Practical Tools for a Less Anxious Life - Donald Robertson

What do you wish more people knew about how anxiety works and what causes it from your perspective?

Gosh! Well, anxiety used to be my specialism, although now I focus a bit more on anger these days. Um, but they're both, they're two of my favorite, uh, emotions. The main thing I think that people should know about anxiety, uh, is it's- we tend to think of emotions, uh, in a very simplistic way in our society. We have very simplistic language for emotions, and most people buy into something that psychologists sometimes call the hydraulic model of emotion, which is the idea that emotions are just like a blob of energy that sort of wells up inside you, and you can sort of try and push them down, or you can sort of vent them or whatever, and that's wrong. That isn't how our emotions work, basically. It's massively overly simplistic, unfortunately. That's what we sometimes call the folk psychology or kind of default psychology. So we get off to a bad start by not having the faintest idea how our emotions work in the first place. So the main thing I would say is I, I think of a, an emotion like anxiety, more like a recipe for baking a cake. Like it's got milk and sugar and eggs and raisins and whatever else you might put in. So the thoughts, actions, feelings, mental images, memories, all these things kind of get mixed together, and that bakes the cake of whatever type of anxiety that you've got. And the main thing people should know about treating anxiety, I'll hammer this home because it really is one of the main things. Uh, I like to call this the most robustly established technique in the entire field of psychotherapy research. How would you like to hear about that, right? And that's no exaggeration. So there's a thing that we use in CBT that we've known about for, like, well over half a century, maybe it's cracking on like seventy years or more now that it's been used in therapy, called exposure therapy, right? And it's probably the most reliable type of therapy that we have basically. It's used for phobias and other types of anxiety as well. So Chris, what would happen if you take someone that's got a cat phobia? Animal phobias are generally considered to be pretty much the simplest type of anxiety. It's pretty straightforward. There's other types of anxiety. It comes in flavors like social anxiety, panic attacks, PTSD, stuff like that, right? But we'll start off with a nice, easy snake phobia or, uh, cat phobia. So you get someone with a cat phobia, right, and you sling them in a room with a bunch of cats. What's gonna happen to their heart rate, for a start?

It's gonna go up a lot.

It's gonna go up. So it's probably gonna almost double, Chris, like as if you're sprinting or something like that, and it'll do that in less than five seconds. And that's a pretty robust measure of anxiety, generally speaking, certainly for phobias, it is, right? So that's easy. We start off with an easy question to kind of lure you in, buddy. Now I'm gonna ask you a slightly trickier question. What happens next?