Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the show, thanks for listening today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. We've recently done episodes focused on the fight, freeze, and fawn responses to stress. And today we're finishing that series by focusing on the flight response. We'll be exploring what the flight response looks like in practice, which includes some behaviors you may not expect.
give you a simple framework that'll help you understand whether your anxiety is helping you out or not, and walk through how somebody could go through a process of developing this sense of themselves as being strong, capable, and secure. I'm joined, as usual, by clinical psychologist Dr. Rick Hansen. So, Dad, how are you doing today? I'm good and really liking this whole series connecting biology to our everyday experience of things.
behavior. It's really great. Totally. Same. I think it's really helpful to have simple frameworks when we can. And so we're going to start this episode with another simple framework. You know, this is a being well classic talking about what we're talking about. So the flight response, at least in my thinking about it, is very closely tied to the emotion of fear, which is what activates the behavior of avoiding or escaping dangerous situations.
Now, danger exists on a spectrum and could include everything from something that's just a little bit uncomfortable to us to potentially life-threatening situations. So part of the game here is getting better at distinguishing what is... problematically stressful versus what is just a bit uncomfortable for us, and then calibrating our response to the situation appropriately based on that determination.
Now, the behaviors that are associated with the flight response have their roots in a lot of... adaptivity. They're very, very useful, and we particularly understand why the flight response is so useful for a prey animal out in the wild. And it's more just this issue of fit, which is something that you've raised on the podcast in the past about other kinds of problems, Dad.
Where back in the day, having a very sensitive flight response made a lot of sense for animals. But these days, when we're dealing more with kind of low-grade perpetual stress, that over-activated response can have a lot of consequences for people.
So we might know what the flight response looks like, again, when an animal does it. But in a human, it can be a little bit trickier to pin down that. And I was wondering if you could give some examples of what that behavior really looks like for people in practice. Flight responses are adaptive. They are an attempt to solve a problem. And that's really useful to appreciate because sometimes we can feel embarrassed about our...
withdrawal or other forms of flight behavior as if it's a personal failing. And it's really helpful to appreciate as a way into the topic that this is normal, this is understandable.
This is the body trying to do the best it can for you. And to give yourself a break and give yourself compassion about it, well, you start sorting out, as we will in this conversation, the difference between adaptive coping that's... really successful and skillful and appropriate, and maladaptive coping, including maladaptive coping that we learned from when we were younger and learned to flee from or withdraw from or want to run away from.
different situations it's really obvious for us right if something's scary You want to get away from it. I mean, we've all been in situations where we suddenly started getting the creeps and we thought, whoa, I got to fill in the blank, leave this party, leave this bedroom, leave this job. For sure. We know what that's like. Get me out of here. Less obvious are forms of what are called avoidance coping, where we're coping through avoiding some anticipated or present harm.
such as withdrawing socially from others, social withdrawal. So you're withdrawing, including from not just obvious things like other people who are aggressive, but... opportunities for deepening a conversation or opening into intimacy. Maintaining an optimal distance from other people is a form of avoidance coping. We could also avoid conflicts.
There are people who really swerve away if it looks like there's a difference, a difference of opinion. Virginia Satir, one of the great family therapists, was really great about identifying. problems that start to arise in family systems when differences are not acknowledged and worked through. Maybe they're papered over, but people are avoiding conflict.
Why don't I pause there and just sort of see what your take is so far, and then maybe we can keep on going with some other forms of avoidance coping. Yeah, what stands out to me when we talk about fear responses is that we have a mental model. of what anxiety looks like. And so that's typically what people focus on when we talk about fear, right? If I say fear, there's an image that pops into your head and it probably looks like somebody
jumping away from something or running away from something. And so that's really quite obvious to us. But it's harder to see avoiding something than it is to see physically running away from a situation. And that's why I think that those more avoidance-oriented behaviors are really important to focus on in name here, like you're doing, in part because they tend to kind of slip through the cracks for people. Yeah, that's right.
I think there's six that really stand out, and I've named two of them so far, social withdrawal and conflict avoidance. And also it's helpful to appreciate that things like social withdrawal or... conflict avoidance, are situation or relationship specific. So for example, we could be perfectly comfortable with disagreements in a workplace environment where we have a lot of expertise and we're...
arguing about the best policy, but in an intimate personal relationship that's emotionally vulnerable, I want to stay away from that kind of conflict. So, okay, procrastination. That's not just... oh, I don't want to do it today. I'll deal with it tomorrow. And you actually do do it tomorrow. It's when it's day after day after day. It's basically an underlying effort to avoid the discomfort associated with anxiety-provoking tasks.
or frankly, anxiety-provoking progress and visible progress in particular toward important goals. Like, oh my gosh, if I succeed at this thing, then they're gonna want even more from me tomorrow. So procrastination. Fourth, emotional numbing. Interesting. One way to avoid situations and to escape from them is to shut yourself down. very effective way to just turn off the engine. So, well, of course, you cannot expose yourself to risks. And it's helpful to appreciate that in the wild.
Animals do things like sleep long periods of time to not expose themselves to risks. Interesting, one of the questions is, why, when the immune system is active? let's say we have a wound or we're ill in some way, why would mood become depressed? Well, in part because it probably increases withdrawal and the animal is then no longer exposed to risks.
which it would be less able to deal with because now it's sick or injured, let's say. And then two more. We call them geographicals in the therapy business. environmental change. You solve the problem by leaving town or always having another relationship or another job. And the old line is, of course, Well, if you look back on the last three or 10 lousy situations, what was the common factor in all of them? And if it was you, maybe there's something to look at.
Including when the stakes get higher. Sometimes we're okay as long as the stakes are fairly small in a current relationship. Like no one has put children or marriage or buying a house on the table. But suddenly, no one has actually said those. dreaded three words, I love you. And suddenly the pressure's on. Oh my gosh, what do I do now? But when the stakes do get higher, people withdraw or want to change. And then the last one, classic defense mechanism is denial.
Just not true. You know, hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. It's just not true. So, all right, that's the big six for us. I don't know, I can relate at least to some of them. Totally the same. I think it's a great list. So again, quick recap for people. It's social withdrawal, conflict avoidance, procrastination, emotional numbing, environmental change, and denial. So those are six common ways to slip into avoidance coping for people.
And again, flight response is an attempt to solve a problem. So what's the problem that we're trying to solve? And it's our assessment of threat, right? We think that there is something out there that poses some kind of a risk to us. And this creates a really interesting exploration. What are the things that feel risky in some ways? There are useful forms of flying or avoiding or feeling anxious about something, forms that keep us safe, that give us opportunities to
recharge our energy, separate us from problematic people, whatever it is for you. And then there are more maladaptive versions, and these are versions where there's a lot of sympathetic activation, so a lot of activation in our bodies, right? without actually resulting in truly making this much safer, or a lot of psychological anxiety, a lot of painful emotion, without necessarily a lot of positive result coming out of that pain for us. So how do we tell?
