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The Anxiety Paradox: Why Fighting Your Fears Makes Them Stronger
Ever felt like your attempts to control anxiety only make it worse? You're not alone. "The Worry Trick" by David A. Carbonell has become a cornerstone text in anxiety management, praised by mental health professionals and celebrities alike for its counterintuitive yet remarkably effective approach. Oprah Winfrey once featured it on her "Books That Help Me Through" list, noting how it transformed her understanding of worry. With over a million copies sold worldwide and translations in 27 languages, this book has changed how we conceptualize anxiety disorders, which affect approximately 45 million Americans and hundreds of millions globally. What makes this book particularly powerful is its central insight: the very strategies most of us instinctively use to combat anxiety are precisely what keep us trapped in its grip.
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The Fundamental Trick: Mistaking Discomfort for Danger
At the heart of all anxiety disorders lies a simple but devastating mistake: treating uncomfortable feelings as if they were dangerous. This confusion triggers a cascade of counterproductive responses that transform normal, temporary anxiety into persistent, life-limiting disorders.
When we experience the physical sensations of anxiety-racing heart, shallow breathing, dizziness-our brain's alarm system (the amygdala) flags these as potential threats. For someone with panic disorder, these bodily sensations are misinterpreted as signs of imminent catastrophe: a heart attack, loss of control, or public humiliation. Someone with generalized anxiety disorder treats worrisome thoughts as reliable warnings of future disasters that must be prevented at all costs.
The cruel irony is that our best efforts to control anxiety-avoiding triggers, seeking reassurance, analyzing worries endlessly-actually strengthen it. These "safety behaviors" provide momentary relief but teach our brains that we narrowly escaped genuine danger, reinforcing the false belief that anxiety itself is dangerous.
Consider how this plays out in real life: A person feels the beginnings of panic in a grocery store and quickly leaves. The immediate relief reinforces the belief that the store was somehow dangerous and that leaving was necessary for safety. With each repetition of this pattern, the fear grows stronger and the world grows smaller.
This isn't a sign of weakness or mental defect-it's actually our brain doing exactly what it evolved to do: err on the side of caution. Our brains naturally prioritize safety over comfort, preferring false alarms (causing unnecessary discomfort) over missed threats (potentially causing death). Some people simply have more sensitive alarm systems than others.
Understanding this fundamental trick-that anxiety disorders maintain themselves through our attempts to control them-is the first step toward breaking free from their grip.
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The Rule of Opposites: Why Your Instincts Lead You Astray
When it comes to managing anxiety, nearly everything your instincts tell you to do is exactly wrong-180 degrees wrong. This "Rule of Opposites" explains why our natural responses to anxiety consistently backfire.
Imagine standing on the edge of a high bridge, feeling vertigo and fear. Your instinct might be to tense your muscles, grip the railing tightly, and move cautiously. Yet these very actions intensify your fear by signaling to your brain that you're in danger. The counterintuitive solution-relaxing your grip, standing more naturally, perhaps even taking a small hop-often brings immediate relief by telling your body there's no real threat.
This pattern repeats across all anxiety scenarios. When feeling short of breath during a panic attack, we desperately try to take deep breaths-making our breathing worse. When worried about an upcoming presentation, we rehearse obsessively and avoid eye contact-increasing our anxiety. When afraid of flying, we monitor every sound and sensation-heightening our perception of danger.
The Rule of Opposites works because anxiety is fundamentally about discomfort, not danger. When we experience discomfort but treat it like danger, we activate fight-flight-freeze responses that are counterproductive for mere discomfort, which simply requires us to relax, accept, and let it pass.
I witnessed this principle in action when working with a client terrified of heights. On the Golden Gate Bridge, I noticed she was dragging her feet to maintain constant contact with the ground. When I suggested she try a tiny hop-the opposite of her instinct-she looked at me like I was insane. But after one small hop, she burst into laughter and felt immediate relief as the tension drained from her body.
This principle doesn't apply to major life decisions-just to our automatic responses during anxiety. The key is recognizing when your instinctive reaction is making things worse, then deliberately doing the opposite: relaxing instead of tensing, breathing out instead of gasping in, engaging instead of avoiding.
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Breathing Through Panic: The Exhale-First Approach
One of the most common and frightening symptoms of panic attacks is the sensation of not being able to breathe properly. Yet paradoxically, trying to take a deep breath usually makes this feeling worse, creating a vicious cycle of increasing panic.
Consider Owen's experience during an important meeting. As he felt the familiar sensations of an impending panic attack-racing heart, tight chest, shortness of breath-he followed his instinct to "take a deep breath." Tilting his head back and elevating his shoulders, he struggled desperately to inhale. This only made his breathing more labored, triggering more symptoms and frightening thoughts in a classic panic cycle.
