Confronting Your A nx iety 75
to confirm their findings. In the second study, results gener-
ally stayed the same, but there was one noticeable difference:
people were willing to pay more money to avoid fearful expe-
riences than they were to re-create feelings of excitement,
calm and tranquility, or self- pride (Lau, W hite, and Schnall
2013). This study tells us that people are fairly well motivated
to avoid feelings associated with anxiety and fear, even at the
expense of experiencing more positive emotions.
In our own work in treating anxiety, we routinely encoun-
ter people who choose avoidance- based responses despite
knowing it unfavorably affects their psychological well- being
and in spite of more rational ways of coping. To understand
why this happens, we have to turn to psychological theories
on early learning experiences, including conditioning. In
psychology, we define learning as a long- term change in
behavior based on an experience. There are generally two
types of learning; both are forms of conditioning (learning by
association), termed classical and operant conditioning.
The Impact of Early Learning
Experiences on Anxiety
Almost all children develop a fear of the dark (also known as
nyctophobia) during their toddler years. It’s an interesting
phenomenon because during infancy, most babies content-
edly sleep in their cribs in dark rooms, yet around age three,
darkness suddenly becomes cause for concern. Toddlers
tend to overestimate the probability of danger in a dark
bedroom because they have enough imagination to believe
monsters could be lurking in the shadows, but they don’t yet
have enough cognitive ability to distinguish fantasy from