Mastering Anxiety Through Learning

Achieving "Goldilocks anxiety": Not too much, not too little, but just right.

Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

Key points

• Anxiety’s purpose is to protect us from danger. We want our anxiety levels to accurately match reality.
• Attaining realistic anxiety involves learning whether a situation results in a feared outcome.
• Anxiety is comprised of beliefs of how likely and how severe the feared outcome will be in a given situation.

Are emotions always perfectly in touch with reality? Absolutely not. They’re based on our perceptions, and our perceptions aren’t always in line with reality. That’s the goal, though—to get our emotions to accurately match reality.

Think “Goldilocks”

While Goldilocks is exploring the house of three bears, she sits in three chairs: the first was too hard, the second was too soft, but the third chair that was just right. The same idea applies to anxiety: given the reality of a specific situation, we want our anxiety to be not too much, not too little, but just the right amount. After all, anxiety serves a purpose: to protect us from danger.

The problem of having too much anxiety is that it can be very unpleasant and can lead to avoiding or limiting aspects of our lives (impairing social relationships, personal interests, home care, work/school, etc.), and the problem of having too little anxiety is that we won’t adequately protect ourselves from real dangers or undesirable outcomes. So, when thinking about how to master anxiety, the goal is to have the right amount of anxiety based on the reality of the situation so we can properly respond to the situation. Our level of anxiety needs to be juuuuuust right.

Changing Anxiety by Learning Safety vs. Danger

How do we accomplish the goal of having realistic anxiety? One major approach is to learn what is safe and what is dangerous. Anxiety involves learning about associations: whether this situation results in that feared outcome (e.g., whether touching this dirty object results in getting sick; whether swimming in the ocean results in being attacked by a shark; whether giving a presentation/speech results in social rejection) (Beckers, et al., 2023; Duits, et al., 2015). When learning about these associations, we need to learn two different things: i) what is the likelihood that the feared outcome will occur, and ii) if the feared outcome does occur, how severe will it be? In clinical terms, this learning process is called exposure therapy (Parker, et al., 2018).

Exposure therapy involves approaching situations that the person believes will result in their feared outcome to test out whether the feared outcome occurs and, if it does, whether the feared outcome was as severe as they originally predicted (Craske, et al., 2014; 2022).

For example, if a person is worried that giving a presentation/speech at work will lead to social rejection (or synonyms of “social rejection,” such as social criticism, negative feedback, negative judgment), exposure therapy would involve repeatedly giving presentations/speeches to test out whether rejection occurs and how bad the rejection is if it does occur (e.g., is it severe rejection, in which the speaker gets loudly ridiculed by all members of the audience or gets fired? Or is it no rejection or possibly even praise?). By doing many exposures across a variety of situations, the person learns how likely rejection is to occur and how severe it is when it does occur. In other words, the person is learning to calibrate their beliefs and anxiety to reality.

Oftentimes, people are overly anxious, so exposure therapy reduces anxiety. But it’s important to remember the true goal: to have realistic anxiety—not too much, not too little. If the person from the example above has learned that giving an unprepared public speech to authority figures at work realistically results in some critical feedback from the authority figures, then it would make sense to prepare the public speeches—that’s the reality. It would not make sense to excessively over-prepare the speeches (at the cost of time, effort, and interference in other aspects of life) nor to continue under-preparing the speeches. It would also not make sense to exaggerate in one’s own mind how bad the feedback was (was it catastrophic, or was it fair/minor constructive criticism?).

Exposure Therapy Is Like Playing a Piano

Importantly, exposure therapy is like playing the piano: anyone who presses some piano keys is technically playing the piano. However, playing the piano well requires practice, knowledge of music theory (e.g., chord construction), and often a deliberate plan (e.g., which song to play and how to play it). Exposure therapy is the same: anyone who faces their fear might technically be doing an exposure, but to do exposures effectively requires theoretical knowledge, a detailed and nuanced exposure plan, and focus on the key elements of learning (Craske, et al., 2014; 2022).

Unfortunately, doing exposures without a deliberate plan could very easily be counterproductive—exposures are anxiety-provoking, and if they aren’t designed well, the anxiety and underlying beliefs might not change, which can be discouraging. But with high-quality exposures, we can calibrate our anxiety to realistic levels, which will allow us to live our lives more enjoyably and more fully. A competent exposure therapist can guide people through the mechanics of exposures, calibrate their beliefs/anxiety to be based on reality/evidence, develop a long-term plan for independent exposure practice, and help ensure that the exposures being done are indeed safe (wouldn’t want to do exposures to objectively dangerous things!).

Using the work presentation/speech example, added nuances may exist, such as not knowing whether negative feedback occurred; this can happen in work settings, as the work culture might suggest it is unprofessional to give negative feedback in public. Rather, authority figures might provide this feedback at a later one-on-one meeting or performance review, making it difficult to know during the presentation/speech whether negative judgment occurred. A competent exposure therapist could help the person navigate these nuances to optimize learning and long-term anxiety reduction from exposures.

Summary

In order to calibrate anxiety to realistic levels, we need to learn the likelihood that our feared outcome will occur and, if it does, how severe it really is. The main path to doing so is exposure therapy, which involves approaching the anxiety-provoking situations to learn how likely our feared outcome is to occur and how severe it is when it does occur. This may seem simple to do, but there are lots of important nuances to doing exposure therapy well, which a competent exposure therapist can help with.

How Do We Know If We Have Mastered Anxiety?

That’s tough to say, and I’m sure there are differing opinions. However, I believe a major part of the answer is having “Goldilocks” levels of anxiety consistently across time and across situations: not too much anxiety, not too little, but juuuuuust right.