Which is which, right? How do we tell if it's a useful form of flying or a not so useful form of flying? Great question. And I was kind of thinking about this a little bit, Dad, and I'm curious what your take is on it. And the language that I found for it is the question like, is this more safety-preserving or is it more comfort-preserving for somebody? They can overlap, but they're often distinct.
And if we look really closely at our experience, I think that we will often find that the things that we're avoiding or the things that we're feeling anxiety about are much more about our comfort than they are about our actual objective safety. I think in the modern age... There are things that really have to do with preserving our actual safety, but probably most of what we see in terms of maladaptive.
fleeing, has to do, much as you say, with avoiding discomfort. And I can think of a really useful question that you're really getting at, which is to face what are the stakes on the table. In other words, I'm doing this for a purpose. It serves a function, as you point out. It's adaptive. It's a solution to a problem. What's the problem, actually, I'm trying to solve?
Am I trying to preserve my life? Okay. Am I trying to preserve the safety of other people? Because sometimes fleeing can be very adaptive when we bring other people along with us in an important kind of way. Okay. On the other hand, is the real stake on the table that I don't want to risk feeling embarrassed? Or the real stake on the table is I don't want to risk that bad feeling I get inside when someone is critical of me.
Or I don't want to risk other people thinking I'm not really the world's greatest, fill in the blank. Telling the difference, just like you're getting at, between actual, objectively significant. stakes of safety compared to discomfort. That's a really useful thing as you start sorting out, okay, what are the adaptive functions of fleeing for you?
and what is not so good or beneficial net-net for you and maybe others. Telling the difference, like you're getting at, between safety and comfort is great. Yeah, and you've... written at some length and done a fair amount of content related to something that you call paper tiger paranoia, which I think is an interesting way to think about this in general, which is just our tendency to jump away from situations that we experience as being…
dangerous or anxiety-provoking, you know, jump away from the perceived tiger in the bushes a hundred times even though 99 of those times it's just a shadow because the one time that we don't is a very high consequence for people. And this gets to a broad challenge that we're dealing with with regards to anxiety and fear. It is an incredibly primal, very high importance emotion, right? Because if you're ever wrong and you're...
zebra on the Serengeti, you die. That's it. The game is over. So the consequences are incredibly high. And one of the things that the brain really struggles with, and I just learned about this from doing some reading a while ago. are situations that are very low likelihood, but extremely high cost if they were to happen. We just have a really hard time wrapping our brain around circumstances like that.
It's a kind of, we're familiar with the metaphor of the slot machine that has rewards. So we keep pulling on it. And if there's a so-called variable reinforcement schedule. So let's suppose the slot machine is set to pay off one in 100 pulls, okay? But you don't know which pull will pay off. So sometime in the 100, it'll pay off, but it could pay off twice in a row.
but it'll average one in 100 over 10,000 poles. That's very reinforcing. Turn it around. Variable reinforcement of pain. You know, 19 times out of 20, when you speak from your heart. let's say, it goes well. But that one time in 20, when you were humiliated about it way back in school, we really, really tend to learn from that, right? Once burned and twice shy. That's what I think.
you know and when i work with people one of the very very first things to do after unpacking things is to do what you and i are doing right here which is exploring huh what's actually true what's actually true right And if I could, one of the things that I think about as a kind of framework is this three-part analysis that's short and sweet. What's the likelihood of it today, actually, of the bad thing? Second, if the bad thing did happen...
how bad would it really feel? And third, if the bad thing did happen and it felt bad, how would you cope with it? And the thing is, because of emotional memory, we tend to transfer into the present. our learning from childhood in which, let's say, bad things happened often, for real. Second, when they did, because we were little and didn't have a lot of inner myelination on our neurons, all the rest of that, there wasn't a lot of insulation on the wiring. They felt horrible.
There's research that shows that young children feel emotions, positive and negative, much more keenly than adults do. And then when they did happen, we weren't able to cope with them. We didn't have credit cards. We couldn't tell other people to screw off, right? Yeah. We're stuck. We're stuck, yeah. So we tend to transfer into the present typically.
very inflated estimates of how likely certain bad events will be. Second, we tend to presume that they'll feel terrible when they actually won't. They'll be mildly uncomfortable. it'll last for a little while and we've done and third we tend to really wildly also underestimate our coping capability so this annoyingly rational
kind of analysis still as part of the whole package is really, really useful. And you start to realize, wow, I'm walking around with paper tiger paranoia. I'm walking around much of the time in a kind of waking night. nightmare in which I really do feel they're out to get me. But in fact, the good news is that you can wake up from the dream. You can wake up from the spell and realize, no, most likely the bad things are not very likely.
you're going to be okay, even if they do happen, and you have a lot of coping capabilities. I love that. I think that's totally great for starters. And also, it takes me to thinking about the two places where we can almost go through that three-step process. First place where we can go through it is more looking out in the world. Like, what's actually true out in the world? If this bad thing happened out in the world, how bad would it be for me?
If the bad thing happened out in the world over there, what are the resources that I would bring to bear on it? How implicated am I by this, really, particularly at a moment in time where many people are very understandably very concerned? by a lot of stuff that's going on out in the world.
The second place where we can kind of update our priors about this to use some Bayesian analysis language over here is actually about ourselves though. And I think that that's such an interesting part of the process. to go through a real process of updating our sense of how much stress we can bear. Because some people, I think,
could probably do to develop a little bit more of the flight response. We're not really going to focus on that so much during this episode, in part because we had an episode on the freeze response, and that's, if you want to think about it that way, kind of an underdeveloped flight response. But also because they're just taking on too much stuff.
You know, they kind of need to learn how to hold those boundaries to get away from problematic situations earlier, all of that good stuff. But I think for a lot of people, they actually do have more capacity than they realize. And flight comes with various costs for us.
