Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway

"I have my copy here from when I was 20. I chose this as the first one because it doesn’t really take a clinical approach to anxiety. It very much positions anxiety as something common that lots and lots of people experience. I think that’s an extremely helpful way of thinking about it. My concern, and what I talk a lot about in my book , is that we’re starting to talk about all anxiety as a medical problem or health problem. And actually, unless you’re right at the extreme end, it’s just part of the human condition. That’s one thing I liked about this book. Jeffers also makes the point that, whatever it is that you’re worrying about, ultimately all fears or worries are about the fear that you won’t be able to cope if something bad happens. After all, if you believe that you can handle whatever might go wrong, you’d have nothing to worry about. I found that a really interesting concept. I still find it important because, when you worry about something, there are two components. First, you worry that something bad is going to happen. But, secondly, you also worry that if that bad thing does happen then you won’t cope. You can feel one or the other, or both of these. But people generally cope better than they think they’re going to. So first, if you get people who are prone to worry to track what they’re worried about, and then see if it comes true, the vast majority of the time, it doesn’t come true. But even when it does, it’s not as bad as they predicted it would be, or they cope better than they thought they would. In general, no matter how much you worry, things are generally not as negative as you think they’re going to be in advance. That is a concept that’s deeply useful for worrying because you can never fully reassure yourself that a bad thing won’t happen. So it’s a really useful extra step to say ‘okay, but even if it does happen, it won’t be as bad as I’m predicting, and there are ways to cope with it.’ For me that was a very useful aspect of this book. This is the truth about so much anxiety. It’s irrational and you know it is, but that’s not enough to stop you feeling anxious. With spider phobia it’s often not that you’re scared that they’re going to hurt you. You’re scared of the physiological reaction they cause, how panicked the spider makes you feel. The worry is not that the spider is going to kill you, but that they have a horrible effect on you, and that you won’t cope if you encounter one. If it were that simple, then no one would worry. Worry is extremely enticing, and seductive, and resistant to reason. The title in itself is so powerful and so important. Again, I think this is getting lost in the current public conversation about mental health. The goal with tackling anxiety is not that you eliminate it entirely, but that you should try and do things in spite of it. Avoidance is hugely tempting and common when you’re anxious. But it means that you’ll never learn that the thing you fear is not as bad as you think it is, or that you will in fact cope. When you avoid something, in that moment, your anxiety is relieved—for example you don’t have to deal with spiders. But your fear of spiders is maintained in the long run, because if you avoid them all the time you never learn how to cope. It’s an empowering, useful message to say that the goal isn’t that you get rid of anxiety altogether and can do the things that scare you. The goal is that you do them in spite of being anxious. Maybe, if you have extreme levels of anxiety, you will need a professional to help you do that. But always, always, the goal is to try and do it, even though you’re anxious. “Trying to change the way you think can be extremely demanding” Georgia O’Keeffe said, which I absolutely love, ‘I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life, and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.’ That’s a message that I wish was out there more in the public sphere. As we try and raise awareness and have sympathy towards mental health problems, I think accidentally we’re saying, ‘It’s okay to be anxious, that’s just who you are’. But actually, always, the goal should be to be sympathetic and to figure out how to help you do it anyway. You should always still try and do it. That’s the key message. Otherwise, the risk is that your life becomes too limited and small."