this technique remains the observing, going over why we may be feeling it. This technique of observing can also be powerful for other reasons as well. It has an effect on our amygdala.
Whenever you have a panic attack or serious bout of anxiety, your amygdala is at play. It has then decided something is a danger and instantly raised the threat level. Sometimes even without you having an anxious thought first.
We’ve already seen that it will deliberately misjudge situations and give you anxiety when none was needed! It has to. When something has even a hint of danger, your amygdala will classify it as danger and push the alarm button. Better safe than sorry indeed.
There is a way to deal with this. A 2007 study done at UCLA by psychologist Matthew Lieberman has shown that calling out the emotion you are feeling can instantly calm down the amygdala.
This means that a simple “Hey, I’m feeling anxious. It’s just anxiety” has the power to calm you down.
Whatever set of techniques you decide to use from this book, make sure to include this one. If you feel an unwanted emotion, any emotion, call it out, explain why you feel it. This will help you calm that emotion down, silly as this technique may sound.
When your amygdala makes a call, your reaction to it proves it right or wrong.
If you faced a real, hungry tiger and your amygdala launched the fight-or-flight response, you’d run as if your life depended on it... because it would. If, however, you were walking around in the woods on a Sunday afternoon and heard a sudden movement behind you, your amygdala would raise the anxiety instantly as you turned around and looked for the danger. When you then saw it was a cute little rabbit, your inner dialogue would say, “Oh, it’s just a rabbit.” Thus, this thought would calm down your amygdala. That’s why we’ve been spending so much time on your inner dialogue throughout this book. When you feel anxious, whatever you say to yourself next will matter a lot.
Calling out the emotion you are feeling and explaining what’s happening is powerful. This is a great example of emotional intelligence at play. Use the knowledge you have, from now on, and explain to yourself what’s happening and why it’s happening.
Pushing anxiety over the edge
Humor is the antidote to anxiety, as I’ve already briefly discussed.
Anxiety simply cannot survive in the presence of humor. There are multiple ways for you to use humor whenever you are anxious, on top of those already discussed earlier on in the book. Here are some more:
Exaggeration
If your negative voice isn’t yet doing it on its own, it can help to push your anxious thoughts into the realm of total ridiculousness.
Cara, one of my clients, was afraid of what other people would think of her when her face flushed all red. This regularly happened when she saw someone she knew at a random place like the supermarket, when she had an important talk at work, and in other circumstances where she was surprised to see someone she deemed important.
Cara told me she then had thoughts like, “I hope I don’t get a red face. I’m blushing. I can feel it. I’ve got to get away from here, or people will think I’m weak and ridiculous, or worse, they’ll ask me why I’m blushing and then I won’t know what to say.”
So I asked Cara to exaggerate the next time and to push her thoughts over the edge. I asked her to turn her thoughts into, “Oh my God. What if I get as red as a lobster? Or a tomato? What if I get so red that people wonder if I’m a cartoon version of the devil himself? And what if they say, ‘Cara, you’re so weak I can’t even continue to talk to you. I hate you!’ What if an online group would be created called ‘Red Cara’ and that group gets thousands of fans?” As you can see, we were slightly exaggerating here.
Cara diligently gave this a try the next time and sent me an e-mail reporting what had happened: as she was pushing herself over the edge, she had started to laugh, with and at herself. She realized how totally ridiculous her thoughts were and as a result, there was a disconnect from the anxiety.
The man she was talking to asked her why she laughed, and she responded, “Oh nothing, don’t worry I just thought of something funny I heard. So tell me, how are the kids?” And she continued the conversation.
This can be a powerful technique for two reasons:
It uses humor, the antidote to anxiety.
It instantly demonstrates that you have no fear of the fear.
Since you dare to push your anxious thoughts even further, you’re clearly proving to yourself you don’t fear them. This is super powerful.
Ben, another client, was a hypochondriac. He had several weird sensations in his body that scared him all the time. He visited many doctors, trying to get a diagnosis that never came. He had thoughts like: “I sense my heart just skipped a beat, I’m going to die and my life will be over. And oh no, I still want to see my daughter graduate high school. How will my wife then make enough money to support herself and the children?” A couple of days later, he noticed a strange color on his skin, convincing him that he had skin cancer. His train of negative, anxious thoughts often led him to get a panic attack on top of the generalized anxiety disorder he was living with. Not fun, as you can imagine.