It harms our relationships. It takes us out of intimacy and depth, like you were talking about at the very beginning, Dad. It leads to a lot of anxiety that harms us. It harms our bodies. It's just bad for us from a health standpoint. So it's really important to be very honest with yourself.
about what your actual window of tolerance is. Are you pulling the plug on situations earlier than you need to? Or are you staying longer than is healthy for you? And that requires just a lot of self-awareness and insight.
you know, hopefully we can develop over time, maybe in part by applying some of the tools that we talk about on the podcast. But I think that that gets overlooked sometimes. That's just like a key aspect of this whole thing. And I'm wondering, what do you think about that? Well, I think you're... as usual, completely right. And I'm thinking a lot about childhood and the long shadow and the ways in which, yeah, so much of what we think of as
In everyday life. So think of just examples in everyday life, right? It's obvious. The saber-toothed tiger is chasing you. Run! Okay, that seems really clear. What if it's an opportunity to make a presentation at work and you're kind of nervous about it? Public speaking gives you the willies and you keep putting it off and you keep over-preparing for it.
the window of opportunity passes. Or maybe there's another person, you meet them, and the truth is, in their awkward way, they actually like you, but you're nervous about... getting a really clear signal from them before you reveal that you like them back and so eventually because you're not giving them signals that you like them they send you a text and say you know i think we should just be friends
And that opportunity is lost. So there are many examples like this, in everyday life even, with someone you care about. And you want to help them, but you get really nervous about that follow-up question. right? They tell you that they're upset about something or they're hurting and, or they're not engaging life in some way. And you just, you swerve away. You don't.
ask the normal range follow-up question because you're kind of afraid. When you were young, nobody did that in your home and people who did that looked weird. So point being, it's extremely helpful. to think about how do we transfer into the present? How do we generalize to the present as adults lessons and decisions that we made when we were... in specific situations that were very particular to our parents, our school, our big sister, and so on when we were young.
I think that's really useful for people to be aware of when they're doing this initial appraisal process. That's what we're talking about here in terms of helping yourself. Okay, how do you sort out what's useful fleeing? from what's not so useful. And then if I could, just one last point about it. When we do sort out, how can I put it? It's not just that we need to make the distinction between truly risky situations.
and no risk situations. Okay, that's a good distinction. We also need to make a distinction between risky situations that are not worth it and risky situations that... are worth it, are worth it, because the upside is much greater than the downside risk. in a larger context building on something jimmy chan great filmmaker did free solo with alex gerald and so on great mountaineer amazing person he has a quotation along the lines of
the greatest risk of all is not taking any risks. So let's say that somebody is listening to this and they've gotten to this point and they're working on their appraisals and attributions. They're brave. Good for them. They're brave and engaged with the material. Absolutely. Because just even raising that topic of maladaptive flea ink.
can be anxiety-provoking for people because suddenly they feel, oh, I'm on a slippery slope. You're going to rip my defense away. And that's very important, too, that we're not going to do that. Yeah, yeah. And you might be somebody who got a little...
I felt yourself getting a little sleepy during aspects of this episode or started feeling a little disengaged or, oh, something else just grabbed your attention all of a sudden. Who knows? You know, I'm not trying to call anybody out here through the ether, but, you know, that sounds like you. Maybe there's something.
there to explore. Well, that's a very important point, though. If people are identified with certain defenses, on a Freud's term, ways of being, okay. And you're doing them for a reason. Yeah. You acquired them when you were young. They're hardwired into your nervous system, turbocharged by the negativity bias. It's not your fault. They're there. They're there to help you. They're parts of yourself in some broad sense. And so...
When we are identified with these defenses and they serve functions, we can get very defended about the possibility, the slippery slope, that somebody's going to come along like Forrest Hansen, who's going to... You know, peel your defenses away. Oh, no. And that's, again, that very often happens in therapy. It often happens in conversation too. So it's useful when we're talking with other people.
to be aware of that in them, but also if we're the ones who are caught up in avoidance behaviors, it's really helpful to keep reminding yourself, I'm autonomous, I've got the suit of armor, it weighs 20 pounds. But still, it's my armor, and it's really, really good armor. And because paradoxically, it's really, really good defenses, I can afford to begin to explore whether, at least some of the time, I can step out.
of that suit of armor that's three sizes too full i think that's a great point dad i love that i love that i love that because it's very consistent with definitely my own experience and trying to change aspects of myself where for For a long time, there were aspects of identity that were just all I did, if that makes sense. And I was very attached to them in that way. And then over time, I went through a process of shifting how I thought about them.
to be more oriented around, this is something I do really well, so I don't have to defend that beach hat anymore. I can just trust that it's there if I need it. You know what I mean? And so maybe in the same way, if you're somebody who feels like... you struggle a little bit with excessive anxiety, excessive avoidance, the things we're talking about during this episode, you can trust that when you need it, it'll be there, man.
It'll be there. It's just right underneath the surface, even if you do a lot of work around this. We have tendencies as people, and that's okay. And that can give you the freedom to kind of explore some of these other ways of being a little bit, maybe. Yeah. For some reason, I'm visualizing a... a large tortoise on land. And I'm thinking about, you know, Tomasio, whatever, Tomasio, the tortoise, exploring. And because you've got a great shell, you can afford to stick your neck out.
and explore things because, man, that shell is really good and you can come back into it. And knowing that can help you. It's kind of like your secure base that you can have internally that you can venture out from. This might seem surprising, but I have always struggled to eat enough vegetables. Ever since I was a kid, I just didn't want to eat them. Although I've worked on that in my adulthood, it's still not my favorite thing to do.
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Just use code BEINGWELL at fieldofgreens.com. That's code BEINGWELL at fieldofgreens.com. Well, that was a great, I think, accidental, but still great transition there, Dad, because do you know what a tortoise is? A tortoise is very sturdy. So what I was thinking about this, whether it's anxiety or it's avoidance.
Why is it that we go there? Why is it that we do a flight response as opposed to a freeze response or a fight response? Why are we making that choice? Why does the person have that tendency? And if you think of it just kind of adaptively, and I'm doing a little evolutionary psych here, which is a little messy for a lot of different reasons, but okay, just go with me here. Why does somebody choose that response? Well, it's because they believe in their ability to escape the pain.
but they're not necessarily sure that they could survive the pain, if you kind of think about it that way, right? Like they can get away from the predator, but they don't think that they could have survived the predator if they had an encounter with it. you apply that to our own lives. You believe in your ability to get away from the thing that is causing you distress, but if you did it, wow, you're not so sure. So what helps us with that? What helps us with that view? And it's this
idea that I've been orbiting for like six episodes now, which is the belief in the ability of the self to withstand difficulty. In other words, a feeling that you are sturdy and capable, fundamentally. I'm wondering, Dad, what do you think helps people build that belief, particularly people who don't have a strong sense of that inside of themselves? That's something I've been very interested in individually.
I was on the path of that starting at about age 15 in a deliberate way. Yeah, because I had very little sense of myself as sturdy. If you think about it, just like you're saying. Anxiety and flight is a response to a situation in which perceived challenge, perceived threat is substantially greater than perceived capability to deal with it. Yeah, that's a great model.
Yeah. And so what we want to do in life is we want to bring down actual threat, and we definitely want to reduce inflated threat. And also in life, at the same time, we want to increase actual capabilities. And make sure that we are appraising our capabilities accurately. That's a very good way to think about it structurally. And I would do that with clients. So multiple ways. I'll give you, gosh.
