The experience of anxiety involves nervous system arousal. If your nervous system is not aroused, you cannot experience anxiety. Understandably, but unfortunately, most people attempt to cope with feelings of anxiety by avoiding situations or objects that elicit the feelings. Avoidance, however, prevents your nervous system from habituating. Therefore, avoidance guarantees that the feared object or situation will remain novel, and hence arousing, and hence anxiety provoking. Moreover, avoidance tends to generalize over time. If you avoid the elevator at work, you will soon begin to avoid all elevators, and then all buildings that house elevators, etcetera. Soon enough, you'll be living in a prison of avoidance.
Moreover, when you avoid something that scares you, you tend to experience a sense of failure. Every time you avoid a feared object or situation, your anxiety gains strength while you lose some. Every time you avoid the feared object or situation, you accumulate another experience of failure and another piece of evidence attesting to your weakness. Finally, avoidance eliminates practice. Without practice it is difficult to gain mastery. Without mastery,
confidence is less likely to rise.
So, avoiding anxiety maintains and magnifies it. To get rid of your anxiety you should instead capitalize on the principle of habituation through the use of "exposure." Exposure is by far the most potent medicine known to psychology. It is responsible, directly or indirectly, for most positive improvement achieved in
therapy--any therapy, but particularly the treatment of anxiety. Exposure entails facing your fears, which makes it aversive in the short-term. But many worthy long-term
goals entail short-term discomfort (think studying for an exam). Exposure also seems counter intuitive, but many truths are counter intuitive (think about the fact that we're residing on a ball floating in infinite space). Exposure scares people, but scary things are not necessarily dangerous (think roller coasters, horror films). Exposure is scary primarily because most people, lacking an
understanding of the habituation principle, expect their
fear to escalate indefinitely in the presence of a feared object or situation. But nothing rises indefinitely. And fear, if you face it, will soon begin to subside as you habituate.
