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Entry tags:
anxiety
I came across this quote in someone's post:
Anxiety is practising failure in advance. Anxiety is needless and imaginary. It’s fear about fear, fear that means nothing.
Bullshit.
Anxiety is *learned response*. You get it because you been "trained" to fear failure (or other things) *because* in the past bad things have happened in similar situations. and do so with enough consistency to "train in" the response.
It's a conditioned reflex, and no more "imaginary" than any other.
It's not "practicing failure". It's the fight/flight response getting triggered by *danger*.
Try telling someone who has anxiety because of past abuse (physical or emotional) that their anxiety is imaginary or means nothing. and you be yet another abusive jerk.
Instead, you have to treat it like a phobia. Expose them to small, controlled version of the anxiety inducing situations. As they learn that bad things don't necessarily happen, you can expose them to "bigger" triggers. And less controlled situations.
But you need to introduce the "less controlled ones very carefully.
At this level the same rules that apply to things like dog training apply. If one out of ten situations goes wrong, it weakens or invalidates the lesson. Meaning you have to start all over.
Remember, they learned to be anxious over dozens, if not hundreds of events that *hurt* in some way. They aren't going to learn to not expect the pain after a small number of events where it doesn't happen.
BTW, just like training a dog, you gotta reward "good" behavior. So, for example, ripping into a kid for getting stuff wrong, but never praising them for getting stuff right (and yes, treating getting it right as "expected" and thus not worthy of any special notice counts) is like to make them very anxious about that behavior and not willing to put in any more effort than it takes to avoid getting yelled at (or worse).
Anxiety is practising failure in advance. Anxiety is needless and imaginary. It’s fear about fear, fear that means nothing.
Bullshit.
Anxiety is *learned response*. You get it because you been "trained" to fear failure (or other things) *because* in the past bad things have happened in similar situations. and do so with enough consistency to "train in" the response.
It's a conditioned reflex, and no more "imaginary" than any other.
It's not "practicing failure". It's the fight/flight response getting triggered by *danger*.
Try telling someone who has anxiety because of past abuse (physical or emotional) that their anxiety is imaginary or means nothing. and you be yet another abusive jerk.
Instead, you have to treat it like a phobia. Expose them to small, controlled version of the anxiety inducing situations. As they learn that bad things don't necessarily happen, you can expose them to "bigger" triggers. And less controlled situations.
But you need to introduce the "less controlled ones very carefully.
At this level the same rules that apply to things like dog training apply. If one out of ten situations goes wrong, it weakens or invalidates the lesson. Meaning you have to start all over.
Remember, they learned to be anxious over dozens, if not hundreds of events that *hurt* in some way. They aren't going to learn to not expect the pain after a small number of events where it doesn't happen.
BTW, just like training a dog, you gotta reward "good" behavior. So, for example, ripping into a kid for getting stuff wrong, but never praising them for getting stuff right (and yes, treating getting it right as "expected" and thus not worthy of any special notice counts) is like to make them very anxious about that behavior and not willing to put in any more effort than it takes to avoid getting yelled at (or worse).