In work today a question came up about what originally caused someone to be anxious. Whilst its often interesting to know why someone started to become anxious, in reality, to help them get over it, it doesnt matter too much. Anxiety can be maintained by entirely different factors to that which causes it. And what is the biggest maintaining factor in anxiety? Yes, you guessed it, avoidance.
Most phobias work like this - an initial frightening experience (lets say having a spider run across your hand when you were very little) leads you to become hypervigilant for the same thing happening again. You start avoiding anything which might lead to the feared experience happening - in the spider example, it starts by not putting your hand anywhere where you cant see it (the back of a wardrobe), then maybe not putting your hand on the floor in case they are there, and then perhaps you start avoiding dark rooms or dusty rooms, and perhaps you start cleaning a lot to get rid of cobwebs and so on. Before you know it, your whole life is organised around avoiding spiders, but you always feel as though you could do a bit more to prevent them getting near you, just in case. Your world becomes very limited, and you are constantly on high alert JUST IN CASE a spider appears. Knowing that its because of a scary spider experience when you were small isn't very helpful - what's helpful is knowing that your world is shrinking BECAUSE you are trying so hard to keep the spiders away.
Following on from my last BLOG about comfort zones, lets take for example someone who has a bad fall whilst climbing outdoors. Naturally they are anxious the next time they climb. However, knowing why someone is anxious doesn't really help us make them less anxious, because if that were the case, we would probably say, try not to fall off next time. What's likely to happen therefore is that they avoid getting into a situation which reminds them of the falling scenario, or a situation where they may possibly fall off. They stay hypervigilant about falling off, increasing their overall anxiety levels, and paradoxically making them more likely to fall through being too tense and not paying enough attention to the things likely to make them climb well. They start avoiding certain routes and so their climbing repertoire decreases, meaning they lose technique, and before you know it, leading anything becomes a problem.
But if instead we take the tack, what is maintaining my anxiety, then a whole new scenario opens up. What's maintaining the anxiety is the thought of having another bad fall in a similar scenario and doing all you can to try avoid having another fall. What we need to do therefore is try to have some good falls so that we can learn how to fall well, maybe learn some tricks to make ourselves more relaxed when we do fall, and so on. In essence, its not about avoiding falling off (which may be effective short term but long term is disastrous as it shrinks our comfort zone) but about facing up to that fear and learning how to deal with a similar scenario.
Human beings do like to know why, and so in some ways that curiosity is natural. However, we do need to accept that knowing why is not the same as doing something about it, and breaking the vicious cycle of anxiety is more important than perhaps than getting to the bottom of what caused the anxiety in the first place. So try thinking about all the (initially helpful) ways you try to avoid feeling worried when you are climbing, and see if you can start undoing them a little.
