Why anxiety does not disappear when you fight it harder
Written by drs. Pauline Bos
Psychologist NIP and educational psychologist, Amsterdam city centre
Everyone who lives with anxiety for a while lands on the same idea: just push through. Do not give in. Do it more often. For some people that works, up to a point. For the rest the problem only grows, and that is not a matter of insufficient character.
The short term reward of avoidance
Avoidance works. That is the problem. The moment you steer around a situation, your tension drops immediately. Your nervous system registers that as: that was dangerous, and staying away helped.
So next time the threshold is higher, not lower. The fear grows not because you meet it, but because you go around it. With fear of flying that is most visible: the longer someone does not fly, the more impossible it becomes.
The same applies to subtler forms. The drinks you skip, the question you would rather email than call, the lane you never take.
Why pushing through is not enough on its own
Exposure only works if your tension actually drops during the situation. If you get through it with your jaw clenched and only relax once it is over, your nervous system learns nothing new. You survived it, but the evidence that it was safe never arrived.
The same goes for the aids people use. A pill before the flight, two drinks before the party, always the same seat near the door. They make the moment bearable and at the same time keep alive the belief that you could not manage without them.
On top of that, the fear is often not about the situation but about your own reaction to it. Being afraid of blushing, of shaking, of panicking. Then avoiding the situation is not even the point: you are trying to avoid your own body, and that never works.
Anxiety does not go away because you overcome it. It goes away because your nervous system learns something new.
What does work
Two things at once, usually. First we use EMDR to take the charge off the experience that locked the fear in. That can be a real event, but equally an image you built in your head of what might happen.
Then we practise the situation itself, in steps small enough to do and large enough to matter. With VR exposure that can be done in a controlled way: the same take off, ten times in a row, without it costing you a flight or a presentation.
The difference with pushing through lies in the dosing and the measuring. We only move a step further once your tension at this level has genuinely dropped. Not once you have endured it.
How long does that take?
For a clearly defined fear such as flying or heights, three to six sessions are often enough. Social anxiety usually takes a little longer, because there are more situations and the belief about yourself plays a bigger part.
What surprises people most is not that it works, but how little talking is involved.
drs. Pauline Bos
Psychologist NIP and educational psychologist, Amsterdam city centre
More than 25 years with people, behaviour and the stories people have come to believe about themselves.