Do you realize that you have an imaginary pet tiger? No, well I’m about to tell you about it.
Before we get to the pet tiger, though, it’s important for us to talk about something. You are your own worst enemy at times. You try to deal with issues that come up as best you can, but it doesn’t always work. In the outside world, outside of our minds, when we have a problem we get rid of it. Got a flat tire? Get a new tire. Got a stain on your clothes? Wash them out. You have a problem and you do what you know that you need to do to make it go away.
Unfortunately for us, this doesn’t work in our brains. Got anxiety… don’t..have anxiety?! No, that doesn’t work. How about I pretend that I’m not feeling anxious? That doesn’t work either because by telling myself to NOT think about something, I have to think about it by default. Our problem solving strategies that work outside of our heads don’t work well here. So how do we end up coping, then?
One of our tendencies is to cope by avoiding the issue. Let’s reflect on the college student, for example. Lets say she’s got a test coming up soon that she needs to study for and she has anxiety about the whole thing. After all, this could determine her grade for the semester. She’s been putting it off though; something we call “Experiential Avoidance”.
Now, this is where we get to talk about the tiger. The tiger in this analogy is the student’s anxiety about the test and I’ll elaborate on the metaphor in green.
- Early on in the process, the student opens her door and and finds a cute baby tiger.She brings it in to her apartment and it begins purring at her, looking for something.
- The student recognizes a little tinge of worry
- She feeds the little tiger a bit of red meat, knowing that this is what tigers like, and it seems happy.
- The student “feeds” her anxiety with Experiential Avoidance. She does something to avoid doing the studying/feeling the anxiety and feels a bit of relief.
- This goes on for days and days, maybe even years, until one day the student realizes that she’s caring for a full-blown tiger growling for food.
- After avoiding the anxiety the first time she felt relief and so she continued to avoid the task every time, looking for that relief. Meanwhile, the problem grew bigger and bigger; as the test gets closer, her anxiety grows.
- At a certain point, she has to keep feeding the tiger so that it doesn’t eat her, even though she is concerned by how large the tiger is.
- At a certain point, the anxiety becomes too overwhelming for our old strategies to work and we can’t handle it.
You can see that it’s not really likely that this strategy will work to make something go away, yet we all engage in it because that’s how we’re built. It’s an unfortunate consequence of being a language-based people. What can you do instead, then?
- Give yourself a break and accept what’s going on.
- Accept what you can have responsibility for and take care of it, be compassionate to yourself about the things you can’t actively do anything about.
- Let go of control. (Hah. Easier said than done).
These are all just steps on the path to living more presently in your life and having a new relationship with your emotions. If you liked the information presented here, I strongly recommend you read the book “Get Out Of Your Mind and Into Your Life” by Steven C. Hayes. After all, it’s where this information comes from.
I hope that as you’re reading this, you’re in a good state of being and that you’re successfully on your path to where you want to be. If you need help, we have the map.
By Alex Michaud. Counseling Denver for a Better Life.