fear is futile (by casimirpulaskiday)
Your fears are signposts. Read them. Accept them. And then walk in the opposite direction they’re trying to tell you to go in.
- Mark
That’s the topic we’re all going to be posting on this Wednesday. If you’d like to join us, click here to submit your post.
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Sometimes to get out of complex, destructive cycles happening in my life, solutions are often simple things that I throw into those cycles as paths to help me get out.
The first thing about any of my destructive cycles I’ve noticed is that they revolve around a mindset. They arise out of some need that I feel that needs to be fulfilled. And if it isn’t fulfilled, I go right back into doing something destructive - even if I know it isn’t the most logical choice.
I see it like eating fast food. The experience of eating that food is amazingly tasty at first, but makes me feel bloated and guilty after - because I knew what I was eating. And I knew what the effect would have, but I did it anyway.
When my behaviors repeat like this, at first I only see two choices: to continue those behaviors, or stop them. This can be incredibly limiting, and sometimes the path to stopping them altogether can seem like light years ahead. So I give myself more choices - more opportunities. I try to think of ways I can minimize my destructive behaviors instead of quitting them cold turkey right away.
One of my biggest fears used to be talking to people - especially people I didn’t know or know well. I would go out of my way to avoid approaching or meeting people. And I would feel detached because of that, and at the end of the day just relapse into those feelings.
I knew that I couldn’t instantly get the confidence to stop feeling afraid. So I started with the people I knew best, and slowly tried to meet new people through them. It helped so much knowing I was comfortable with someone I knew, which helped build up this new behavior of talking to people.
The thing that really helped me there was knowing there was other paths to take to get where I wanted to be. I knew how I wanted to feel, but I often jumped to the extremes of how I thought I should be. That shot me back to my old behaviors, instead of taking what I had with my friends, and making some new behaviors out of it.
Whenever I feel destructive behaviors taking hold now, I think hard about the things in my life I can move around to give me some paths to take. If they don’t exist, then I have to make them - but there’s always a way if you’re motivated enough to make a change.
- Matt
When you deal with an anxiety disorder, your brain rationalizes everything, so it’s difficult to remember all of the things I didn’t do because I was insecure or waiting for confidence. There are two reasons it’s difficult to remember: 1) Because there were so many, and 2) Because I made up all sorts of rationalizations at the time so it seemed completely reasonable not to do whatever it was I wanted to do. I had reasons!
I didn’t know at the time that reasons are a sure sign something unhealthy is about to happen.
One thing I’ve learned in the process of recovering from my anxiety disorders is that confidence is a big con. It’s really not necessary to build up your confidence to do things. Confidence is a completely artificial, fabricated barrier we invent for ourselves. We may as well say you need unicorn farts. You don’t need any special feeling to do something. You don’t need unicorn farts to do what you want. And you don’t need confidence to do what you want. You just go and do it, regardless of what your brain says.
Although, obviously, if your goal in life was to collect unicorn farts, then you’d need unicorn farts. Likewise, if your goal in life is to have confidence, then you’d have to go and get some confidence. But if that’s not your purpose in life, why are you waiting for it?
- Mark
When we’re talking about stigma, we’re really talking about the fear of stigma. People don’t open up about mental health because they’re afraid of what others might say or do. It’s a fear of a possibility. And avoidance of something based on anxieties about other people is no different than any other social anxiety or OCD behavior. In other words: the fear of stigma is part of the illness.
We know that trying to avoid feeling anxious is one of the causes of anxiety disorders. We try to avoid that negative experience and, unfortunately, end up only creating more of the very experience we’re trying to avoid. I tried to fight anxiety for years and years with compulsive avoidance behaviors and it only made me an anxious wreck.
The path to beating anxiety is to realize there’s nothing to beat and, instead, to accepting it into your life. So if we’re trying to fight stigma because we don’t want to experience it, aren’t we engaging in the same unhealthy avoidance behaviors we engage in that we already know only make mental illnesses worse?
I don’t think campaigns to defeat stigma are effective. Having a campaign to defeat stigma is like having a campaign to defeat anxiety. In fact, I think campaigns to defeat stigma only educate people on how to be afraid. I’m really lucky I only watch Korean television. If I saw the how-to PSAs you North Americans put out about bullying, mental illness, and stigma, I’d be terrified to talk about my own mental health.
So how do we get over the fear of stigma? The same way that research shows we get over any fear: by doing the thing we’re avoiding because of that fear. Just as you get over your fear of heights by going to a high place and showing your brain that you can be afraid and still act according to your values, so to do we get over the fear of stigma by putting ourselves in situations we fear being stigmatized in and, instead of reacting to that fear, accepting and acting according to our values.
