Emotional Avoidance 185
anxious about a situation if you think that you might eventu-
ally need to use an avoidance strategy.
This suggests that if you want to reduce your anxiety,
you shouldn’t seriously entertain safety behaviors as an
option. Therefore, it will be critical to foster emotional
acceptance, which you can do by way of mindfulness. In the
exercises that follow, we will distinguish two types of fear
objects: external and internal. External fear objects are those
feared situations and feared stimuli that are directly observ-
able. For people with social anxiety, for example, public
speaking is an external fear object. Internal fear objects can
be slightly trickier to identify, as they can include physical
symptoms (such as shortness of breath) or even thoughts
(such as worry). People with generalized anxiety disorder
tend to experience excessive, uncontrollable worry about
multiple areas of their life and future uncertainty. As we
mentioned before, worry has been conceptualized as a
harmful emotion regulation strategy used to avoid unwanted
emotions, which can train you to perceive future uncer-
tainty as intolerable.
Because it’s difficult to physically expose people to the
things they worry about, researchers have developed inno-
vative techniques to apply the principles of exposure therapy
to repetitive negative thinking. In one study of people with
symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder (Lee and Orsillo
2014), some participants were asked to mindfully focus their
attention on their breath. Other participants were instructed
to listen to relaxing music or let their thoughts wander to
whatever topic they pleased. After undergoing these differ-
ent treatments, participants were given an emotional Stroop
task to measure their cognitive f lexibility, or the ability to
switch between thinking about two different concepts or to