So I asked Ben to use the same technique. I explained to him that I often call this technique the “According to Jim” technique. I don’t know if you have ever seen that old TV show, but Jim, played by Jim Belushi, plays a stereotyped dad married to his stereotyped wife Cheryl. Cheryl always worries about everything. Jim, on the other hand, often doesn’t worry about anything at all as real men supposedly do. Funny, since my client base is almost equally filled with women and men. In a certain episode, Cheryl starts the “what if?” train and launches some worries, to which Jim loudly replies, “What if? What if this? What if that? What if a cat gives birth to a dog?” That silly moment in that TV show helped me develop this technique.
Here too, I asked Ben to push his negative thoughts over the edge. He asked me for an example, so I told him:
The next time you think, “What if I’m having a heart attack?” simply add, “Yeah, what if my heart will start to beat out of my chest like I’ve seen in cartoons? What if I die here, r
ight now and it turns out the TV show The Walking Dead was real and I wake up as a zombie? Or what if the ambulance comes to get me and as they are driving me to the hospital they get into a terrible accident? And as the ambulance crashes the doors fly wide open and I get pushed out on the highway. What if five cars, one bus, and a semi-truck consecutively run over me while recording it with their dash cams? What if that video then goes viral on the Internet and my daughter has to see it? What if they play that video on the big screen during her graduation? And what if my daughter then starts to laugh and says, ‘I never loved my dad anyway. Look at what a loser and nitwit he is. He can’t even die properly...’”
Ben actually took notes and followed this script to the letter the next time he had a panic attack caused by his heart pounding fast.
As he gave me feedback afterward, he had the same reaction Cara had. The first couple of exaggerations slightly increased his anxiety, but as it came into the ridiculous zone he started to laugh as he continued to read the script out loud.
Again, the disconnect took place, and he realized his thoughts were as ridiculous as the script. They were not based upon reality. And hey, even if they were, “whatever happens, it’s OK. I’ll see it when it happens.” The power never lies in one technique alone but in a combination of what works well for you. This technique not only works well with anxiety; you can apply it on other simple worries as well. Push them over the edge and start exaggerating for fun. This will make it much easier to see how ridiculous some of your negative thoughts and worries are.
If you’d like to try this technique to see what it can do for you, there are two ways to go about this.
Do it on the spot. Your anxiety voice, the little cartoon devil, will start to talk and will make you scared. Here you simply join the conversation with, “Yeah, but you know what, what if...” and then you make it all worse, a lot worse! You must arrive in the realm of ridiculousness as you’ve seen with Ben and Cara.
If you find out option one is too hard because you’re not able to think clearly on the spot, that’s OK. You may be in a conversation or in the midst of having a panic attack at that time. Write down or record your anxious thoughts immediately afterward. So note the exact phrases your negative voice came up with, word by word. Then, when the wave of anxiety has totally passed, take a piece of paper and push the anxious thoughts over the edge, on paper. Write your exaggerations down, just like I did for Ben. Then keep that piece of paper with you, or put it in your phone.
The next time your mind starts to worry about something similar, take the script you’ve just created, start reading those exaggerations, and add them to the discussion your negative voice is having in order to simply push it over the top.
Please try this technique multiple times. It’s a really powerful one, and I find it helps most, not to say all people who gave it a try.
The fact of pushing your anxious thoughts over the edge will be scary because you’re probably trying to not have those negative thoughts at all.
How well has that been working for you?
Here we’re doing the opposite, we’re demanding more and more. This proves you don’t fear the fear anymore, which is very important, and will push it into the zone of humor, which is the antidote to anxiety.
The “Let’s Do This” Technique
The “let’s do this” technique is a powerful technique to overcome anxiety, especially when it’s a fear that is truly not real. This technique is a very strong form of exposure, often called flooding.
It works really well for:
Fearing that you are going to lose your mind and go crazy
Fearing that something bad will happen to you in a certain location that other people don’t fear at all
Having a fear of flying, heights, social interactions, etc.
