Practice Makes Possible

Whenever someone tells me that they are trying hard to overcome their anxiety, my response is always the same; please don’t. What kind of crazy advice is that to someone fighting a constant battle against crippling anxiety! Actually, not as stupid as it sounds. If you try to do something there are two possible outcomes. You may succeed or you may fail. Whilst we love to succeed, the prospect of failing is not a good feeling. It arouses a degree of anxiety in us as we approach the task, whatever it may be. But isn’t anxiety just what we want to avoid? Look at it another way; if you want to confront your anxiety and overcome it, then you have to use the only mechanism that your body/mind has for the task - the fight or flight mechanism, which is where the physiological sensations of anxiety come from in the first place. Let’s spend a bit more time with the plank. It can teach us a lot. The plank is not a threat in itself, although we may create a threat around it. If you can easily walk along it when it’s on the floor, you could in theory walk along it just as easily when it’s thirty feet off the ground. Except that most people can’t. What stops them is their imagination. They picture themselves falling off and breaking a leg, or worse. That picture in their mind’s eye is what stops them from simply strolling along it. In the same way, what confronts you in particular situations is a self-generated image of you not being able to do it without feeling awful and having to run away from it. So when I say, please don’t try to overcome your anxiety or cope with your anxiety it’s because I want to suggest a better way. Why should you have to live your life with an undercurrent of anxiety that you somehow manage to control? There was a book written a few years ago entitled “Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway”. Wrong!!! Far better to get rid of the anxiety in the first place; you don’t need it. It’s a product of your imagination. Unwittingly, you created it. You can discard it. How? By practice. So you take a walk along a plank on the ground. You are probably a little careful because you’re not sure that you will place your feet absolutely correctly. So walk along it again… and again… and again, until you’re doing it without thinking. Now we’ll put it on two bricks. You show a little caution the first time; you could lose your footing. So do it again, over and over until it’s boring, and it’s time to put it between two chairs and start practising walking along it properly off the ground. Then, if you wish, prop it on two stepladders like painters and decorators often do and practise walking along with confidence. You too could be a steel erector, trotting along girders a hundred feet off the ground. There’s another advantage to practising. It doesn’t involve success and failure - as long as you don’t do something silly like turning it into a challenge. “I’m going to walk this plank fifty times and then I’ll reward myself with a cup of tea and a biscuit.” Do you see that you’ve just reintroduced the possibility of failure - and the fear that that arouses? No, you practice, that’s all. How long you practice is entirely up to you. Because the benefits are cumulative, 30 seconds of practice is just as valuable as half an hour. Take your time and stay comfortable. The object is to erase the anxiety, not put up with it, and that takes as long as it takes, but it’s worth the wait. I mentioned imagination. That’s what I want to come back to next time.