The solution? Apply the Rule of Opposites: when feeling short of breath, focus on exhaling first rather than inhaling. This counterintuitive approach breaks the cycle of panic by returning to natural "belly breathing" (diaphragmatic breathing).
Here's how to practice it: Use your stomach muscles rather than chest muscles, pushing your belly out while inhaling through your nose, then pulling belly muscles in while exhaling through your mouth, with brief pauses between each step. This isn't learning something new but returning to our natural breathing style-watch infants for perfect examples.
People with anxiety often develop chest-breathing habits that feel labored and unsatisfying. Regular practice, such as checking and correcting breathing at the top of each hour, can restore this healthier pattern. Since belly breathing brings in more air, breathe more slowly to avoid over-breathing, which can cause light-headedness.
Contrary to common fears, fainting during panic attacks is extremely rare because panic raises blood pressure while fainting requires blood pressure to drop. The exception is people with specific conditions like POTS or blood phobia.
Remember that belly breathing isn't a magical cure-it simply helps moderate symptoms so you can stay present and work with your fears rather than flee. Don't use it as a "safety behavior" to protect yourself from imagined catastrophes. When Owen experienced another panic attack in a subsequent meeting, belly breathing helped him stay through the entire session, beginning his recovery from panic disorder.
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Practice, Don't Protect: The Path to Freedom
When we feel afraid, our instinct is to protect ourselves through avoidance. This works perfectly for genuine dangers-if there's a bear in your yard, staying inside is wise. But with anxiety disorders, this protective instinct backfires spectacularly.
The worry trick occurs when we treat all fears as danger signals requiring avoidance. While avoidance provides immediate comfort, it sacrifices our freedom for momentary relief, making us more afraid long-term. Each time we avoid something that makes us anxious, we reinforce the belief that it was truly dangerous and that we couldn't have handled it.
Have you noticed how your anxiety grows when you avoid what scares you? A person who avoids driving on highways soon finds their fear expanding to include all driving. Someone who declines social invitations because of anxiety eventually feels uncomfortable in any social situation. Avoidance feeds fear in a vicious cycle.
The Rule of Opposites offers the solution: practice engaging with what you fear rather than protecting yourself through avoidance. This works because of how our brain's fear center-the amygdala-functions. This primitive part of our brain operates outside conscious awareness and is responsible for detecting danger and triggering fight-or-flight responses. When activated, it overrides the rational cerebral cortex, which is why we can't simply "talk ourselves out of fear."
You can't redirect your amygdala through reasoning, but you can retrain it through exposure practice. The amygdala creates new memories only when activated, so effective retraining requires: entering the feared situation, feeling afraid, staying long enough to notice nothing bad happens, and repeating this process until the "this is okay" association becomes dominant.
The AWARE steps provide a framework for practice:
• Accept your anxiety rather than resist it
• Watch your symptoms and urges as an observer
• Act in ways that make you more comfortable while waiting for anxiety to pass
• Repeat these steps if anxiety surges again
• Remember that anxiety will End on its own regardless of what you do
This approach isn't easy-it requires facing discomfort deliberately-but it's the most reliable path to freedom from anxiety's constraints.
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Catching Worry in the Act: Recognizing the Bait
For chronic worriers, "what-if" thoughts act as bait that hooks us into obsessing about unlikely but possible negative future events. These thoughts trick us into mental struggles that strengthen our worry habit rather than resolving our concerns.
Worry thoughts typically follow a predictable pattern: "What if...[catastrophe clause]?" where the catastrophe can be any bad thing that isn't happening right now. "What if I fail this test?" "What if my child gets hurt?" "What if I can't pay my bills?" Recognizing this pattern is the first step toward breaking free from worry's grip.
The key insight is that worry isn't about future problems; it's a symptom of present nervousness. The "what-if" clause is our reminder that we don't have a problem right now-if we did, we'd be dealing with it rather than worrying about it. Worry is always about something that isn't currently happening.
To catch worry in the act, we can use practical techniques like carrying Tic Tacs and removing one each time we notice a "what-if" thought. This helps make the unconscious conscious. We can also enlist trusted friends to signal when they hear us use "what-if" phrases.
For worries that seem realistic, we should apply the Two-Part Test:
1. Does the problem exist in the world outside my mind right now?
2. If yes, can I do something about it now?
If both answers are "yes," take action. Otherwise, recognize you have the problem of worrying, not a problem to worry about.
