Why Facing Your Fears Isn't Working

If you're doing the work and feel like your exposure practice isn't paying off, this one's for you! I walk through what I think are some of the most reasons facing your fears might not be moving you forward. Plus a couple of reminders most of us need to hear (recovery is measured by what you're doing with your life, not by how anxious you feel doing it!). Most "stuck" exposure routines just need a small adjustment, and this is where to start. Plus: sign-ups are open for the RECLAIM cohort kicking off July 1st!


SOURCES:
-Craske, M.G., Treanor, M., Conway, C.C., Zbozinek, T., & Vervliet, B. (2014). Maximizing exposure therapy: an inhibitory learning approach. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 58, 10-23. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4114726/ (The inhibitory learning framework behind doing exposure right, including expectancy violation, consistency, and varied context.)

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Welcome back to the 18 Minutes Podcast. I'm Amanda, and this is the show where we take everything that is scary, isolating, and confusing about fear and anxiety, and we turn it into something you can actually work with. Last week we talked about healthy habits that might be keeping you stuck in a fear loop. And I told you that this week we would get into even more detail about why our recovery efforts might not be working. So this is the second half of this kind of two-part series. I hear quite often I'm doing the work, I'm practicing, I'm facing my fears, nothing is getting better. What am I doing wrong? If that's you, this episode is for you. We're going to talk about why facing our fears might not be moving us in the direction we're trying to go, and a handful of adjustments to your practice that take it from something that is just exhausting you into something that actually moves you forward. Before I get into the list, I want to be really clear about something. If you have been putting in this work, you've been practicing, you're practicing feeling your feelings, accepting your feelings, and you feel like it's not working, that doesn't mean that this process is not going to work for you. In my experience, people who feel like they're stuck are not unfixable. They're just missing one or two key principles that they can adjust. And once they do and things start to click, they start to move forward. As always, I am not a therapist or a medical professional. Everything I share on this show is based on my own experience with fear and anxiety, my journey through recovery, and the research that I do for the show. This is not a replacement for therapy. Please take only what's helpful to you, leave what isn't, and listen to your medical and mental health professionals first. If you're new to the show, welcome. So glad you're here. Please go hit follow or subscribe wherever you're listening because a new episode comes out every Friday morning, and I would hate for you to miss the next one. If you're a returning listener, welcome back. Just a couple quick housekeeping things before we really get into it. If you ever have a question that you want answered, I go live every Thursday on TikTok at 3 p.m. Central. That is a great place to pop in, ask a question, say hi, um, clarify something from a recent podcast episode. I love hanging out in that space and connecting with you there. This podcast episode was actually born out of a question I got on my live a couple weeks ago. And signups are still open at the time of this recording for the Reclaim Group Coaching Cohort that kicks off July 1st. It's a four-week small group coaching program where we do the exact kind of work that I'm talking about today and for the upcoming weeks. It's very fear-focused. How to get at the root of the lens that we tend to look at the world at, which is through a lens of fear. So that's what reclaim is. If that sounds like something that would be helpful to you, you can go to the link in my bio and sign up today. With that, let's talk about why facing your fears might not be solving your problems. I want to start with something that I think is incredibly important and maybe obvious, but I think it's worth saying anyway. You cannot feel your brain physically changing. There is no sensation when a new neural pathway is created. It happens completely outside of your scope of awareness gradually over time. So there is definitely an element of trust the process here. We can't actually feel the changes happening in real time. What that means is you can do the work of facing your fears and overcoming fear and be doing it effectively and not feel any different for a while. The first part of really good fear exposure practice can feel exactly the same as the months prior to starting. And oftentimes worse at times, because you are voluntarily exposing yourself to situations and feelings that you used to avoid. That was my experience, at least. And I'm telling you that up front because if you don't know it, you'll quit. You'll think it's not working, and you'll walk away from the exact thing that could actually help you move forward in the long run. So if you're doing the work and you're not feeling different yet, please don't take that as a sign that it's not going to work for you. The changes might still be happening. It just takes a while for you to feel them consciously. Which brings me to something I want to point out to you because a lot of times the metric that we use to measure whether or not we're doing this effectively is not a good one. If you are measuring whether your practice is effective by asking, am I feeling anxious less often? Am I feeling scared less often? Or did that situation, that feeling, whatever fear you're exposing yourself to, not feel scary? You are going to be disappointed for a long time, even if you're actually getting better. I recommend moving away from measuring success that way. Instead, ask yourself, are you doing more than you used to be willing to do? Are you saying yes to things you used to say no to? Are you driving further than you used to? Are you staying at the party longer? Are you taking the trip even with the fear? Even with the racing thoughts, even with the adrenaline surges. If your life is getting bigger, if your world is expanding, that is a telltale sign that you are doing the practice correctly or effectively. It is working for you, even if you still feel afraid. The feelings of fear will get less intense over time, but that happens much later than the behavioral changes. So measure how you're behaving, not how you're feeling about it. Okay, now into the reasons. I would guess the first one I'm going to talk about is probably the