You can’t defeat a fear of flying by standing firmly on the ground. You can’t defeat a fear of falling by complaining about gravity to everyone you meet. You can’t beat your social anxieties by avoiding people. And we won’t defeat stigma until we stop trying to defeat stigma and instead just start talking about our mental illnesses (yes, it’s a paradox, but it’s a healthy one—learn to love it). Stigma happens, just as planes crash, people fall, and we say stupid things at parties. But do you want the fear of a possibility to control your life?
- Mark
(via we-are-all-earthlings)
Lesson #1: Act. Don’t react.
It’s unfortunate that cartoons are geared towards kids because cartoons are full of lessons that most adults haven’t learned.
Today’s useful lesson comes from a series called Bleach. Bleach is about a guy named Ichigo trying save his friend Rukia, who is going to be executed for giving him some of her powers (Rukia is a Soul Reaper and she makes snow come out of her sword—it’s all very complicated so don’t worry about that stuff). Ichigo needs to beat all of the other Soul Reapers in the afterlife and save Rukia. In the clip linked below, Ichigo has just arrived in Soul Society and is in the midst of his first fight with a Soul Reaper named Renji. Ichigo is losing badly. But in the midst of getting chopped up by Renji’s sword, Ichigo remembers back to his training, when his teacher taught him to stop doing everything because of fear. Ichigo realizes that when he was thinking about protecting Rukia, really he was only trying to get rid of his fear of being responsible for her death. He wasn’t resolved to save her. He was resolved to get rid of that fear by saving her. Saving her was only a means by which he could avoid an unpleasant feeling. Here’s the clip: http://youtu.be/XCO4sqcqM4Y?t=1m32s
I’ve heard people struggling with OCD say that they have OCD because they’re too nice, they care too much about other people, they can’t stand pain in the world, they don’t want others to get physically or emotionally hurt, etc. I used to think that, too. I thought I was really focused on other people. But really, OCD is an incredibly selfish experience. I felt like I was fighting for other people, but really I was fighting to not experience the anxiety and other negative emotions I’d experience if something bad happened to somebody else. It wasn’t about them. It was about me avoiding an experience. It was about me being motivated by fear. Like Ichigo, I wasn’t fighting to save somebody, I was fighting because I WAS AFRAID of what would happen to them. It’s a totally selfish motivation: to get rid of that fear. It was all about how I felt. OCD is actually a very selfish experience and the worse it gets, the more totalizing that selfishness becomes.
When you do something as a reaction to anxiety because you want to feel safe or certain or right, it’s always selfish, even if it involves other people—the purpose is to make you feel a certain way. Getting over your OCD or any other anxiety disorder is all about learning to act according to your values instead of reacting to your fears. And that’s the switch that Ichigo makes in that clip. So I’d say Ichigo is doing the right things to keep his mental health on track.
Learning to act for things instead of because of things is a change that really helped me get over OCD and it’s probably a useful one for anyone who is dealing with an anxiety disorder or any other mental health issue.
Act. Don’t react.
- Mark
I used to have a big fear of talking to people. It didn’t matter which social situation I was in – whether it was with friends or family, or whether I was in big or small groups of people. But somehow, every time I got the chance to talk to other people, I tended to mentally freeze and such a small part of what I was thinking would actually get out.
I don’t remember the exact moment everything started to change. Actually, I don’t think it was one moment – it was more of a gradual process. But things really started to change when I moved to where I am now – in Vancouver, Canada. Although it wasn’t far from Washington in the U.S., which is where I grew up, it was far enough that I didn’t know anyone or anything much about the city I was going to.
I started to overcome my fear as soon as I had to get my own apartment in the city. I made a habit of trying to chat to the people showing me the rooms – not just about the apartment, but about the city, similar tastes, etc. It helped me tremendously, by pushing myself just enough to change.
Another thing that helped was trying to shift my thinking towards conversation with other people. Instead of just latching on to that freezing fear when it was my turn to talk, I took to being sincerely interested in what other people had to say. If I felt myself losing the connection in a conversation, I tried really hard to ask something like a personal question to keep it going. People can be awesome, and you’ll only find out if you talk to them.
I noticed pretty quickly that talking to people, at least for me, almost needed to be treated like an exercise. If I didn’t keep it up regularly, I felt myself recede back to freezing up. I’ve improved so much, but it’s definitely still a challenge I need to be aware of every day.
- Matt
