Getting comfortable with anxiety

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Transcript

00:00Anxiety often feels completely overwhelming, completely intolerable, it really hurts.

00:06And so of course we feel like we have to do something, we have to try and make it go away.

00:11The anxiety feels so bad that we're like, there must be a way to get rid of this,

00:16because I just can't live like this.

00:19But the paradox of anxiety is actually if we can stop ourselves from trying to make it go away,

00:26from trying to control the worry, it often loses some of its power.

00:30Not all of it, but a lot of it.

00:33And so what we're talking about here is this idea of acceptance.

00:37It's not quite simple, of course, of saying, OK, well, I won't worry about it.

00:42But it can be really useful to remind ourselves, actually, we can tolerate this.

00:47And if you've had loads of panic attacks over the years,

00:51it's really useful to remind yourself that you've had all of these panic attacks

00:55and you've been able to tolerate it and keep going and you've somehow got through it.

00:59And it was horrible, but you actually did get through it.

01:03Now, as I've said, this is a model of acceptance used in ACT or acceptance and commitment therapy.

01:09And ACT says that basically when we fight the anxiety,

01:13then we're not only having to deal with the anxiety, which we call the clean pain in ACT,

01:20we've also got an extra layer of pain because we're exhausted from constantly trying to control these feelings,

01:26to suppress these feelings, to keep these feelings locked down,

01:30to protect ourselves from the really painful sensations of it.

01:35But actually, if we can let some of those in, which feels like the scariest thing in the world to do,

01:42but if we can do that, then actually we start to realise,

01:47actually, as horrible as this is, I actually can get through this.

01:52And if I can allow myself to just get through it rather than adding all this extra worry on the top,

01:57it's actually much more tolerable than when I was trying to block out and control all these feelings

02:03and telling myself that I couldn't possibly tolerate all of this.

02:08Now, acceptance is a great route to go down, but it is really hard

02:12because we've spent so many years trying to suppress all of these horrible feelings,

02:17so it absolutely takes a lot of practice and ideally the support of a good therapist to go down this route.

02:24But there is a real power if you are able to develop some acceptance of anxiety,

02:30then that's ultimately the way to rob it of its power.