most common. It's white knuckling. White knuckling is when you face a scary thing, but you spend the whole time fighting the fear. You are gritting your teeth, you're doing every technique you can think of to feel more calm. And you're telling yourself, I just have to get through this. And eventually that scary situation is over, and you think I survived, and then you dread the next time you have to feel uncomfortable just as intensely, if not more intensely. I'll give you an example of what this looked like in my own life. For years, I would white knuckle my way through every social situation that was outside of my own home. I would go to a restaurant with my friends, and immediately after sitting down, I would start thinking about how long I was going to have to be there and whether or not I could tolerate it. I would decide what I was going to order based on what I thought would take the least amount of time to cook and eat. And I would ask for the check as soon as it was socially appropriate to do so. And I would be getting up to use the bathroom multiple times throughout the meal to give myself breaks from feeling trapped at the table. I was constantly fighting against the feelings of fear and never allowing myself to just feel them. And every time I went to a restaurant, I was just as terrified as the time before because I wasn't giving my brain a chance to learn anything new. I was just gritting my teeth and surviving. And here's the thing about white knuckling everyone who struggles with fear encounters their triggers regularly. We all have to drive, we have to leave the house, we have to go to doctor's appointments, we have to talk to people, we have to hear triggering information. So if just being around or exposing ourselves to a trigger was enough to make us better, then all of us would be better by now. The reason we're not is because most of us are running on the same pattern, which is bracing against it, fighting it, and doing everything we can not to allow ourselves to feel fear, anxiety, stress, etc. We're bracing against it, fighting the feelings of fear, and just surviving. Many of us get stuck in this cycle for years, and it doesn't move us forward to the life we're trying to live. The primary adjustment I think you could make here is acceptance. You go into the situation willingly, and instead of gritting your teeth and fighting against the feelings the whole time, you allow them to happen to you. You stop trying to make it stop. You're not gritting your teeth, you are allowing the wave to move through you while you stay present to your life. That's the kind of habit that actually teaches your brain a new lesson. The next reason why your practice may not be working for you is if you are sneaking in safety behaviors. This is when you technically face a fear, expose yourself to an anxiety trigger, but you sneak in a safety behavior to take the edge off. You might go to the grocery store, but you keep your AirPods in the whole time listening to a podcast or calming music. You might go to a party, but you have your partner on speed dial in case you decide at a moment's notice that you need to get out of there. And you might drive on the highway, but only with mints or cough drops in your car because you don't like the feeling of your throat being weird. So you're technically there. You are facing the fear, but you've added in a little something so that the fear doesn't actually get to do its work on you. And what your brain learns is I went to the grocery store, and the only reason I was okay is because I had my AirPods and I listened to calming music. This was the whole point of last week's episode. The healthy looking thing that you're leaning on during a fear confrontation might be the exact thing that's keeping you stuck in this loop. If you listen to the same podcast every time you go to the grocery store or anytime you drive anywhere, the podcast is not helping you recover anymore. It's helping you cope just enough to avoid actually learning something new. One way to change this is to look for safety behaviors that you might be using and start gradually, purposely letting them go. And maybe just one at a time if that works best for you. The fear exposure is supposed to be uncomfortable. And once you've made it comfortable, it's not really doing the work anymore. Okay, this one is the most important to me. So many people message me and tell me that they're working on their anxiety, and then what I find out after asking some questions is that they're just trying to handle the anxiety-inducing, fear-inducing things that come up in their everyday life. They're letting their triggers dictate how often they practice. The problem is that organic exposure, meaning when anxiety just happens to find you, is almost always a situation where you're going to be caught off guard, feeling unprepared, not in the right frame of mind, and way more likely to fall into using safety behaviors and avoidance patterns. You don't learn nearly as much from those types of situations, and they can be super discouraging. Scheduled, intentional facing of fears is what allowed me and so many other people to move forward. You sit down and you say, Tomorrow at 2 p.m., I am going to drive on the highway for 30 minutes. I'm going to feel anxious on purpose, and I'm going to stay anyway. That's a totally different posture. You're going in on purpose with an empowered mindset and enough time with the intention of allowing the feelings to be there without fighting against them. The habit change for this one is literally just putting it on the calendar. Pick the situation, pick the time, pick the duration, and then do it like an appointment. You would be amazed at how much faster you make progress when you are dictating the schedule and not letting the exposures be random. Another reason you might not be moving forward as efficiently as you want to is if you're not being consistent. Practicing intentional facing of fears once a week is probably going to move you forward slowly. Practicing five times a week is going to move you forward a lot faster. There's really no way around it with this kind of work. Your brain learns through repetition and the frequency matters. And I know that might be tiring to hear. Doing five exposures to anxiety triggers every week is tiring. It is difficult. Some of those days you're going to feel like you can't and you'll have to do it anyway. But this is the trade. The faster you want to move toward freedom from fear, the more often you're gonna have to practice. The slower the practice, the longer this whole thing stretches out. And you get to pick. As far as specific frequency, please talk to your therapist about which practices