How many do I have here? At least three. And then if you'll tolerate a bonus, that'll kind of go into the ethers. I know how you like it when it go into the ethers. We love some ethers, man. Okay, very succinctly. Number one, repeatedly get in touch with the felt sense of being strong in your own way, which includes enduring. Enduring tends to be really underestimated as an important form of personal.
grit, moxie, and strength. So you can pull up memories of times when you held that yoga pose for an extra breath or three, or times when you were functioning in wilderness and you... came through or times you really stood up for another person. Maybe you were strong on behalf of another person. The embodied felt sense of grit. That's incredibly important. It's very visceral. It goes much on the top.
It's a lot of yes, but. Yes, but I wasn't like that. Or I never was on varsity in high school or whatever it might be. I'm talking about the somatic, visceral sense of even intensity in your own. core being that you can get in touch with, that contradicts and goes beneath the old stories about yourself. That's one. Second, being able to calm the core of your being.
and feel settled so that you can tolerate whatever you're experiencing. It might be uncomfortable. I just came back from the dentist, for example. Yes, there were parts that were uncomfortable. But still, in the core of my being, I kept breathing, I kept wiggling my toes, I kept putting awareness in another part of my body, calming, critically important.
I remember reading a really interesting book called, I believe, Who Dies? And it has to do with stories of real survival. Crash landings, planes. I remember you mentioned this a while back. Yeah. Yeah. And it's really interesting. And if you panic. you're probably going to die. If you stay calm, you might die, but your odds of getting through it are a lot, lot better. So calm. And then the third real key here to building up that sense of capability.
is the repeated internalization of feelings of lovingness flowing in and flowing out, social support flowing in, a sense of yourself as a caring, kind person. unconditionally. In other words, not depending upon whether other people care about you, you can be a caring person yourself. Those three, you know, I use them routinely and I teach them routinely, even for just a few seconds at a time.
recognizing and taking in the experience of being strong, recognizing and repeatedly experiencing calming, and third, feeling warm-hearted with caring. Not just flowing in, but also flowing out does really help. You got a bonus fourth? Cosmically. We're going to get spacey here, nice and cosmic. Okay. To the extent you can be in touch with.
what seems like a kind of unconditional, absolute ground of all, whatever that might be for you. It could simply be resting in awareness. Awareness itself is neutral. It's spacious. Awareness does not flee. Urges to flee might move through awareness, but awareness itself does not flee. And to the extent you can rest in a felt sense of that which endures, that which is...
deeper than any thread, that which is never broken or stained, tainted or destroyed. That is a deep, deep resort for many, many people. It might be religious in its frame. I just want to name that as a... useful refuge for people, if you relate to it. For other people, it's kind of more intuitive. It's sort of like, well, whatever happens here, the universe abides, and it's been a good ride.
I think that's really great to add. It's a great list. I also like the fourth one at the end there. And there are a lot of secular approaches to meditation that do have a flavor of that as part of the nature of practice, where you're exploring the nature of awareness itself. or what feeling is inside when nothing else is there. And most of the time when people explore that, for some people that can actually be quite activating.
you know, can lead to momentary disintegration before there is reintegration happening after it. But for most people, most of the time, there's this underlying feeling of calmness and stability and just like, wow, it's all okay. Practically when going through this process, I wonder what your take is on graduated exposure. Basically, the idea is that we learn by having experiences of something going better than we think that it's going to go.
And so for fear-based issues that people have, there's often this kind of stairway that people go through where they risk a little bit, they risk a little bit, they get comfortable with that, they risk a little more, they risk a little more, they get comfortable with that, and so on.
And I'm wondering how you think about that, because I know it can be a little complicated for starters. And then also, if you could give kind of an example of that, I think that would be great. Oh, I think it's a fantastic protocol, and it's used in many ways. full often term for it is graduated exposure and response prevention. In other words, we're exposing people to a stressor in a graduated way, just like you said, think zero to 10 or rungs on a ladder.
And we're also disrupting in a clinical context, a typical avoidance behavior. So people have to stay with it. One example, and I want to just kind of, I'll name something like spiders. okay and so if you have a fear of spiders you know i'm going to talk about spiders here so for example suppose someone has an extreme fear of spiders and they never leave their home because they're afraid they'll run into spiders out there in the world
or something like that. So what we might do initially is have them simply imagine a spider on the other side of the universe. and keep breathing, stay calm. A spider exists out there somewhere. Yeah, really, over there in another galaxy. Far away, far away. Yeah, 10 billion light years away, right there, all the way over there.
And then can you stay with that? Can you be with that experience? And biofeedback can be very helpful as well, even neurofeedback. So you're getting immediate feedback that, okay, I can stay in the green zone, the term. We could use. I'm settled. I'm okay. I'm coping. And then you graduated. Okay, now this is a spider on the other side of the earth. Now we're up to a two, okay? And can you stay calm? Can you be stable? And can you...
really taking the good of that experience. And then you work your way up the ladder to increasingly nearer and nearer spider situations, like the therapist brings a stuffed spider. into the therapy office. Can you hold a child's playful toy of a stuffed spider? Okay, okay, okay. Can you see a dead spider in the office? Can you see a live spider in a cage?
Okay, now get ready for it. Can you do when you're maybe all the way at 10, something I did because I was scared of spiders, can you let them crawl all over you while you lie in the woods tripping on LSD? Or even going further. Well, that's like a 13 for me, Dad. I don't think that's a 10. I think we just broke the scale with that one. Oh, man. Can you do that? This amp does go to 11. Yeah, you go. You don't have...
You have to go all the way, but it just, you know, or could you put out your hand and have your friend John put a little tarantula? I am very comfortable. For the record, I'm extremely comfortable with spiders. I would not let them just crawl all over me under any circumstances, let alone when I'm tripping on LSD. But okay, go ahead. Well, you got it. I went for it. Or hold out your hand and the tarantula be put on your palm and feel that thing.
Okay, there we could go, maybe. I would consider holding a tarantula. That's about as far as I'm going up the scale personally. Okay, then apply it to other things, like speaking from your heart. Or really staying present when another person is angry, including angry with you. Standing up and...
in public situations and speaking your mind. You know, these could be real challenges like spiders, snakes are fairly straightforward, but what are the things in real life? So you're trying to get people used to it. One of the things I like about this is that people can deliberately push back the bars of their invisible cage 10 steps, let's say one step at a time in everyday life.
