The Three Skills together offer several strategies and perspectives for soothing anxiety. Before visiting them, it might be helpful to review what anxiety is and what role it plays in protecting you.
I like to think of anxiety as a natural reaction to a threat whether it is real or imagined. In many respects, it’s a kind of radar for threats that are coming at you. This radar is forward looking in time, meaning it works for the immediate and distant future. It’s important to remember that everyone has this radar system and it started working for each of us from birth onward. To use a familiar phrase that is not meant to diminish its intensity for many people, anxiety is a feature not a flaw.
Of course, not all people have radar systems that are perfectly tuned for all threats. Some people’s radar is overturned for some threats — perceiving missiles when the threats are only butterflies. Some people’s radar is blind to certain categories of threats like those that produce physical harm while others are super-tuned to perceived threats like threats to their social status.
In this context, the goal is not to eliminate anxiety altogether because it often serves a useful purpose. Sometimes, after all, threats are real and addressing them ahead of time is critical for well-being. In other words, the flight or fight response we all have serves us well – perhaps more so in the caveman past than today since in modern times the ratio of real to imaginary threats has decreased (real threats down, imaginary threats up). Instead, the goal is to tune your threat radar so that the threat is seen as a missile when it’s a missile and a butterfly when it’s a butterfly.
This kind of tuning is helped by two steps:
- Embracing, even appreciation, your anxiety as an early warning system that serves a purpose.
- Using one or more of The Three Skills to reduce the fear associated with the perceived threat so that is is much easier to assess its potential for harm.
The first skill that comes to mind for reducing the fear associated with a threat is Not Keeping Score. Not scorekeeping directly addresses anxiety that arises from a fear of judgment or rejection based on expectations that you have for yourself. In each case, the idea is to not fall into the habit of reacting as if negative judgment or rejection is more threatening than it is. In other words, avoid triggering the flight or fight response unnecessarily.
For example, fear of judgment from an audience can trigger most people’s anxiety. Perhaps you’ve experienced performance anxiety yourself? Have you ever asked yourself, what’s the worst that can happen? And what are the consequences of that outcome?
Imagine giving a eulogy. Such speeches are causes of performance anxiety but is the fear in proportion to the likely outcomes? Even a poorly performed eulogy is unlikely to result in the speaker being criticized or ostracized. Perhaps you will protest that doing a poor job is embarrassing and shaming and I will point out the scorecard(s) you are keeping about your performance and how that contributes to anxiety. The take home message is that imaging worst case outcomes – outcomes that are often exaggerated in their severity – is making missiles out of butterflies with the associated uptick in fear and anxiety.
The bottom line is that we can reduce the level of anxiety we feel by being aware of our expectations (scorecards) and by more accurately assessing the risk of being rejected (driven from our tribe) associated with performance. The threat a butterfly poses is different than the threat of a missile.
Other performance situations that cause anxiety are a first date, a sales meeting, a theatrical performance, a job interview, any kind of intimacy, etc. In every case, I would remind you of the scorecard(s) you have created that relate to your expectations for yourself and ask you to either intentionally revise them so they are more reasonable or dismiss them with the three steps described in the book The Three Skills: Not Keeping Score (catch yourself, ground yourself in the present, and redirect your thinking to something you feel appreciation about or awe of, etc.).
Of course, not all anxiety and the underlying fear is triggered by performance situations. Often anxiety arises from an anticipated negative outcome. A severe weather or financial threat may be the source of distress. A health concern, real or imagined, can be a source of fear. I’m sure you know someone who has searched the internet for the cause of symptoms and only increased their level of unease. And let us not ignore the observation that our news and social media industries intentionally play to our fears as a strategy for capturing our attention.
When anxiety develops from fear of a future outcome, the skill of Mastering Acceptance can be helpful. The core of mastering acceptance is identifying the fear that is at the root of distress and then soothing it using reframing or by recalling other fear activating events that were eventually mastered.
For example, learning that you are being audited by the IRS can incite fear about fines and even imprisonment. One strategy for reducing this fear is contacting a tax expert for perspective and what steps to take to resolve any issues with the IRS. In most cases, the fear of an audit is out of proportion to likely outcomes. And, if you’ve been audited in the past, you can further reduce any fear by recalling you’ve been through such a process before and came out okay (if that’s the case).
In summary, soothing the fear associated with anticipated negative outcomes will automatically reduce the anxiety about the outcomes – increasing acceptance. It’s another way putting one of the three skills into practice can reduce anxiety. See The Three Skills: Nurturing Intimacy and Mastering Acceptance for a detailed description of the Mastering Acceptance skill.
One final note before closing. Chronic anxiety can be seen as a symptom of a seriously mistuned early warning system. My observation is that this mistuning is something that can take hold early in life and be reinforced by confirmation bias – only attending to the information that favors one’s beliefs.
So, for example, the child that sees people around him or her as rejecting will feel anxious around others and ignore when someone is not being rejecting – depriving themself of the comfort of being accepted. When a belief like this is reinforced, it dominates how the person thinks about others and can trigger chronic worry or a chronic flight or fight reaction. In a very real sense, the person sees the world differently and more threatening than others. This perception is literally hard-wired through learning.
In these cases, both skills (Stop Keeping Score and Mastering Acceptance), if applied with discipline, can start to retune the warning system, and provide some relief in the process.
I’m happy to answer questions about this post using the comment section below. Be well.
This post expresses the opinions and ideas of its author. Its intent is to supply helpful information on the subjects covered. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical/mental health help for any symptoms, concerns, or conditions that the reader may have had or may be experiencing. If the reader has symptoms, concerns, or conditions, the reader should consult a medical/mental health professional. The author/publisher specifically disclaims any and all responsibility for injury, damage, or loss that the reader may experience as a direct or indirect consequence of following any suggestions or advice given in the post.