first aid: anxiety

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Do you ever think of yourself as a powerful mystic who routinely foretells the future? Well, you are. We all are. Our habit of looking into the future, of making predictions, plans, and preparations, is so natural and commonplace, we don't even notice we are doing it. Most of the time. But that all changes if our predictions include the likelihood of a misadventure befalling us; when that happens, we experience a distinctly uncomfortable feeling, scientifically classified as "wet knickers". Oops! Sorry, my bad. Maybe it's called "anxiety".

Anxiety can be characterized as the anticipation of that which we dread. When functioning as it should, it provides us with a valuable warning signal. Unfortunately, anxiety is not always well-behaved or reality-based, and when it becomes excessive or inappropriate it can vary from a minor annoyance to a major disability. Such dysfunctional anxiety occurs in many guises including identified disorders such as Panic Disorder, Specific Phobia and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. These disorders represent a natural warning signal gone awry. Some are fairly easy to fix; others take more time.

Anxiety:
Anxiety relief
More anxiety relief
Relaxation exercise

Elsewhere in the Library:
Introduction
First Aid: Individuals
BluesBusters
First Aid:Relationships
The right stuff
Tool Room I
Sub-modalities
Parting thoughts

Phobias

Specific phobias are a surprisingly common form of anxiety. Their essential feature is an immediate, intense anxiety response elicited by the phobic stimulus. Common phobic stimuli include animals such as snakes or dogs; insects such as cockroaches or spiders; environmental aspects such as heights or water; situations such a driving over a bridge or riding in an elevator. Many individuals struggling with phobias are consciously aware that their fear is unnecessary and unreasonable, yet it continues. Obviously, some non-conscious part does not share their conscious mind's opinion! Fortunately, a number of techniques have been developed that usually are very effective at correcting specific phobias. The technique presented here has also proven to be an effective treatment for post traumatic stress disorder and other disorders that are triggered by traumatic memories.

The Phobia Delete Procedure

... when done by a trained professional, is often very effective. In fact, this procedure is so effective, even do-it-yourselfers can often get positive results. If you plan to use it, you may want to make a tape of the entire procedure. That way, you can relax as you give yourself step-by-step instructions; listen to one step, pause the tape, do the step, listen to the next step, pause the tape, do the step, etc.

A word of advice: please, do not rush willy-nilly into using this, or any other, procedure. If you have a specific phobia you would like to "undo", that's great. Just use your common sense when applying this technique. For example, do not listen to a phobia delete tape while driving a car. Another example: if thinking about your phobic stimulus tends to collapse you into a severe anxiety reaction, do not attempt this procedure on your own; seek professional help. Finally, if you decide to use the phobia delete, you may want to first employ your gopher to find out if your anxiety reaction is serving some important function for you. If it is, I suggest that you generate new behaviors to take care of that function before you playfully blast your phobia to smithereens.

Before we begin, let's get a baseline response. Imagine that you are in the presence of the phobic stimulus that, up to now, has elicited an anxiety/fear response in you. For example, if you had arachnephobia, pretend there is a spider on your hand...

How did that feel? Make a mental note of the intensity of your old response to the phobic stimulus, and put it away now.

Recall the first, last, or a particularly intense episode in which you experienced the phobia-triggering stimulus.
Consider that experience as a made-for-tv "trauma movie" (you know, low budget) in which you see yourself going through the entire event on a TV. The starting point of this movie should be a still picture of you (i.e., one frame of the movie) just before anything upsetting begins to happen. The end point of the movie is a still picture of you after you have gone through the entire episode and have regained your emotional equilibrium, feeling safe and secure again. In other words, the two anchor points, one at the beginning and one at the end, are still pictures of you feeling fine, with no stress.
Imagine you are in a room with a TV and your trauma movie is about to begin. For the time being, you see the screen in black and white, no color. On the TV, you see your black and white starting point frame (you appear relaxed in that slide).
In a moment, I will ask you to run your black and white movie, starting at your starting point frame and ending at the end point frame. I'm going to ask you to run that trauma movie all the way through at high speed... with everything moving much faster than normal. But before we do that, I want you to imagine that the real you floats up and out of your body and into yet another room where you will watch, on a closed circuit TV, your body, back in the first room, as it watches the trauma movie.

Say what??!! The real you is safely removed to a room where you watch a TV. On that TV, is a picture of your body, in a different room, watching a different TV with your trauma movie on it. What I want you to notice right now is what color pants your body in front of the other TV has on (or, if you're like fuzz-bucket here, what color spear you have beside you).

Remember, your body, in another room, is still looking at a black and white slide, while the real you is watching everything from another room. OK. Now we're ready.
Turn the black and white slide into a movie, and run that black and white movie, at high speed, all the way through to the end point. While the movie is running, the real you will be able to see your body, as both the real you and your body watch the trauma movie. When you reach the end, stop the movie allowing it to become a black and white slide once more, namely the end point slide.
Next, add color to the end point slide. Then, allow the real you to float into the colorised end-point slide. In a moment, we are going to run the movie backwards, in color, at a high speed, back to the starting point. But this time it will be as if you are an actor in the movie; you will see what you saw out of your own eyes, hear what you heard with your own ears, but this time, everything will be rushing by backwards... like a rewinding VCR tape, only you're in the movie, not watching it.
Ready? Then run the color movie backwards with you going through all the motions backwards. When you are done, stop at the starting point.
Next, float out of the now color slide (it's still, no motion) back into your body.
That's it for the first time through. Think about something else for a minute, and then repeat the entire procedure. Do it three more times, for a total of five times through... and you are done.

If you are like most people who do this procedure, you won't think anything has changed... you don't feel any different... until you encounter the trigger stimulus again. Be prepared to be surprised. Remember the baseline you did before the phobia delete procedure? Once again, imagine the trigger stimulus. How do you respond this time? Can you tell a difference?

The more you know, the more you will be able to help yourself; it's those little details that often make the difference between a roaring success and a so-so improvement. The above procedure was adapted from an NLP technique called," the fast phobia cure." I highly recommend that you read Using Your Brain for a Change by Richard Bandler. It's packed with useful information and effective techniques.

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