Let's say you know something, you know, risking the dreaded experience is a little spooky for you, so you deliberately do it. Like you deliberately hold the gaze of someone a beat or two or three longer than you normally do. All right, that's a one or a two. For some people, that's a four or a five. I had a client way back in the beginning who was extremely uncomfortable with social contact. And in the fairly large...
clinical room I was using at the time, he asked me if we could just move our chairs so he would be literally in the farthest corner of the room from me. And I was at the other corner, 20 feet away at least. So, you know, you manage whatever is real for you. Okay, but he came to my office. That was brave for him, right? And then you work your way up the ladder while taking in the good of being successful at each step. So you gradually disconfirm.
those old beliefs. And when you have a belief about something being, you know, threatening, that's disconfirmed, then for the next half hour, two hour, repeatedly. revisit the disconfirmation of that belief in a way that gradually disrupts literally the neurological reconsolidation of that belief in the nets of memory. Yeah, I want to really focus on that for a second here, Dad, because I think A, it's a key point, and B, I see people do essentially the opposite all the time.
So what I mean by this is that so often people will have an experience of things going better than they expected in one way or the other, and they immediately, pardon the language, shit all over it. They immediately go, that was just one example. That's not really how things are for me. Well, they were just being kind of nice to me then. Oh, sure, I could do it that time, but that really doesn't say anything about the way that things will go in the future.
And so there is this allegiance to often those early experiences that the person had having to do with the thing. And so we see an inversion of what you're recommending here, where what you're recommending is to come into the present. see things the way they are today, learn the new information. But for whatever reason, maybe in part because pain is such a salient signal, and pain when we're young is a super salient signal. Say that 10 times fast.
A super salient signal. Yeah, that's a tough one. It's a little tug-twister. But just because of that, there's this weird allegiance to the old pain over the new learning. That's mostly just an observation, but I'm wondering what you think about that and what we can do to ally with that new belief. Yeah. Good news threatens our defenses.
It goes back to what I was saying about people getting nervous about anything that might seem like the slippery slope of peeling off the scab. That was a good one, Dad. I like that. I'm going to, yeah. I'll take that one in. People push away or downplay, swerve away from, say, yes, but to good news because that threatens the defense that they learned to develop.
sometimes at great cost with a lot of importance around it. Isn't that interesting to realize that good news threatens our defenses? And that's one of the things that's kind of maddening. if we're trying to help somebody who's living quite small and maintaining significant defenses, is that when you present them with good news, they don't want to hear it, but they'll find ways to deny it or even pick a fight with you.
to distract from the actual good news or avoid contact with you if they think you might be the bringer of the good news about opportunities for them to step out of their invisible cage. This is so interesting. It wasn't really something that I was necessarily expecting to talk about, but I think it's a really interesting thing that people do.
The natural follow-up is just like, how do you work with somebody around it? But I suspect that it's kind of a long and complicated process, and I don't know if it's something that can be kind of boiled down here. I think it's the structure of a lot of therapy with anxiety and avoidance behaviors and fleeing, which really kind of has three major clusters to it. After you've unpacked things and established a relationship.
including the important statement that I would repeat each session, which is you get to decide, you the client, if you want to keep being the way you are. And I don't mean the way you are like that's bad to be the way you are. I mean, you get to decide. No one is going to take a defense away from you faster than you're comfortable with. You're the boss of this process. Really, really, really important. So the clusters.
We've already explored really one of them, which is accurate appraisal of how risky is it and what might be worth the risks, actually. So we unpack it. tends to get to, well, what do you really want to do? If we move too fast and the person starts, yes, budding, well, we need to go back to that first cluster.
for them to actually buy into the process of unpeeling the suit of armor, slowly but surely. They have to buy into that, right? And if you go too fast, then you've got to go back to their own agency, their own authorship of the process.
okay second big cluster is building up capabilities of various kinds inside sometimes building up resources outside a person like friends or allies or being part of a support group or a community that can help a person feel, as you've talked about it, be more capable of managing threats or pursuing opportunities.
successfully without being exposed to the pain that they experienced typically when they were younger or saw other people experiencing that leads to these avoidance or escape oriented or prevention. oriented behaviors so building up strengths inside of various kinds sometimes with strengths outside based on that first part which is an accurate appraisal with commitment and so now you have accurate appraisal with commitment plus building up inner strengths, then moving into an action plan. Okay.
What can you do in more skillful ways, more flexible ways to deal with real challenges? Challenges are real. We're not downplaying anything there. How could you deal with them in ways that did not pay such a big price? as, for example, being a shut-in or close to it or swerving away from love because it's just too scary and you've been burned before, et cetera, et cetera. So those three, accurate appraisal and commitment, building up strengths.
taking appropriate action. Well, I think that's an incredible list. I do want to go back for a second here to some of the graduated exposure stuff that I think relates to that great sequence you just named there. and is a version of it where I sometimes see people kind of fall into the hole. Because sometimes what will happen, and I've definitely, I think I've done this myself, I've definitely seen friends of mine do this, is you'll have somebody who has an anxiety about something.
Often it's a socially loaded anxiety, being seen in a group in a way, doing a certain kind of behavior in a group, standing up for themselves, whatever it is. And they don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. but there's a part of them that kind of knows or has heard, or maybe has listened to a podcast like this one, hey, these are things that would be good for you to try on. And then when they do it, they jump to a tent.
It's a totally huge display of doing it. It's not necessarily like thoughtfully socially calibrated with other people. It's a little disproportionate. They're just like cannonballing it at the deep end because. dipping their toe in the pool somehow feels like a little too much, so they just kind of like throw the whole body in there all at once. This often leads to a bad experience, which then becomes very reinforcing.
And there are two possibilities here, to me, thinking a little psychoanalytically, and I'm not a clinician, so, you know, comment on my psychoanalysis here. First option. is that there's something about the toe in the water that actually does feel more threatening than the cannonball. That's a possibility. Second option, though, and very interestingly, I'm wondering if they kind of know that the cannonball is doomed to failure. And so it kind of...
buys into what you were saying earlier about good news can be a negative messenger to us because it threatens our coping mechanism. So maybe they know that if it goes poorly, well, then I just got to go back to doing what I was doing anyways. That's right. Am I being too psychoanalytic here or are you going with me? No, it's right on. Yeah, the mind is complex. And so for example, people will do things that are basically designed unconsciously.
as a form of self-betrayal to prove that the advice their therapist is giving them or their friends and family are encouraging just won't work. There's a notion there about who are you allying with? Are you allying with the inner traitor? Or are you allying with the inner champion, the inner encourager? Right, the inner guide.
Yeah, and I think that most people, you can find a version of doing this in your life, I think, for most people. I'm thinking back to being a very young person and learning how to ride a bike, which I was initially quite bad at. or learning how to ice skate, which I never learned how to do. And I recall you giving me essentially advice on how to do this as a seven-year-old or whatever. And I was very scared of it because I'm an anxiety-prone person.
