I love the Canadian Rockies, and a few years ago I had another opportunity to explore them. I was scheduled to teach in Vernon, British Columbia. With only a two-hour drive I could visit and hike trails throughout Mount Revelstoke National Park, which had several mountains topping 10,000 feet. In the months preceding my talk, I excitedly planned for this extra excursion. I booked a rental car, secured a bed-and-breakfast near the mountain, and planned my hike.
The day arrives as an exquisitely beautiful October morning. This park offers me a unique advantage. To access the trail head, I drive twenty-five minutes up the mountain and then have only a three-and-a-half-mile hike to reach one of the lower ridgelines. The trail will take me through a dense old-growth rainforest of giant cedars and pines, past a subalpine forest, and finally to high alpine meadows, within view of the ice-clad peaks of the Columbia Mountain Range.
I pull into the completely empty parking lot of Mount Revelstoke. I’m in a pristine environment, I can already see the snowcapped mountains, and I have it all to myself. Perfect. I head off, reminding myself to clap a few times as I get to each bend in the trail so as not to surprise any grizzly, since these 600-pound locals tend to amble down to the meadows in the fall to feed on the ripe berries.
It turns out I’m completely safe from the bears, but I am vulnerable to another predator: my obsessions. I begin to perseverate on a ridiculous topic that I am too embarrassed to reveal. Suffice it to say that I am exactly where I want to be right now, but I am totally not present. I am up in my head, and I am either obsessing or I am mad that I am obsessing. I see nothing of my surroundings because I can’t focus on anything external. Oh, great.
This continues ad nauseam.
Then suddenly I have this thought: What do you do for a living?!
This is enough to shake me out of my nightmare, and, just as quickly, up pops a plan. From that moment forward, anytime I hear myself obsess, I will subvocalize the following instruction to my obsession, “Thank you! Would you give that to me again?” Then I will turn my attention back to this beautiful setting.
I implement the plan instantly. I step back and hear my obsession, I ask for more, and then I turn back to my surroundings. Within eight seconds, up pops the obsession again. I repeat, “Thank you! [With enthusiasm, too.] Would you give that to me again?” I allow not one moment’s thought about whether the obsessions will disappear. I focus only on mentally stepping back to notice each obsession when it arrives, asking for more, and then turning my attention back to my hike. I don’t check if it is gone, and I try to not even hope that it will be gone. I remain committed to the strategy. I decide to act as though this is how I will respond even if these obsessions keep sounding off for the rest of my life.
And then . . . it disappeared. Ten minutes after I committed to my paradoxical response, the obsession is gone as quickly as it showed up.
Do you think you can do something like this? Because your responsibility is to aggressively beat down the tall, brick walls that protect your old, firmly held beliefs about how to manage your worries. You start by making three moves: personify, externalize, and simplify. Personify: give your disordered thinking an identity, just like we’ve been doing throughout this book by calling it Anxiety. Externalize: perceive it outside of you, not part of you, but in a relationship with you. We’ve been doing that here, too. Simplify: reduce this relationship down to its bare bones. Anxiety gives you messages that you are weak in the face of threat, that you are not capable of stepping forward, that you need to listen very carefully to its instructions and back away from this threat. Now the task is to turn the tables on your challenger. In this case, I spoke directly to my obsessions with the simple, paradoxical message of “I want more of what you’re dishing out.” Whenever we can engage the symptom in any way other than fearing it or fighting it, we have our best chance of beating it.
Faster, Please
Now it’s your turn. Imagine for a moment that roller coasters are not on the top of your thrill-rides-I-look-forward-to list. Now, however, you find yourself buckled in, listening to that haunting, rhythmic clicking as the train climbs the first big hill that inevitably leads to that steep, terrifying drop. So you start screaming at the top of your lungs, “I don’t want to do this anymore! Make it stop! I can’t take this! I can’t stay on this ride! I can’t handle it! Please make it stop!” But the roller-coaster operator, a sixteen-year-old suffering through summer employment, has no intention of pulling that emergency brake. The car is in motion, and you are not going anywhere else. You may agonize through the three-minute ordeal, hating every moment of it, but you are still going to experience it, whether you like it or not.
Now imagine holding a different attitude about the ride, one that is reflected in this subvocalized commentary: “Yes, we’re heading up that first big hill. Okay. This is okay. I’m scared, but I can handle this. In fact, I’m a little terrified, well, really, really scared now—ahhhhhhhhhhhhh! Wow, that was a quick fall. But I made it . . . Uh, oh. Still terrified. But I don’t want to stop. It’s perfectly fine that I’m frightened out of my skin right now. I can handle this.” Your executive voice is in First Responder mode, just like we discussed in Chapter 15. Anxiety isn’t expecting you to take on this kind of attitude about the threat it throws at you. It counts on you to resist and block and avoid at the “I can’t tolerate it,” “I can’t continue,” and “Please make it stop!” level.
