Confronting Your A nx iety 71
What Is Avoidance?
One surprisingly simple way to overcome your anxiety is
to consider your characteristic ways of behaving when you
are anxious. Your behavior is incredibly strongly linked to
your emotions, thoughts, and bodily sensations, all of which
are highly activated during times of anxiety. In fact, behav-
ioral responses to fear and anxiety rarely, if ever, originate
from an actual object or situation; instead, they arise because
of the problematic relationship you have to your fears. The
ways you choose to behave during times of anxiety both
contribute to and reinforce this maladaptive relationship
over time. Thus, one crucial way of changing how you feel
during moments of anxiety is to behave differently than you
have in the past by purposefully and gradually subjecting
yourself to the things that make you anxious and that you
normally try to avoid. Later in this chapter, we will teach you
some techniques for doing just that.
As mentioned in the introduction, anxiety, as well as the
way you behave in response to your anxiety, is a highly sub-
jective experience that varies from person to person. Even
your own anxiety symptoms and their intensity vary depend-
ing on the situation and its context. If you want to test either
of these notions, think about the various reactions people
might have if someone let loose a mouse in a crowded lecture
hall. Some people might freeze or scream, others might
jump onto their chair for safety, and yet others might have
only some mild or f leeting anxiety symptoms and then
watch the panicked crowd with amusement. These various
reactions are based on the ways in which people relate to the
prospect of coming into contact with the mouse.