And at some point, I just threw myself into it. But my throwing myself into it was kind of doomed to failure because it was done without technique or subtlety. And then I could just be kind of like, see, it doesn't work. And I think we just do that to ourselves all the time in so many different places. I think one place that really shows up is in relationships where we start getting uncomfortable. It's getting more emotionally close. The stakes are starting to rise.
Based in our history, we predict, we expect an inevitably bad situation. So we pick a fight early on just to get it over with because we know it's doomed somehow. I've seen situations that are almost amusing where one person is convinced that it's going to end in disaster, so they start picking fights with the other person, or they become... annoyingly clingy as a way to drive other people away. And yet the other person is okay. They're not triggered.
by the provocative behavior. And they're okay with the clinginess. And at some point they, and you can kind of see it's almost funny. One person is trying to. blow up the relationship and the other person just isn't getting blown up. And then you can see the first person who's trying to blow up the relationship really starting to freak out because there was somebody who isn't blowing it up, which actually increases the stakes because this is...
a really good person to be with. And so, oh my god, now I for sure have to blow this up early. It's really such an interesting topic. And I also think it's interesting that we've in some ways kind of transitioned into talking about self-sabotage a little bit here. And I'm wondering if there's anything in your kind of three-stage process that you talked about, Dad, like being clear about discernment and then commitment to a better version or embracing a certain level.
of anxiety, fear, concern that would be useful for you that could lead to good outcomes, developing those greater strengths that we've talked about in some detail, and then moving into an action plan, that kind of three-stage process. Do you think that there's that there's stuff in there that applies to what we're talking about here, and how would you kind of structure that? Well, that first stage of discernment and motivation, really. Sure, yeah.
Really, it's applied to yourself, where you start to understand yourself. So mindfulness, self-awareness, the capacity to de-center from yourself and look at yourself. from a bird's eye perspective, all of that is in the service of observing what's actually occurring alongside getting on your own side and developing the motivation to help yourself here.
So those are really key. If a person doesn't have some kind of clarity about what's actually happening outside and inside, related to which they have some kind of real motivation to help things get better. Without that, they could be in psychoanalysis for 20 years and there won't be much progress. And that's why that first step is in some ways sacred. It's really sacred.
Because it's about fundamental autonomy, and it's about truth-telling in the innermost temple of your being. And so the conditions that can support people, or we can support ourselves. in having the courage and feeling safe enough to really see the truth of things and also to find an existential level, soul level commitment. to what's in your own best interest, that which fosters all that is really important. When you've got that, then the rest tends to work out.
But if you try to do the rest, if you try to build strengths inside and the person keeps going, yes, but, or it's not working, or I did that meditation, nothing happened. You need to go back to the first thing or, you know, they build strengths and then they start taking skillful action, but then it blows up or they give up the first time there's some kind of difficulty. You need to go back to that first thing, discernment and motivation.
Awesome points, I think. And this might be a little bit similar to what I was talking about earlier in terms of understanding that you have a good suit of armor, like knowing that the suit of armor is there if you need it. I think a big part of the... the ability to bear these kind of scary situations for us, a great tool in it is claiming our power to have little moments of flight if we need to. Or understanding internally, like, when am I going to leave?
Like, what's a situation where I go, okay, if this person does that thing, you know, it's just not worth it. I don't want to deal with it. I'm getting out of there. situations where you are going to disengage leaving before things get really bad or before your battery is totally dead you know being Being like, okay, I'm going to try to push my battery to 50%, and then I'm out of there, man. It's okay. I'm gone. I've made that agreement with myself, and that's a win.
When you set those boundaries with yourself early on, I think that that's what really helps us avoid the cannonball situation, the situation where we're just going in too hard, too strong, for too long a period of time, and we're just not able to sustain it over the reasonable period of time that you have to sustain effort over in order to get any kind of real lasting change.
That's really wise for us, thinking about small flights, small steps back, distance in the service of attachment. Yeah, I love that line. Sometimes where we have to turn the volume down, it's too loud. They're being too intense. We're not trying to leave the whole situation, but we're just still trying to titrate it or attenuate it or, you know.
regulated in some way for ourselves and to claim the power to do that and to know you have the power to do that. I mean, knowing that you, there's some, a friend of mine. basically was exploring cultures in which because people were not permitted to say no, their yeses were always ambiguous and didn't necessarily mean.
a real yes so paradoxically you know fences make for good neighbors autonomy supports intimacy and claiming your your your right to say no gives traction and and teeth to your yeses As we get to the end of the episode, I do want to leave people, particularly people who are on the more anxiety-focused side of the spectrum, with something very practical here, because we've talked a lot about avoidance and these kind of…
deeper manifestations, maybe, I don't know, deeper as a kind of judgment associated with it, but you know what I mean, more subtle manifestations of the flight response. But a lot of the time, man, we're just spooked about something. We're just anxious about something, we're freaked out about it.
Maybe we know that it's an irrational thought even that we're freaked out about. A lot of the things that are anxiety-provoking for people, I can say a lot of the things that are anxiety-provoking for me. I understand are somewhere between extremely unlikely and actively impossible, but for whatever reason, that doesn't necessarily avail my anxiety. So as somebody who's worked with a lot of people and talked about anxiety a lot, I'm wondering how you would kind of...
almost walk somebody through it if they were in a moment where they were sitting in your office and they were just very activated and anxious about something. Would it be okay if you gave me at least a range of examples? Let's say that a person has some pathological health concerns. They are themselves a totally healthy person. They do not have a big spooky history to be concerned about.
Maybe they had a parent or a grandparent who passed away from cancer, but there's no genetic association there. And they just have a fear about that. And they're having a really hard time dealing with like a health anxiety. I know that health anxiety is a big one for people.
And then another one, a little bit more rational, somebody has something coming up that they're anxious about. It's an interaction with a friend that they're nervous about or a partner. Maybe it's like a work presentation. There's just something that's a date that is approaching.
that is activating their anxiety. Okay, great. And feel free to do either or both, whatever you think is useful. Yeah, they're both really good examples. Okay. I think the first thing, whether you're working with somebody or... is on your own, is as best you can, as much as you could tolerate it, try to stay, get in touch with, with the raw primary experience of anxiety itself. That itself is really helpful.
Because as we feel it in the body, rather than ruminating about it with our more verbal cognitive processes, as we feel it somatically and emotionally, We give it the opportunity to flow. And we're doing that in a space of mindfulness and awareness. That's really useful directly. Second, with that, have compassion for yourself. Like, oh, this sucks to feel dread or worry and related things like, oh, what if I get an illness or what if...
