Anxiety and the Big, Scary Dog

When I was a small child, my family had several large German shepherds as pets.  I don’t remember the times those dogs jumped on me and knocked me down, though I have been told it happened.  I do remember growing up with an intense fear of large dogs.  Throughout my childhood, when I saw a large dog, my primary instinct was to run away.  Unfortunately for the young-child-me, dogs enjoy a good game of chase.  By running away, and encouraging the “big scary dog” to chase me, I was reinforcing my own fear: that dogs were scary and should be avoided at all costs.  Anxiety is often a “big scary dog”.  We feel the discomfort, and seek to avoid it by running away, or avoiding situations that cause anxiety.  When we avoid anxiety-provoking situations, we reinforce in our brains that those situations are unsafe, creating a cycle of fear and anxiety that grows the more we avoid specific situations.  In order to retrain our brain, we have to confront the big scary dog.  This can be an overwhelming task, so it is important to have tools to draw from.  Three helpful tools are box breathing, positive affirmations, and challenging thinking errors.Box breathing:Take a deep breath, filling your lungs completely while imagining moving your lungs in the outline of a square.  At each corner, pause and hold the breath for 4 seconds, then exhale along the next side of the square.  Breathing in this way helps to regulate your nervous system, increasing your sense of calm.Positive Affirmations:Words are powerful, and we tend to believe the words we tell ourselves.  A friend recently recounted her experience on a climbing wall.  “I was doing really well, until I looked down.  At that point I panicked and told myself, “I can’t do this”, I sat frozen for several seconds and then let go of the wall, letting the ropes catch me and return me to the ground.”  If we constantly tell ourselves “I can’t do this”, “This is too hard”, or “My anxiety is too high for coping right now”, we are likely to give up early or avoid the situation entirely.  When those thoughts pop into our minds, we can replace them with a positive affirmation.  “I can do this”,“I am capable”, and “I’m stronger than I feel” are all positive affirmations that can help push back against the anxiety that is preventing us from reaching our goals or functioning in daily life.Challenging Thinking Errors:  Thinking errors are irrational patterns of thinking that often come along with anxiety or depression.   As with positive affirmations, we can replace thinking errors by challenging them.  Common thinking errors include all-or-nothing thinking (where we view things in very black and white terms), mind reading (where we assume we know what another person is thinking), filtering out the positive (where we focus entirely on the negative, and ignore anything that might counter our current thoughts), and emotional reasoning (taking our feelings as signs, i.e., I feel scared, so I shouldn’t attend this event).  Recognizing then challenging these kinds of thinking errors can help us confront our anxiety by reminding our brain that there are other ways to see the world and we do not have to be stuck in our anxiety.  If you have tried utilizing these tools and need more support in confronting the big scary dog of anxiety in your life, Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy can help retrain your brain to see the dog not as a snarling beast, but as something more approachable.  ERP therapy is effective in treating anxiety as well as obsessive compulsive disorder.  If you are struggling with these issues, schedule an appointment with Alice in either the Bountiful or Cottonwood Heights office at (801) 944-4555.