OVERCOMING THE FEAR OF FEAR: Challenge Your Thinking

As psychologist William James said, “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” To gain mastery over your anxiety, it’s very important that you learn how to challenge automatic thinking, such as catstrophizing and overestimating the probability. To do this effectively, we need to collect evidence. We must resist the confirmation bias and look for information that disconfirms our fears rather than confirms them. We must closely examine our thoughts to evaluate their accuracy and logic. We must learn to choose the rational thought over the fear-inducing thought. The most helpful technique for evaluating a thought is to examine the evidence that supports it.

In a sense, you need to consider yourself a scientist who runs “mini-experiments” designed to gather data to test out whether your thoughts are correct. It’s important to conduct a logical analysis of your thoughts when they first enter your mind. To do so, first remind yourself that just because you’re thinking about losing control, dying, and so on doesn’t mean you will. Instead of treating those thoughts as reasons to become more frightened, evaluate them objectively. Let’s go back to the two common thinking errors that lead to anxiety so we can learn some techniques to challenge these thinking errors.nn~ EXAMINING THE EVIDENCE ~

The way to challenge overestimations is to examine the evidence for your probability judgments.

Remember to treat your thoughts as guesses rather than facts. Before you make a judgment, examine the evidence for your prediction. Your interpretation of any given situation represents one of many possible interpretations. It is important to explore alte
ative interpretations, especially given the knowledge that when we’re anxious, we tend to be biased in our interpretations. The goal is not to remove anxiety conce
ing real threats but to minimize your thinking errors in situations where there’s no real threat.

To evaluate the evidence for a prediction, ask yourself:n+ What are the true odds of this happening?n+ Has this ever happened before?n+ What’s the evidence that it won’t happen?

Asking yourself these questions requires that you consider all the facts and all the evidence before predicting the likelihood of something’s happening. For example, a friend may act in a hostile or cold manner. You assume that he’s displeased with you, yet you’ve overlooked the possibility that he may feel angry with someone else or has merely had a bad day. In terms of anxiety sensations, you may assume that a tingling in your left arm is a sign of a heart attack, overlooking the fact that you’re in good health and have experienced the tingling many times before without suffering a heart attack. It’s also possible that you’re making negative predictions on the basis of a very limited set of past examples. For instance, you may predict that you’ll become anxious because you’ve become anxious in similar situations before. However, you may overlook many instances in which you weren’t anxious in those situations. You may, in fact, confuse low probabilities with high probabilities or think that negative outcomes are certain rather than just possible. The base rate for events that result in disastrous consequences is very low; that is, they occur quite infrequently—fortunately! But, because these events are highly memorable, we tend to misjudge how often they occur.nn~ DE-CATASTROPHIZING ~

De-catastrophizing means imagining the consequences of the worst-case scenario and then gathering information about the threat to critically evaluate the true danger. You can conduct this kind of analysis with events that are both likely to happen (such as shaking when you feel anxious in a public situation) and unlikely to happen (such as fainting when panicked). If the worst that’s considered likely to happen is death or loss of a significant other, then de-catastrophizing may not be effective, because for most people, it’s not always appropriate to say that it’s not so bad to die or lose someone very close to you. Fears of death or loss are generally more appropriate to the analysis of overestimation; that is, how likely is it that you’ll die the next time you panic and how likely is it that you’ll lose someone close to you? It’s worth noting, however, that in some cases it could be very helpful to more closely examine what would be so awful about the possibility of dying. An example is the case of a woman with hypochondriasis who believed that leaving her children motherless would be horrible because nobody would care for them as she did. In this case, examining the underlying meaning of her fear of death helped her identify and know how to address the specific concern. In most cases of predictions of death or loss of a loved one, however, challenging the probability overestimation is the best first step.

The next time you panic or consider an upcoming situation about which you’re worried, ask yourself: what’s the worst possible thing that could happen? What if you did faint when you panicked? What if you did look very shaky when speaking to others? Your first reaction to these questions might be something like “That would be awful” or “I couldn’t stand it.” However, when you think carefully and critically about these assumptions, you’ll find that you have prematurely assumed them to be catastrophic. If you analyze your thinking, you’ll probably find that, in actuality, you could tolerate any misfortune that happened. It’s only the statement “I couldn’t stand it” that creates the anxiety, that makes us think we couldn’t manage.

De-catastrophizing can be summed up in one phrase: so what? What if the worst-case scenario did happen? What would you do? Could you survive? What would you do if you saw others faint, shake, or turn red? What would you say to others if they expressed similar fears?

SUBSTITUTING WITH REASONABLE THOUGHTS: WHAT ELSE COULD YOU THINK?

It’s important to learn how to replace your negative thoughts with more reasonable, helpful thoughts, because without a set of alte
atives, it’s difficult to resist falling back on your previously established thinking errors. To start off, it can help to simply write down the alte
atives (even if you don’t yet completely believe them) or repeat them in your head a couple of times. If you practice these alte
ative thoughts, eventually they’ll become more automatic and will come to you almost as easily as your previously established negative thoughts. Throughout this process, you’ll also need to explore the alte
atives and reshape them so that they become thoughts that you believe and so that they can be integrated into your system of thinking about yourself and the world around you.

Let’s try to challenge some thoughts commonly associated with anxiety and panic. Then we’ll try to challenge some of the thoughts you have when you feel anxious or when you anticipate a panic attack.
Remember, after you’ve challenged a thought, provide yourself with an alte
ative so you can replace the automatic thought with a more reasonable and helpful way of thinking.

Excerpt from: OVERCOMING THE FEAR OF FEAR: HOW TO REDUCE ANXIETY SENSITIVITY (New Harbinger Publications)