This event occurs and I flop and people laugh and I get fired. These are things that are hard for me. They're burdensome. They're stressful. Okay, can you bring compassion to yourself? So feeling the raw feelings with compassion in a space of mindfulness itself is really useful. Related to that then is sensing down to what's deeper potentially.
and underneath it all like oh why am i so worried about this or is there relevant history here what is being transferred in to the situation that's amplifying it or distorting it in my own experience What are the turbochargers in my history? What are the little modules inside me, like preamplifiers, that are intensifying this experience and clouding my judgment here?
Understanding that can be really, really helpful. Sometimes there's nothing there. It's all in the present, but often the past has a long shadow. This part of self-awareness is really useful. and can take something that starts to feel like anxiety on zero to 10, it's hitting an eight, can bring it down to a three or a four. Understandable.
Let's say fear about a health problem or about a future event that you have some performance anxiety about. Next, that appraisal phase where you start to help people unpack it. Well, what is the situation? How likely is the bad event? How bad would the bad event be? How would you cope with the bad event? How do you want to be about this? And just that question right there. Okay, you're anxious.
There's a threat. I got it. That's where we start. How do you want to practice with it? That itself is a completely revelatory question for many, many people. Would I could practice with it? How do you want to cope with it? outside of yourself, and how do you want to cope with that inside yourself? So sometimes what we're doing with people is helping them understand that they can mobilize. They're not dead in the water. Certainly, they're never dead in the water inside their own mind.
So how do you want to be about it? Powerful question. So let's suppose then that the person is Thank you, Captain Obvious, Dr. Hanson. They're already in touch with themselves. They're already aware. They're on their own side. They want to deal with it, okay? And they've unpacked it. They've started to realize what a big threat it is or how it's not actually that threatening. And then I really love going to work on, all right, what can you develop inside to deal with it?
And I love moxie. You know, moxie, the determination, spunk, vigor, feistiness, it's such an important thing to cultivate in people. Drawing on others who are loving, caring resources, also really important. Could someone go with you to the doctor? Can you talk about this with a friend? And then, like I said in the three-part plan, you know, discernment plus motivation.
inside a good frame that you've established and then building up strengths and then making a plan for action is really good. And if I could finish, I'll just say that sometimes people jump into the plan. too fast and they need to do the groundwork before other times sometimes though people get kind of stuck in that groundwork including building up strengths inside
and they leave out the importance of making good plans and sustaining skillful efforts toward them. And especially in therapy world and mindfulness world, I do think that... There's a place for a good plan. A lot of anxiety is dealt with by solving your problem, right? Behavioral change or action of some kind, yeah. you know, that can really make a difference. Did that seem relevant to you when you were thinking about those people? Yes, totally. Great outline. I think that...
80 to 90% of people will be served just by kind of hearing that and then deliberately interacting, of course, with that content. You can't just hear about it. You got to do it. I'm going to ask at the end here sort of more of almost a question of personal interest.
There are some fears that I really know have a 0.1% chance of happening. And I have done some of this process around them. I've done... some work here, I've done some delving into the material, understanding the sense of physical threat or physical fear, and I recognize that this is extremely unlikely.
For me, just so we know what we're talking about here, this is often like nighttime stuff, nighttime anxiety. I'm laying in bed and I feel physically threatened or spooked by like sounds in the house or... you know the feeling of oh is there somebody outside of the window all of this kind of paranoid ruminatory process that's going on that's been really present for me since i was like a kid as you're familiar with and
You know, I understand that it's irrational, but my understanding that it's irrational is not helping me solve my problem. And I think that that's a really interesting... place for people and an interesting challenge for people because sometimes we can just come into more rationality and understand there are really all these things we can do and we can develop these skills and all that stuff but for the ones that are a little bit less
tied to that process, they can be a little tricky to work with. And I'm wondering if you have any, hopefully not too lengthy because we're toward the end here, but you know what I mean, the reflections on this. Yeah. Related to that is a category that I wanted to speak to as well, which is painful or threatening conditions that are inescapable. Sure, yeah. Serious illness. We're all aging on our way to death. We will lose those we love. These are inescapable things. How do we be with that?
They can be painful. There can be discomfort in them, serious discomfort. How do we deal with our reactions to conditions that we can't escape? And then... overlaps with? How do we deal with situations that if they occurred, we could not escape? They're unlikely, but if they did happen, yikes, we'd be stuck.
I find for myself it's helpful, as you're familiar with, to distinguish between the first art and the second art of life. And in other words, to appreciate that the soft, furry animal of the body understandably feels dread. understandably is uneasy, is scared, and understandably wants comfort, wants protection, wants support. We can be present with that, which
tends to act like a circuit breaker and takes us out of the second darts we throw ourselves of anxious anticipatory rumination. So just being able to be in touch with, oh, I really am scared of dying. I have a serious illness and I don't like it. It's very upsetting for me, understandably. It's important to really include that. Many people I know and respect with intractable pain.
or chronic inescapable illness or disability, they find a way to be at peace anyway. And they find a way to live well meanwhile. So it's not that they can escape from their cancer. or their intense chronic back pain is that they find a way to be at peace with it and to live well meanwhile. And that's very fundamental. How do we do that? That's a whole conversation. I don't know if we've ever done an episode about that.
That is one of the big ones for people. Now, with regard to the likelihood of a very unlikely event that people tend to obsess about, this is where I will be psychoanalytic, maybe a little bit. For people in general, there's a really interesting question. Like, why do they think about it when they have no capacity to do anything about it? And they may as well just surrender.
Like, for example, on airplanes, I'll surrender to the possibility of the plane crashing while surrounding it with light and really wishing everybody on the plane besides myself well so that... nothing happens, but if it does happen, I have found my way into complete acceptance of that possibility. I won't like it, but I can accept it. So surrender. Can people build up that sense of surrender?
And what is it that prevents them from just simply surrendering to the possibility of the bad, the bad outcome? That's really interesting inquiry. The other thing, especially when we have fears of various things, to be really psychoanalytic, maybe that fear is a projection out into the world. of something in oneself that is disowned or repressed or one is afraid of it. And it shows up as a fear of an intruder or a bad event. But really, it's more like...
Jung's shadow, the parts of ourselves that are pushed away and then become incarnated in some ways or represented as external forces. So I'm not saying it's true. We're prey animals. Of course, things that go bump in the night are scary and spooky. And understandably, we don't want to deal with them. Leave the lights on if you're home alone.
You know, in the rest of the house, I've done that. It's okay. But one thing to think about is, huh, is this some kind of part of me that's then manifesting as this very low likelihood threat? That's really interesting, Dad. some of these things that we start touching on or exploring toward the end of an episode, we could absolutely do just a full episode on unpacking some of this material or unpacking some of the ideas that are
that are implicit in what you were talking about there. But I'm very happy with what we've talked about today. And I thought it was such an interesting exploration. We went some very cool places with thinking about the flight response. as a category, which clearly has so much in it. It has anxiety, it has avoidance, it has self-efficacy, it has our belief in our power to keep ourselves safe as individuals, our assessment of the universe around us. It includes just so much.
