92 Don’t Let A nxiety Run Your Life
want you to take an all- or- nothing approach to exposure—
that is, to face your fear all at once or not at all. If you take on
too much anxiety in a single step, you may panic and back
out of the exposure, which would leave you even more afraid
to attempt it in future. The best exposures entail a delicate
balance between confronting and avoiding.
Integrating Mindfulness and Exposure
Mindfulness can greatly enhance your ability to con-
front your anxiety and reduce anxious avoidance. Notably,
mindfulness can increase your attentional capacity, which
facilitates greater awareness of your behavioral avoidance
tendencies. Primarily, mindfulness will enable you to be
more aware of your moment- to- moment activities so that
you can more closely examine your anxiety and its impact
on your behavior and general functioning. It may also facili-
tate decentering, or the ability to perceive your thoughts and
feelings as temporary and transient rather than permanent.
In this way, mindfulness allows you to change your relation-
ship to your anxiety by broadening your perspective and
learning to accept and confront your experiences rather
than running away from them. Mindfulness may also
enhance learning, especially from exposures, by helping you
more accurately describe and label your feelings, which will
give you greater insight into the relationships among your
thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, and behaviors.
Finally, mindfulness may change the way you think about
anxiety- provoking experiences. Without mindfulness, you
may be prone to think negatively about your experience at a
party, for example, and label yourself as socially inept;
however, by taking a more mindful stance, you may be able