4 Common Myths About Anxiety and Fear

By Dr. Rob Purssey

At Brisbane ACT Centre our expert psychologists, psychiatrists and other therapists use the latest effective mindfulness, values and action oriented strategies to help you better handle anxiety, so as to feel better, and live better, quickly. Many common beliefs about anxiety unfortunately undermine effective approaches – and many such myths are commonly held by health professionals. Let’s take a look at some of these myths, to help untangle them, and therefore help untangle you!  (With gratitude to Professors John P. Forsyth and Georg H. Eifert – see below)

Myth #1: Anxiety Problems Are Biological and Hereditary

“Anxiety runs in my family – it’s due to my genes”. While anxiety often runs in families, that’s more due to learned behaviour than genes. Sure, we inherit some genetic predisposition to anxiety, just like we inherit a tendency to be outgoing, introverted, intelligent, muscular or athletic. But genes are not destiny, in fact at most contribute 30 to 40%. Newest genetic research shows epigenetics turn genes on and off – great news, as there is always room to grow, change and live more freely, whatever your genes.

Myth #2: Intense Anxiety Is Abnormal

Intense anxiety does not equal an anxiety disorder. We all need capacity to feel intense emotions like anxiety and fear for our own survival. Many studies have shown that various behavioral processes impact quality of life more so than anxiety symptom severity – particularly one’s psychological flexibility, which is the ability to flexibly handle difficult thoughts and feelings. Many people experience intense anxiety, even panic attacks, in their daily lives and continue to do what’s important to them. Intensely felt emotions need not be a barrier to the life you want to lead. They can be welcomed in as a vital part of you – and paradoxically, over time, become less central.

Myth #3: Anxiety Is a Sign of Weakness

Anxiety isn’t a sign of weakness, personality defect, poor character, laziness, or lack of motivation. Anyone can get stuck and off track because of emotional or psychological pain. All human beings have pain. Having pain is built into the human condition. You may believe you’re less “strong” than others, as they seem so be doing so much better. This is a grand illusion – fuelled by two sources: firstly our mind’s tendency to make inferences on limited information, bolstered by the “myth of normal happiness”. Secondly the mind’s tendency to compare ourselves with others and find ourselves wanting – a useful habit in tribal prehistoric society, not so helpful today as we compare ourselves instantly with others all over the globe.

Myth #4: Anxiety Can and Must Be Managed to Live a Vital Life

Of all the myths, this one is the most damaging, and central to the culture of feel-goodism in modern Western culture. This anxiety myth sets up emotional and physical pain as barriers to a life lived well. The message is this: In order to live better, I must first think and feel better. And only once I start thinking and feeling better, my life will improve for the better. This is a trap. Indeed Russ Harris in his excellent ACT self-help book has called it “The Happiness Trap”. The more we strive to get rid of certain feelings, the stronger they often become. The more we try not to think certain thoughts, the stickier they get. Try this one out – whatever you do, over the next 30 seconds, don’t think of a pink elephant!… So how did that go? What if you could simply have that thought, and others? Simply have those uncomfortable feelings, and others? AND step forward into life doing the things you care about?

Where These Myths Can Take You

These myths feed anxiety and can keep you stuck and cut off from the life you want to lead. Like a sticky spider web, when you get caught up in the web, the natural reaction is to struggle – and the more you struggle, the more tangled up you become. You become an anxiety management expert, searching for that magic cure or new solution. The hard truth is you won’t find a cure for anxiety in a pill, an online support group, or even in some solid psychotherapies known for offering “new, better, different” strategies for getting control over your anxious thoughts and feelings.

Whenever your mind tells you otherwise, look at your experience. Have these and other options worked in the long run? Does your experience tell you that they will work if you work harder, longer, or better at them? Do you want to be about dealing with anxiety for the rest of your life? Haven’t you worked hard enough?

By breaking free of these disabling anxiety myths we discover some very good news – you can quickly learn the skills to more effectively handle your worries, anxieties and fears far more effectively, and to live far more freely and fully – and all this within a few sessions. Contact our expert anxiety flexibility experts at Brisbane ACT Centre today.

Acknowledgement

Much of the above wisdom comes from the masters of ACT for Anxiety – John P. Forsyth and Georg H. Eifert. See their wonderful new book, the 2nd edition of The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety: A Guide to Breaking Free from Anxiety, Phobias, and Worry Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy here. The first edition of this self-help book was shown in a randomised control trial to greatly benefit those who used it – even without a therapist! And Georg and John’s fantastic 2005 textbook “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Anxiety Disorders: A Practitioner’s Treatment Guide to Using Mindfulness, Acceptance, and Values-Based Behavior Change Strategies” directly helped inspire and shape me into becoming an ACT therapist way back in 2006. All my thanks, Rob Purssey

How to Become an Emotional Resilience Superhero

Life is full of challenges, some more difficult than others, it’s how we respond to those challenges that matters most. Everyone has the experience of facing a challenge that was just out of their realm of control. Facing tough times like that can make us stronger, but how can you prepare for a crisis in the easier times?