If you decide to ride the roller coaster a second time, you could consider yourself engaging in an exposure practice, facing the threatening situation in order to learn how to tolerate it. But that’s not the game we’re playing. No, for our challenge, you won’t merely ride that roller coaster again. Instead, you step into your paradoxical “I want you to give me more of this” role. You purposely, voluntarily seek to up the ante by moving from the fourth row to the first row while you ask that teenaged ride operator to increase the speed a bit this time. You progress from agreeing to tolerate the ride to provoking the provocateur. “More, please!” So your messages become, “Make it faster! Make it more terrifying! I’m not uncomfortable enough! Not only can I handle this, I want this!” Rather than simply permitting and accepting that onslaught of discomfort and uncertainty, as well as all the physical symptoms that come with them, you encourage Anxiety to give you more. Keep in mind that your voice is quaking as you give the command. You are really scared! You aren’t pretending to sound macho. But you’re speaking courageously. You are frightened and you still push forward.
Let’s try another scenario. Imagine you are sitting onstage, one of four people about to participate on a conference panel, and you become aware that your knees have begun to shake. Distracted, you put your attention on your relationship with Anxiety for a moment. You encourage Anxiety to intensify the shaking in your knees, to make it so intense that the stage floor rumbles beneath you, and then you return your focus back to the discussion about to take place on the stage.
Let me repeat this description, because it’s an unorthodox move. Don’t try to make your knees shake more, don’t try to get the floor to shake. Ask Anxiety to serve in this capacity. “Please make the shaking worse. And give me some fearful thoughts while you’re at it.” Once you have delegated that responsibility, you are done with the transaction. Turn your attention back to whatever you’d like. You can look over your notes, scan the audience for friendly faces, or engage a panel member in small talk. If you get distracted again by your nervousness, you can compliment your challenger before you encourage it again: “Oh, that’s excellent. But still not shaking enough. Try harder, please.” Then return to your chosen activity.
It is possible that moments later you will have forgotten all about those shaking knees. Why? Maybe because they’re not shaking anymore. Or maybe because you decided not to care anymore. Anxiety needed you to beg it to stop, or to try to shake off the worry, or press your hands against your kneecaps like you always do, forcing them to remain still. In fact, all your challenger wanted was for you to resist.
But no, you do the exact opposite.
Anxiety needed you to give in to the panic; to cross one knee over the other, over and over again; to make some excuse and flee the stage; to run and hide and seek out comfort.
But no, you talk directly to your challenger. Who is the challenger at this moment? It’s Anxiety trying to scare you about your fear response. Once you’ve told it to keep provoking you, put your attention back on the present moment. You didn’t remove your uncomfortable feelings. They’re probably still there. But they don’t require your attention, so you are redirecting your focus. Connect with your surroundings again until your worry or your physical discomfort grabs your attention once more.
That’s how you apply this tactic as you take on a challenge.
This is not a permanent change. You won’t forever have to beg for doubt or feign excitement at discomfort. However, it is a good starting place. Why? Because it shifts your consciousness away from resisting the present moment. When we fight against our current experience, Anxiety wins.
Could You Drench My Shirt? Please?
I imagine that when worry has relentlessly nagged you in the past, all you wanted was for worry and its distressing symptoms to subside. Perhaps it has pestered you so much that a big lump appeared to develop in your throat moments before your keynote address, or you ended up sweating through your shirt before you even arrived at the family gathering. “Stop worrying,” you instructed yourself. “Relax. Enough with the sweating already! Calm down.” And when the symptoms increased, your pleading increased. “Stop freaking out! Quit it! Get out of my throat, you stupid lump!”
But with all your attempts to quiet your worries and doubts, up they come again. “You can’t do this. Trouble is coming, and you can’t handle it. You’re not ready, and you could make a fool of yourself. You must come across looking good. Don’t let anyone see you struggle. No one!” All these demeaning, pessimistic, perfectionistic messages and all this anxious worrying and fear of humiliation is producing the lump in your throat or causing those pockets of sweat to accumulate on the armpits of your blouse or generating whatever other symptoms you’re experiencing. Then when you react with “I can’t stand all this anxiety,” you produce even more symptoms.
So we have two problems in front of us: your doubts and insecurities, and your need to get rid of symptoms. To address both of these troubles, let’s personify, externalize, and simplify. Bundle all these messages of threat and fear up into “the stuff Anxiety is saying to me.” By doing that, you then have to address only this one identity, Anxiety, instead of having to counter every single new message that shows up in your mind. Now consider talking directly to Anxiety, making a completely different request. In fact, say just the opposite, one that is counter to the plea of “Please get rid of these anxious symptoms and these fear-
inducing doubts.”
In the same way that we can hit zero on the hotel room phone to speak to the reception desk, we have a direct line to our anxious preoccupations. I suggest that whenever you get distracted or threatened by fearful thoughts, consider speaking to your challenger one-on-one. It need not be out loud (addressing Anxiety aloud at the post office or during Temple or in the middle of a moving eulogy could lead to negative consequences), but the notion of talking directly to your challenger is significant. Give Anxiety a clear set of instructions, and make sure those instructions are the opposite of what Anxiety expects to hear. Then turn your attention back to the current activity, just like I was doing on my hike.
