140 Don’t Let A nxiety Run Your Life
imagine. If there were a lion racing after you, your anxiety
would immediately draw your attention to this threatening
beast. You wouldn’t need to deliberate over whether you
should pay attention to the lion; it would automatically
happen. If anxiety didn’t focus people’s attention in this way,
we wouldn’t have survived as a species. In some instances,
however, people’s attentional processes can become biased.
They may attend to negative stimuli too frequently or for
too long, which can result in unnecessary fear or distress. In
the following sections, we will describe how biased atten-
tion plays a role in anxiety and what we can do about it. But
first, it might be helpful to examine how explicit and implicit
processes play a role in emotion regulation.
Explicit vs. Implicit Emotion Regulation
Remember the last time you were in a rush to get to work or
to an appointment? If luck wasn’t on your side, perhaps due
to heav y traffic or your alarm clock not going off, you might
have felt nervous or angry. In what way did you respond to
your emotions, and how did you know what to do? Did you
purposefully try to manage your emotions, or was it an auto-
matic reaction? In this section, we will review the difference
between actively (on purpose) regulating your emotions
and more automatic (unconscious) responses.
A good deal of this book has so far focused on the use of
explicit, or effortful, emotion regulation strategies for man-
aging your anxiety. In this context, the term “explicit” refers
to processes that underlie your efforts to actively respond to
and modify your emotional experience. These include
making a conscious and deliberate effort to regulate your