“Emotional resilience” is how readily you can cope with stresses both small and large, and how well you can adapt to difficult circumstances in our life. Resilient people tend to be happier and teaching resilience to children can prevent depression, anxiety and increase grades in school.

Developing resilience helps you keep going when challenges, sudden or expected, make the going get tough. Research shows that natural aptitude is only a part of resilience, and it’s largely a learned skill which you can cultivate to turn yourself into a stress busting super hero.

  1. Get Clear About Your Purpose.

Developing resilience is a personal journey of learning your strengths and working on weaknesses. Everyone’s journey is going to be different but one of the most useful things you can do on that journey is get clear about your motive and your purpose. Without a strong purpose driving you through adversity you’ll quit or crumble. A strong awareness of purpose works like a lighthouse guiding you through the heaviest of storms.

How do you get clear about purpose? Think about who and what you care about day to day, and how you’d like life to be in the future. Ask yourself how you’d like to behave through whatever challenges you face. What’s motivating you? What are the values you want to express right now?

2. Everyday is an Opportunity to Improve.

Practicing awareness deliberately with low to moderate daily stressors will build resilience. Developing skills of being present, emotional flexibility and keeping focus on your values and goals in relatively safe environments helps when the stress level gets dialled up.

View small conflicts and daily trials as opportunities to develop your skills as they come. Be like a scientist running an experiment, and be curious about the results. Pay full respect to the successes – and focus also on the areas that have room for improvement next time – learning opportunities!

3. Thing Big Picture.

Get in the habit of paying attention to the things are going well in your life. Remind yourself of things you’ve enjoyed, that have been worth your while, and take time to be grateful for things you’re fortunate to have, friendship, food, and shelter. Getting in this habit before you’re under a time of stress will help you to maintain a broader awareness within a crisis.

People who view their crises as insurmountable problems are less likely to thrive, whereas framing something as a challenge makes it easier to work through.

5. Let Yourself Feel Things Flexibly.

We’re all capable of feeling a dizzying array of emotions simultaneously, even feelings that are seemingly contradictory. An Acceptance and Commitment Therapy skill is learning to ‘defuse’ from thoughts and feelings and notice other feelings in your rich emotional landscape. Research by Barbara Fredrickson, PhD shows that in a crisis resilient people are able to feel both traditionally positive and negative emotions simultaneously. They allow themselves to feel upset while also being able to celebrate the good things. Contrasting to that less resilient people are in crisis all of their emotions turn negative. When challenges strike let yourself feel a broad range of emotions, not just the negative ones.

For more here’s a great post by the terrific blog Barking up the Wrong Tree that summaries research evidence about life skills which we can use in everyday life. Here’s an article on building resilience by the American Psychology Association that we used in our research for this post.

Bonus! 6: Enlist the Aid of a Professional.

The psychologists at Brisbane ACT Centre can help you develop these skills and many more – so that you’re ready to face the challenges that crop up in life. If you wanted to run a marathon you’d train before the race so that you could perform at your best, and a good psychologist can help you just the same way. Working with an emotional resilience professional in the good times to help you work on your psychological flexibility skills can make the difficult times ahead a whole lot easier.

Managing Anxiety with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Mindfulness

By Bernadette Devenish

Modern humans have inherited genetics from their ancestors who learned over thousands of years how to survive in a dangerous world. Our modern world hardy resembles the life of our ancestors; however our minds do not know that. Our minds, similar to our ancestors, are still hardwired to keep us safe and threats as a result of modern living e.g. long work hours, deadlines, family and work stress, living close to others, traffic jams, and unrealistic time demands, evoke responses from our mind which are often subconscious and automatic.

These normal responses or flight fight stress responses are designed to pull us back or away from perceived danger to ensure our safety and survival. Take for example our automatic response when we leap away from a stick. Once we realise the object is a stick and not a snake, our mind and body settles and we carry on. Better safe than sorry is our minds approach. If the stick had turned out to be a snake, our minds automatic reaction would have kept us safe. Nothing is lost as far as our mind is concerned, to over-react and leap out of harms way. Our minds will always err on the side of caution and take the ‘better to be safe than sorry’ option in order to keep us safe.

The User’s Guide to the Human Mind – why our brains make us unhappy, anxious, and neurotic and what can we do about it” is written by Shawn Smith (2011) and is a useful self-help resource book that helps us to understand the processes of our mind. Shawn explains in easy to understand language how our minds work and why we are hard wired to react, particularly in times of stress, with behaviours cleverly designed to pull us back and away from perceived threats. We worry and become anxious, stressed, depressed, distracted and full of self-doubt for a reason – to ensure our safety and survival.

