“I understand that anxiety can’t hurt me but I wish I could get my brain to believe that.”
If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say that, I’d have a lot of nickels.
Here’s the thing about believing things that don’t make sense. You rarely if ever believe them until you act as if you do believe them. Let that sink in for a minute if you need to. Allowing, accepting, surrendering and all that stuff makes exactly ZERO sense when viewed through the lens of anxious fear. It’s totally counterintuitive. It goes against your natural desire to protect yourself, save yourself, and achieve a sense of comfort and safety.
So how do you expect to convince your brain, no matter how many words you use, that it should believe that dropping the fight and allowing the worst is a good idea? Remember that your brain is designed to keep you safe and alive. It is not wired to abandon that mission just because a dead Australian physician and some random guy on the Internet says so.
If you are working overtime to get your brain to believe all this before you take action, you can stop now. That’s exhausting and frustrating.
The good news is that your brain does have the capacity to learn and then believe that you are safe even when anxious and afraid. The bad news is that you have to take action to show your brain you are safe BEFORE you believe that. How’s that for a kick in the pants? As much as I would like this to not be true, it is true, so we’ll have to work with it.
This is one of the primary reasons why recovery from an anxiety disorder is difficult and scary and all of those things. In recovery we are doing things we do not believe that we can or should do. We are acting in ways that feel reckless and dangerous to us. We are doing all the things we do not want to do, and none of the things we want to do. It really is quite mad when you take it face value, but it works. Unfortunately though, it works only when we abandon the need to believe as a condition of engaging in recovery.
No conditions. We do, even when we do not believe. Then, we believe. The actions and the resulting experiences create that belief over time. We act, we accept the lesson that the experience teaches us, and we take one more step toward truly believing - and knowing - that we are safe even when anxious and afraid.
Sometimes we CAN generate some pre-action belief. That’s true. When we see other people modeling recovery for us and doing hard things and succeeding, we can gain a bit of vicarious belief through them. When we get angry and frustrated and fed up with being limited by anxiety, those strong emotions can generate some level of pre-action belief. These are great things when they happen because they can absolutely help to inform and inspire productive action. But unfortunately, this kind of belief is often fleeting or situational in nature. If you’re feeling all ready to recover after listening to a recovery success story on my podcast, but then you bail out two minutes into that difficult exposure an hour later, you’re experiencing the fleeting nature of pre-action belief in recovery. When the chips are down and it feels like you are on fire, you brain will revert back to “No way!”. This is normal and to be expected, and this is when we must act even when we do not believe.
I’ll end the discussion here, but if I can leave you with one thing this morning it would be the fact that you are NOT failing or incapable of recovery just because you can’t decide to believe in recovery or the principles of recovery. Nobody gets to just believe that they can safely do scary, dangerous things until they do them and actually experience being safe as an outcome. So give yourself a break. You brain is just doing its job here.
When you can’t find belief, take a step forward anyway. It’s waiting on the other side of that step.
Have you listened to this week’s episode of The Anxious Truth podcast? Check it out out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or my website and YouTube channel.
173. Acting Without Belief