and how often work best for your specific situation. I also want to mention something that I shared in the show notes a while ago. Um, and I realize it's possible that zero of you are interested in those sources, those papers, but they're always there in case you're curious in the future. The research on exposure work shows that variety of context matters as well. Practicing the same thing in the same place over and over again is not going to be as effective as practicing in different situations for different amounts of times with different feelings. If you're only practicing in one context, it makes it more likely that the fear will come back outside of that one context. The fastest path forward, theoretically, is consistent practice in different places at different times with different triggers. Another really important reason why this might not be working as well as you'd hoped is by getting the intensity wrong. Exposure practice works best when you are at a five or six out of ten on your anxiety scale. A therapist can help you determine what exactly that is for you. But essentially, it's enough that you're really feeling it. Enough that the thoughts and feelings that you're afraid of are actually showing up. But not so much that you spiral all the way out and have to leave the situation. If you go too hard, like a nine or 10 on your personal anxiety scale before you are ready to attempt that, your brain is not going to learn anything new, or at least not anything positive. You're probably going to just traumatize yourself a little and teach your brain that the thing you were afraid of is actually as scary as you thought it was. People do this all the time, especially when they're tired and discouraged and want to just rip the band-aid, and it tends to backfire. The other direction is just as common. If you're at a two out of ten, you're barely anxious during it, you're also not giving your brain a chance to learn anything new. The exposure is supposed to bring up the sensations and the thoughts that you're afraid of so that you can actually be with them and prove to yourself, to your subconscious mind, that you can be with them and also be okay. If you're not actually feeling the fear during the practice, then you're not building anything new. You're just going through the motions. And I don't want you to waste your time. The thing you could do to make this more effective is to calibrate. Pick something that is hard enough to be uncomfortable, but not so hard that you have to bail. If you're not sure where to start, start smaller than you think and work your way up if you feel like you need to. Better to start at a four and work your way up to a seven than start at a 10 and completely crash out. Last one for today, and this is another sneaky one because it can hide in what could be an otherwise really good and effective exposure. You start the exposure, you start feeling the feelings, you're hanging in there, the anxiety gets more and more intense, it gets really, really uncomfortable, and that is the moment you decide to leave. You walk out of the store, you call your partner to come get you, you pull over on the side of the road and you turn around and go home. You technically did an exposure, but you left at the hardest moment. And what your brain probably just learned is that fear actually can get to a point that is unbearable. And the only thing that saved us from having to bear that impossible weight was escaping. So next time the anxiety could come up even sooner because your brain is bracing for the peak that it knows is coming, and the only thing that worked or saved you was escaping that situation and those feelings. To build the new pattern, you have to ride the wave all the way through. You have to stay through the peak, through the part that is the most difficult, so that your brain can learn that nothing terrible happened. That's the practice that actually changes things. If you can't quite stay all the way through yet, that's a sign that this exposure is probably a little bit too intense for where you're at now. And maybe you should take it down a notch or do a smaller version of that exposure until you're ready to get back there. Again, your therapist can help you dial that in. Before I wrap up, I want to just pause here for a second because I just gave you a list of six things you could potentially be doing wrong in your practice. I don't want you to walk away from this feeling worse or like all of the effort you've put in has been a waste. Every single one of these is fixable. There's a small specific adjustment for each one that you could try. And like I said before, in my experience, most people are just running one or two of these patterns, and after they make the adjustment, things start moving in a direction that feels better to them. You are not broken, and the work that you've been doing is likely not broken either. It just needs a little bit of tweaking. So a few things I hope you take away from this episode today. One, you cannot feel your brain changing. If you have been putting in the work and you're not feeling any different, please don't take that as a sign that it's not gonna work for you. Two, measure your progress by what you're doing, not how scared you feel while you're doing it. If your life is getting bigger, if your world is expanding even with the fear, that is a win. Three, if your practice isn't working for you, if it's not moving you forward generally, then run through this list and go over some of the items with your therapist. Are you white knuckling instead of accepting? Are there hidden safety behaviors? Are you scheduling it, doing them often enough, calibrating the intensity and staying all the way through the peak? There's probably an adjustment or two you can make in there to make your practice more effective for you. And that's all for today's episode on why facing your fears might not be working for you. One more quick reminder about the Reclaim cohort. Sign-ups are open and the first session kicks off July 1st. If you are wanting to move from fear to a life of freedom and you want real-time support figuring that out, go get your support. If you have questions about anything I covered today, please send me an email at amanda at the 18minut.com or send me a DM on Instagram and TikTok at the 18 Minutes. You can also jump into my TikTok live every Thursday at 3 p.m. If you enjoyed today's episode, please feel like subscribe wherever you're listening so that the next one shows up in your feed. And if you have a second, please consider leaving a rating or a review. Those are genuinely so helpful in other anxious findings. Thank you so much for being here, and we'll see you next time.