Exposure is a great way to decrease and overcome some forms of anxiety naturally. Everything you now take for granted (walking, swimming, bicycle riding) was once very scary. But you exposed yourself to it at a young age and kept at it until the anxiety dissipated. It always does!
“Not true,” say some of my clients at first. “I’ve been doing the thing I fear for years, but my fear is still here!” They then give me examples like using public transportation while going to work, having a social phobia but still attending meetings, having a fear of driving/flying but still doing it—with fear—since it’s a professional obligation and so on.
And my clients are of course right, they have been exposing themselves to what it is they fear and the anxiety did stay. There is a clear and simple explanation for it.
If pure exposure—simply exposing yourself to what it is you fear—were enough, it would be fairly easy to overcome anxiety. Most of the therapists and psychiatrists I talked to when I still had agoraphobia were trying that technique on me too, and it never worked.
Let’s look for the difference.
Why does a kid learning to ride a bike eventually get over the fears he feels? What’s different compared to an adult trying to overcome his fear of driving while still taking the car to drop the kids off at school, and then quickly returning home?
The distinction lies in the mindset.
The kid thinks, “Let’s do this! I want to learn to ride my bike so I can go places and have fun with my friends!”
The adult thinks, “My gosh, I’m so afraid to drop the kids off at school with the car. Let me quickly take the car, swallow the pain, and get it over with as quickly as I can. I hope there won’t be too much traffic.”
The mindset is totally different. The kid knows the anxiety is just a side effect, and that it will eventually pass, and to be honest, the kid just doesn’t care about the anxiety. He takes it with him and does it anyway.
The adult, on the other hand, fears the anxiety. He wants to manage and control it as well as he can, but he dreads it. For every second of the activity, the adult will be fighting the anxiety, wishing it weren’t there and hoping that it will all be over quickly.
Where the adult tries to avoid the anxiety, the kid wants to feel the fear; he wants to ride his bike. He knows the fear comes with it. It’s his intention to feel the fear and overcome it.
Can you sense the distinction?
Chances are that whenever you are faced with anxiety or the panic attacks you have, you try to control them, manage them, avoid them, or run away from them. That’s how you give them power! You’re continuously confirming they are indeed something dangerous.
We only run away from things that are dangerous.
That’s why the “let’s do this” technique is so powerful. And trust me, it’s not just used by kids. Each and every day, some people say “I do” even though the divorce rate is through the roof, people move to a different state or country because they want a new challenge, people start businesses or invest all of their savings in a home, or they decide to get a divorce and start with a clean slate, they get a new job and leave a secure paycheck behind. Each and every day millions of people are taking risks that undoubtedly give them at least some fear. But they do it anyway! You might have done some of these, felt the fear, and took it with you without fearing the fear itself. You wanted a certain result, you knew fear was a byproduct, and you didn’t care.
The only fears that stick around are the ones you choose to fear. The ones where you didn’t use the “let’s do this!” technique.
This technique is really simple by the way. You say, “Let’s do this. Bring it on!” and you do that what you fear, with fear.
Did you ever jump from a high diving board into a pool? If you did, then you know it feels scary. But there’s a point, right before you jump, where you say, “Let’s do this!” You accept the consequences, and you jump. Ah, what a liberating feeling. That’s another example of the “whatever happens, it’s OK attitude.”
The “let’s do this” technique is pure exposure with a twist. It’s the intention to meet the fear, feel the fear, and then embrace it. Heck, the goal of the technique is
for the fear to be as big as possible, so you can find out what will happen on the other side once and for all!
Rianne was a client of mine who had severe dizzy spells in public places like while she was standing in line at the bank or at the checkout counter in the supermarket. When she first met me she often told me “and that’s when I had to get out of there and just went for the exit” or “that’s when I had to pop a Xanax to get better.”
I explained to her that she was feeding the fear. In her case, even though she could have picked any of the techniques described throughout this book or my audio course, I asked her to specifically use the “let’s do this technique.” I asked her to go look for a queue, a long one. I told her to get in line and think, “OK, dizziness, come on! Bring it on. Let’s do this! I’m not waiting here to get to the front of the line. I’m waiting here for you, dear dizziness!”
Badass Ways to End Anxiety & Stop Panic Attacks! Page 9