Our busy demanding lives pull us into a state of doing, rushing, and achieving with little time left for just being. Being with ourselves and fully present in this moment is practically impossible when we are constantly pushed for time, and feeling that we can never get everything done. Time for fun and adequate nutrition, exercise, and sleep are often sacrificed in our task saturated and fast paced lives. Living with this constant unrelenting stress day in day out, increases our vulnerability to physical and mental disease. Living at this rapid, constant pace can cause havoc with our peace of mind, health, and general feelings of contentment.  How then can we go with the flow of what has become the norm – busy demanding lives – and achieve a healthy balance toward vital, fulfilling, meaningful, purposeful, and satisfying lives?  More and more studies are showing that Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (or Training) (ACT) and mindfulness may be the answer, providing a vital link for us to maintain balance and stability while living under the constant pressure, stress, and demands of being a modern day human.

Minds are hardwired to keep us alive and safe, and any good mind that is doing its job would not allow us to move away from what is known and trusted.  Our mind keeps an eye out for us, always problem solving, and constantly churning out thoughts and stories which can trigger unhelpful thinking habits such as black and white and all or nothing thinking, worry, rumination, self-doubt, and procrastination.  The normal human mind is rarely in the present, tending to focus instead on problems, negatives, and things that are going wrong. Because negative experiences are more likely to threaten us than positive, there is an evolutionary reason for this natural tendency of the human mind. Minds focus on negatives, they worry, ruminate, dredge up memories and images from the past, linking these and our past mistakes to the present, predicting what could go wrong in an effort to keep us safe. Living in our busy, ever changing, modern demanding world sets us up for minds that can habitually use unhelpful thinking patterns, pulling our attention away from the here and now, robbing us of the opportunity to live a fully present and vital life.

Welcome to being a human, we all have minds that behave like this.  No human can escape the reality of experiencing pleasant and unpleasant thoughts and emotions, images and memories.  For example, if we feel joy and love then we are connected and attached to others. The risk of being connected to others is losing them which will involve the flip side of love and joy – sadness and grief. These are normal human emotions and we cannot have one without the other.  If we experience feelings of pride and mastery we would also have likely experienced emotions of fear, anxiety and self-doubt to get there. That’s the deal with being a human. We all have minds and they all come hardwired to experience thoughts, feelings, sensations, images and memories.  Some are pleasant, some are not, however, they are all normal human experiences designed to keep us safe.  Are you willing to have all of these normal human experiences?

Our minds can be tricky, frightening us and talking us out of doing things that we really want to do sometimes. Take for example speaking in front of a group of people. If we are not accustomed to speaking publically, our minds will likely throw up thoughts involving self-consciousness and self-doubt along with healthy doses of anxiety experienced in our body in the form of sweating, shaking, dry mouth, and pounding heart. Sound familiar? Your mind is just looking out for you, doing its job to ensure that you do not put yourself out in front of others, running the risk of being negatively evaluated and perhaps found wanting. Our minds cannot speak to us, they have only thoughts and feelings to send us messages and do their job – keep us safe. In the absence of words, minds have the normal human stress responses or fight flight responses to stop us in our tracks, ensuring that we remain quiet and not speak, reducing the threat of us being rejected by the group.  Changing our relationship to one of befriending and joining up with our thoughts and feelings as allies, accepting and allowing them to be just as they are without needing to judge them, push them away or running from and avoid them, stops our minds from pushing us around like this, dictating how we live our lives. Shifting our relationship with these normal human experiences helps us to see that our thoughts are just thoughts, and our feelings are just feelings. Thoughts and feelings cannot hurt us, and we do not have to believe everything that our minds tell us.  We do not have to buy into every thought and feeling that we experience.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or Training (ACT) and mindfulness help to change our relationship with normal challenging human thoughts, feelings, and experiences.  Promoting awareness of what our mind is up to, ACT and mindfulness skills build our ability to notice when our minds have pulled us away from the present moment.  ACT skills teach us how to notice, observe, and become curious of our internal and external experiences using a non-judgmental beginners mind. Taking this bigger picture perspective of our thoughts and feelings using ACT and mindfulness skills, helps to promote value based responds, breaking the habit of reacting unskilfully to the inevitable challenges of being a human.

Applying the six core principles of ACT to our daily lives has been shown to build psychological flexibility, helping us to adapt to the constant changes in our busy modern world. Mindfulness and ACT skills practiced regularly become habits which foster more helpful, workable, and skilful responses to our moment to moment experiences. Mindfulness and ACT skills build a sense of mastery and stability rather than living mindlessly, stuck in unhelpful thinking patterns.

Are you living the life that you want? Are difficult thoughts and feelings getting in the way of a vital, meaningful, fulfilling, and purposeful life? Do you want to know more about mindfulness and ACT skills that could change your life?  You may be eligible for a Federal Government rebate with a Mental Health Care Plan for visits to one of the skilled ACT Therapists working at the Brisbane ACT Centre at 7 Marie St in Milton. Visit the Brisbane ACT Centre website www.brisbaneactcentre.com.au  or phone 07 3193 1072 for more information.

Reference

Smith, S. T. (2011). The user’s guide to the human mind. Why our brains make us unhappy anxious, and neurotic and what can we do about it. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, Inc.