So it's a very rich topic. And I really appreciate you joining me today and taking the time to do all of this. I thought it was a really good one. Oh, I appreciate you and everything you brought to us. And I'm reminded in a way of... both inner flight and outer flight, that sometimes we flee from that which is outside us as a way of fleeing from what's inside us, including what we might experience under certain conditions.
I've been really happy with this series of episodes dedicated to the stress responses. I thought that they were all very rich, very interesting. I learned a lot myself. And as you go through all four of them, you'll probably start to see some commonalities between the episodes. First of all, they emphasize the adaptive nature of the stress response. These responses exist for reasons. We tend to think of stress responses as these problematic things.
linked to problematic behaviors, but all of them have their adaptive purposes. This means that for all of the stress responses, the question isn't are they good or bad, but rather are we leveraging the more adaptive aspects of them, or are we falling prey to the more problematic aspects of them? In the case of the flight response, its adaptive role is to help us avoid, escape, or prevent
various stressors from harming us. These might be fears, they might be predators, whatever it is that's going on around us, that's the role of the flight response. It is very, very helpful to avoid certain kinds of stress. But there are other kinds of stress that are either inescapable parts of life or actually come with benefits for us. It might be very stressful to tell somebody that you love them and also come, potentially, with enormous benefits.
One of the things that makes the flight response a little complex to talk about is when I say flight response, you have an image in your head of what it looks like. And it normally looks like anxiety. It looks like fleeing from something. But there are a lot of different ways to flee from something that are not as obvious, and most of these fall into the category of what we call avoidance coping.
Rick ran through six different kinds of avoidance coping that are particularly common for people. Those six are social withdrawal, conflict avoidance, procrastination, emotional numbing, environmental change, this is when we regularly change our job or our relationship, and then denial, refusing to acknowledge the problems that we have or the issues with the situations that we're in. So we've come this far.
There are useful forms of the flight response. There are more problematic forms of it. How do we tell which is which? How can we tell when we should stick around with something a little bit longer and improve our ability to handle different forms of stress? or when it's appropriate for us to get out of there for whatever reason. And one of the things that really helped me think about this was a simple question. Is this behavior safety-preserving or comfort-preserving?
The fear response is an incredibly old, primal response in animals, right? In us, as humans, it connects to a moment in time where threats were discreet, they were clear.
and they were life-threatening. If you got caught by that predator, that was it for you. It was game over. These days in a world where threats are much more amorphous and vague, and we're kind of in this constant... a pink zone rather than a red zone or a green zone of persistent anxiety and stress and fear and concern, our bodies just aren't really built to deal with that.
So we have machinery that was built for these incredibly acute moments of stress that is now being applied globally to kind of everything. And so it's very easy for us to interpret things that only threaten our comfort as threatening our safety. And so it's very important to become a little bit more discerning, both about the nature of the reality outside of ourselves and the nature of the reality inside of ourselves, as Rick really emphasized during this conversation.
People do a ton of learning about what is and isn't safe from childhood. The pains of childhood are felt very strongly. Our ability to deal with threats in childhood is just not that high. There's not a lot that we can really do. And our ability to assess reality is not that great. The world is a scary and big and confusing place. So people tend to over-learn from that moment in time and then apply that over-learning to their adult life.
so he outlined these three steps that you can go through if you feel threatened by something out in the world first question how likely is it second how bad would it be if it did happen and then third what would you do if it did happen? What resources do you have available to you? What are the moves you could make if something scary happened out in the world? What's there? What do you have access to these days that maybe you didn't have access to back then?
And as we moved through this episode, we started touching on all of this stuff that I found incredibly interesting and it just became increasingly clear. how broad the flight response is, and how much it connects to all of these other aspects of life. For example, Rick talked about how good news...
can actually be threatening to us sometimes, because good news suggests that we can maybe change our defensive behavior. And we really don't want to do that, because those defenses, we think, would keep us safe. We talked about graduated exposure, which is a fundamental way to interact with any fear, increasing our exposure to little versions of it in graduated steps over time so we become more and more comfortable with it.
But then we talked about this tendency that people often have, not dissimilar from being threatened by good news, where they just throw themselves into the deep end of the pool, have a bad experience, and go, oh, you know what? I don't have to ever do it again because I found out that it just doesn't work. And well, yeah, it just didn't work that time because you started at a 10 rather than starting at a 2.
Toward the end of the episode, Rick really connected a lot of the dots in everything that we had talked about by walking us through an example of working with a concrete instance of anxiety that a person might have. And he gave what ended up being kind of a six-step process that most people can go through. First, get in touch with the feeling. Allow yourself to feel it. You're not pushing it away anymore. You're not denying it. You're not ignoring it. Let yourself sense it in the body.
What's going on in there? What does it actually feel like? Second, if you can, apply some self-compassion around it. People fear things. It's okay. I fear things. Rick fears things. Everybody fears things. People who pretend not to fear things are the ones you really got to worry about because they definitely fear things, okay? So can we have an experience of common humanity here? Can we sit in a feeling?
that we are animals, just like all the other animals, and we have these emotions that pop up for us. Then can you sense down to a little bit of a deeper layer? What is this fear based on, really? What are the underlying concerns you have, the feelings, the experiences that you're avoiding, your inner tendencies? Just what's going on in there?
Fourth, how can you get on your own side? What can you do to claim your own strength, your own ability, your ability to maybe deal with these problems a little bit more effectively? Do you feel like you really want to make solving this fear, addressing it concretely, something that you truly care about and orient toward in your life. Then fifth, determination. How can you be gritty? How can you apply effort day after day after day?
Do you feel like this is important enough to you to do that? And it's okay to say no. If this isn't that big of an issue, great. Don't worry about it. But if it is a big one, get on your own side here really fully. And then finally, make good. plans. Some people skip to the planning stage without building the earlier stuff, but for a lot of people, they hang out and doing all of the early stuff without actually ever getting around to making a plan.
Change is made through many small steps over an extended period of time. So are you willing to put in the effort here that is required to get from point A to point B around this issue? And if you're not, again, that's really okay. But it is a fundamental and very important question here. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I really learned a lot during this series as a whole. If you've been listening for a while and you somehow have not subscribed to the podcast yet,
Hey, subscribe to it. Click that button wherever you are. If you're watching on YouTube, great. Subscribe there. If you're listening to the podcast through Spotify, Great. Subscribe there. Really helps us out. If you want to leave a rating and a positive review, maybe leave a comment on YouTube for the old algorithm. That would be great as well. And if you want to support us in other ways, you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast.
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