The Truth Will Set You Free...

I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that you’ve experienced of the pangs of anxiety at times in your life. Most everybody has. You may even suffer from what we call an anxiety disorder. This is characterized by anxiety and worry that a person finds difficult to control, lasts over an extended period of time, and may or may not be controlled by avoidance, obsessive-compulsive strategies, and/or substance abuse.

If you do, don’t fret. You can be helped, as I and my cognitive behavioral colleagues have helped thousands of people rid themselves of this scourge. We do this through the five-step Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) process that I described in my previous blog, The Truth Shall Set You Free (from the ravages of unhappiness), published on November 20, 2017. Before reading on, please take a few minutes to go back and review it so that you have the best chance to help yourself experience less anxiety in your life going forward.

Good. Welcome back. Now, with this refresher, let’s work through this five-step REBT process to free you from your anxiety.

Step One: Take Responsibility For Creating Your Anxiety

Remember that anxiety is an experience at C – the end point of a process – the Emotional Consequence. It is not caused by some undesirable or negative thing that may have happened at A– the Activating Event – but by the Beliefs – the B – that you hold about it. Thus, thankfully, you cause your own anxiety by, if you will, your thinking or self talk. I say thankfully that you, not other people or events, are responsible for your experience of anxiety because, since you caused it, you can eliminate it.

So, with anxiety the C, there are two kinds of Activating Events at A about which people make themselves anxious. One is what we call Ego Anxiety. This is anxiety about the possibility of failing in some endeavor and/or being criticized, judged, or even rejected for it. This is the anxiety one experiences before a test, when showing up at some social situation, or upon facing some public performance. The second is called Discomfort Anxiety. It is the anxiety one experiences when facing some physically and/or emotionally painful circumstances – an operation, some unpleasant confrontation, even becoming upset itself.

So, dear reader, your first step in freeing yourself from the ravages of anxiety is to discern what is the Activating Event at A about which you get yourself anxious – then own, without blame, that you cause it. Is it a fear of failure and or looking bad in others eyes (Ego Anxiety)? A fear of discomfort (Discomfort Anxiety)? Or maybe both?

Now, right now, take a few minutes to think about the last few times you felt anxious (the C). What was it about: Failure? Disapproval or rejection? Discomfort? Once you’ve done that, go on to Step Two.

Step Two: Identify Your Anxiety Causing Irrational Beliefs

Alright, good work. You have now identified the slices of bread – the A and the C – to your anxiety sandwich. Let’s get to the meat.

The meat of your anxiety (the C) are the beliefs, at B, you hold about the possibility of failure and/or discomfort (the A). I have some wonderful news for you: through literally hundreds of research studies and millions of cases, we now know the exact beliefs that cause anxiety. Here they are. See if you don’t recognize yourself thinking one or more of these ways when anxious.
For Ego Anxiety…

• I must, absolutely must, do well and look good;

• It would be horrible if I didn’t; and,

• failing at that proves me to be a failure.

For Discomfort Anxiety…

• I must not, absolutely must not, experience that pain, discomfort, or hardship;

• It would be horrible to do so; and,

• I could not bear doing so.

There you have it. Those are the belief themes people hold to cause themselves their anxiety. Your job is now to observe your own thinking at the time you experience anxiety. Once you’ve brought these irrational thoughts to conscious awareness, you are primed to change them.
So, do it. Take one of those anxious experiences you identified in Step One. What were the thoughts in your head that drove it? What was the musting? The horriblizing? The self-damning? The I-can’t-stand-it-itis? Go.

Step Three: Seek the Truth

Good job. Now, here’s a secret: No belief is true just because it’s believed. It’s only true if it is true, that is, if it holds up to logical and evidential scrutiny. And that’s the problem with beliefs that causes anxiety – they are endorsed as absolutely, unquestionably true without reflection or skeptical analysis, even though they hold no water whatsoever.

So, whether you suffer Ego or Discomfort Anxiety, I urge you to ask and answer this question about your anxiety-creating beliefs: Based on logic and data, are my beliefs true or valid? If you do that, you will see that they are patently false. Consider that…

• they are perfectionistic and unattainable – you cannot and will not always do well, win approval, and have things be nice and peachy;

• they communicate absolute necessity, or a life-and-death situation, when, in reality, there is only desirable or better about the situation in question;

• they communicate that the outcome of a failure, rejection, or hardship rises to the level of a catastrophe on the scale of the Holocaust, a nuclear war, or all the collective child abuse in the history of the world, whereas, most likely, this potential setback or difficulty is merely undesirable, bad, and time-limited;

• they signify that some event is unstandable, meaning they will end your existence, which, of course, they won’t; and,

• they, generally from one failure, rejection, or hardship, hardly define the whole of who you are, which obviously they do not.

Again, pause your reading, and reflect on the beliefs you identified in Step Two that caused your anxiety. Think hard about them. Why might they be invalid? Why are they illogical? What evidence can you muster to refute them? The goal is to get – really get – how absurd and phony they are. Over time the Step Three process of seeking the truth will weaken and eventually release the hold these nefarious beliefs have on you.

Step Four: Cognitive Re-education

Once you’ve revealed the utter irrationality of those beliefs that cause your anxiety, your next step is to work to ingrain and habituate more rational ones. They would be anti-perfectionistic, anti-catastrophizing, and anti-self-damning ones, as per:

For Ego Anxiety…

• I want to do well and look good, but, hey, I’m human, and can’t always do so, so all I can do is my best;

• I won’t like it if I flub this up and show my fallibility to people, but it’s hardly a horror that will ruin my life now and forever; and,

• failing at this neither defines my whole life nor generalizes to my whole existence to make me a failure.

For Discomfort Anxiety…

• I sure would like it if I would suffer no discomfort or hassles when dealing with this situation, but there’s no law of God or nature that says I must not – if I do, I do, too bad;

• While I won’t like it, it’s part of life, not horrible, unstandable, and, in fact, time-limited;

• Going through this discomfort or hardship hardly ruins my life, then making everything else miserable too.

Now get back to work. Take the Activating Event (the A) about which you experienced anxiety (the C) and write a rational replacement belief along the lines of the above (at B). This is what you will want to rehearse every day until it gets habituated.

Step Five: Work, Work, Work

Great job. But I have some bad news for you. One run-through of this process is unlikely to rehabilitate your thinking such that you will rarely experience anxiety going forward. In all likelihood, you’ve thought, and believed, your irrational, anxiety-inducing beliefs thousands of times such that they are deeply endorsed and engrained. So, like any other change, you most likely will need to work daily for a few months to get over the hump. To help you, I want to strongly urge you to integrate two strategies into your daily routine:

(1) Find a standard time each day, say from 7:00 to 7:30 pm and repeat the first four steps of this REBT process regarding some anxiety experience. You could do it about an event from the past, that very day, or something anticipated in the future. It matters less what the Activating Event (the A) is than uncovering, skeptically disputing, and re-indoctrinating new rational beliefs (at B) into your thinking.

(2) Six times a day– at breakfast, mid morning, at lunch, mid afternoon, at supper, and once more before bedtime – take two minutes to rehearse your new rational, anti-anxiety beliefs. Focus on some event – past, present, or future – and forcefully assert the rational beliefs you created in Step Four above.

Going Forward

So there you have it – the five-step process to rid the ravages of anxiety from your life. You can make the changes, I promise you, but only if you work hard at it. Can you? I know you can. Will you? That’s up to you. Please do the work, as you are worth it.

I look forward to communicating with you in my next blog, which I will devote to showing you how truth can set you free from the scourge of panic attacks. Till then, be well, and live with passion.