Have you ever had a hard time trying to fall asleep? You lie down, close your eyes, and attempt to put your mind into rest mode. After a few unsuccessful minutes, you tell yourself, “Look, I’m in bed, under the covers. Eyes are closed. It’s nighttime. It’s time to go to sleep.” Then several more minutes pass . . . “I have to get to sleep! I can’t believe I’m going to end up lying here for an hour. I can’t stand this.”
If in that very same situation you decide to lie in bed with the goal of not letting your eyes close, of making it your job to continue instructing your eyes to remain open, you’ll have a better chance of falling asleep. Why? Because you are responding paradoxically to your frustration about not falling asleep. Your urge to “fall asleep now” is giving your amygdala a more than subtle message that something is wrong. Therefore, it responds by juicing you up a little, and you become more alert. When you commit yourself to the task of keeping your eyes open in your dark bedroom, that move requires you to let go of your struggle with falling asleep. Your negative talk may not disappear, but it quiets down, so your amygdala eventually quiets down, too. And this is the setting that is conducive to falling asleep.
We’re employing this same paradoxical tactic with Anxiety in general, to tell it what it doesn’t expect to hear. We’re going to ask the challenger to give us more worries, more symptoms, more sweat, more discomfort . . . and we want it now. This catches the challenger off guard. “Anxiety, I want you to turn these pockets of sweat into pools of perspiration. I want you to drench my shirt in sweat. Soon, please!”
As with other parts of this book, I’m aware that this proposal sounds utterly ridiculous. You would never, ever want your armpits to sweat more than they have already. You’re probably saying, “Hey, doc, I’m embarrassed enough here. You want me to get more embarrassed?! What is wrong with you? Can I get my money back?”
Well, yes and no. Yes, if we’re talking about your fear of embarrassment, I want you to put yourself in situations where you may become embarrassed. You do have to go toward what you’re afraid of in order to get stronger. That’s a cardinal principle for most any tough endeavor. So I am asking that you seek out the opportunity for more embarrassment. But, no, I am not asking you to generate your embarrassment. The big twist is that you put yourself in the circumstance that has produced embarrassment in the past and you fear will produce it again now, but ask Anxiety to deliver the embarrassment to you. (Oh, and no, you can’t get your money back.)
Imagine what you would sound like if you begged for even greater problems. “Anxiety, I urge you to make me more embarrassed. I want you to make my cheeks bright lobster red. I’m at a seven right now on the embarrassment scale. Make it a ten, please. No, make it eleven.”
It’s absurd, yes, but it’s also formulaic. Whenever you feel threatened by your worried thoughts or your uncomfortable feelings in such a way that it interferes with your desired task, then request your challenger to increase whatever threatens you. If it’s that lump in your throat, ask Anxiety to grow that lump larger. Even better, get more specific about what you want. Ask your challenger to upgrade that lump. “Anxiety, I’d really like you to make it a golf ball-sized lump. Please!” And then what do you do? Turn your attention back to your current activity. You’ll talk to Anxiety again when it disturbs you again.
Of course, “make me more anxious” is not the same as, “I’d like to feel more anxious.” Nobody likes to feel anxious. But if anxiousness comes with the territory of trying something new or difficult, then we can’t let our fear of that distress distract us or cause us to back away. This intervention is about shifting the responsibility over to Anxiety in such a way that it no longer has the ability to dominate you. It’s about shifting your attitude away from “This is going terribly wrong. I can’t cope. It’s got to stop!” Our goal is to get you as far away from resistance as possible. Once you understand the strategy, you will realize that this current tactic has four tasks. First, step toward what you’re afraid of. Second, be cunning by pushing the responsibility of causing you more trouble over to Anxiety. This is a disruptive move in the relationship you have with the threat. Third, and just as important, let go of your need to remove your doubt and discomfort. For every one of us, these feelings come when we choose to expand our territory, to experiment with new behaviors, and to move toward difficult tasks. If you want to grow, you cannot run away from these feelings. Fourth, turn away from Anxiety and put your attention back on your current activity. You’re done with this transaction. If you get distracted again, that’s a whole new transaction.
If all this talking to Anxiety feels like a parody, you’re on the right track. “Thank you, give that to me again. This is not enough. Can’t you make it worse? Please make it worse.” But anxiety disorders are maintained by the person’s resistance. If you want to be a student of this therapeutic work, you need to realize that talking in this manner is not the central point; it is a means to accomplish our goal. The only reason to move to this theater of the absurd is to help you to stop resisting. The more you practice this extreme stance of asking for more, the less likely you will be thinking, Oh, no, this is bad. I can’t handle this. Eventually when you hear those resisting thoughts, you’ll notice them, decide they’re not helpful, and drop them.
You will need to find your own messages to deliver to Anxiety whenever you feel threatened, and that’s what we will address in Chapter 23. But in the meantime, keep in mind that we’re looking for messages that resemble the disposition of “Really, Anxiety? Is that all you got? Come on. Bring it!” When that’s your go-to attitude in the face of noisy worries and anxious symptoms, then you’ll be the craftiest, most cunning challenger Anxiety has ever met.