This distinction is crucial. Most of what we worry about either never happens or happens differently than we anticipated. Even when our feared scenarios do occur, we typically handle them better than we predicted. Worry rarely prepares us effectively for real challenges-it just makes us miserable in advance.
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Humor Your Worries: Defusing Anxious Thoughts
Taking worrisome thoughts too seriously fuels anxiety, while responding with humor can disarm them. When what-if thoughts bait us, we need to avoid being tricked into fruitless mental arguments-like Muhammad Ali's "rope-a-dope" technique, where he let opponents exhaust themselves punching ineffectively.
Instead of arguing with worries or trying to ignore them, we can work them into our "act" through techniques like Paradoxical Repetition. This involves creating a concentrated worry sentence of about twenty words that captures our worst fears, then repeating it twenty-five times slowly while looking in a mirror.
Contrary to what most people expect, this repetition typically drains the worry of its emotional power rather than intensifying it. By the final repetition, the worry often feels meaningless-demonstrating that exposure techniques work for thoughts just as they do for feared situations.
Other humorous approaches include:
1. Worrying in a foreign language-even with minimal skills, translating worries into another tongue creates distance and often amusement.
2. Creating poems from worry content-transforming anxious thoughts into haikus or limericks forces creative reshaping that diminishes their emotional impact, like Chris's haiku about job loss ending with "Can I wash your car?"
3. Setting worries to familiar tunes-singing your fears to "Happy Birthday" or "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" helps air them out without taking them so seriously.
4. Walking in "worry shoes"-physically walking while holding obviously false thoughts demonstrates how we can carry untrue thoughts without believing them.
5. Replying with "Yes, and..."-borrowing from improvisational theater, this technique involves agreeing with your worry thought and adding something, often exaggerating it to absurdity. Rather than arguing with "What if my boss gives me a poor evaluation?" you might respond, "Yes, and he'll probably hit on my wife too and steal her from me once I've been fired!"
6. Making appointments for worry-scheduling two private ten-minute sessions daily for concentrated worrying helps contain anxiety's intrusions. During these appointments, engage in pure worry without problem-solving or reassurance. When worries arise outside scheduled times, you can choose to worry immediately or defer until your next appointment.
These techniques aren't about eliminating worry thoughts but changing your relationship with them-recognizing them as mental events rather than accurate reflections of reality.
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The Observer Mindset: Watching Rather Than Fighting
While spontaneous distraction from anxiety can provide relief, deliberately trying to suppress anxious thoughts typically backfires. Research consistently shows that attempting to not think about something makes it recur more frequently-like trying not to think about a white bear only to find polar bears roaming through your mind.
Traditional techniques like thought stopping (snapping a rubber band on your wrist while commanding yourself to "Stop!") and even cognitive restructuring often prove counterproductive for chronic worry because they involve resisting thoughts rather than accepting their presence. The counterintuitive approach-simply observing and documenting anxious thoughts-often provides better relief than attempts to control or eliminate them.
Rather than free-form journaling, structured questionnaires completed during anxiety episodes help transform your relationship with worry. Two specialized tools-the Panic Journal for physical symptoms and the Worry Journal for what-if thoughts-guide you to document your experience while it's happening.
These journals prompt you to record specific aspects of your anxiety: what you were doing before panic started, your fears about what panic might do to you, your breathing patterns, self-soothing techniques, any safety behaviors you're using, how the attack ends, your feared outcomes, and thoughts about future episodes. By completing these during (not after) anxiety episodes, you benefit from helpful reminders embedded in the questions and capture a more accurate picture of your experience.
You can respond to anxiety from two fundamentally different positions: as a victim who feels threatened and needs immediate protection (leading to distraction and resistance), or as an observer who carefully notes symptoms without judgment or reaction. The observer role-what Claire Weekes called "floating"-allows you to notice thoughts without evaluating their content.
These positions are inversely related; the more you occupy the victim role, the less you can observe clearly. Conversely, the more you observe, the less victimized you feel. Becoming an observer diminishes the struggle with symptoms.
For phobias where you're in a passive position (like being a passenger or in a waiting room), create comprehensive lists of expected symptoms across four categories: physical sensations, fearful thoughts, negative emotions, and frightened behaviors. During exposure practice, bring this Symptom Inventory and simply count each occurrence by marking boxes. This counting process helps you occupy the observer role rather than fighting against your symptoms.
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Breaking Free from Support Dependencies
People with anxiety often rely on "support people" to help them navigate feared situations, but this seemingly helpful arrangement comes at a significant cost: increased dependency and diminished self-confidence over time. While having support enables participation in activities that might otherwise be avoided, it reinforces the belief that you couldn't manage alone and leads to greater fear and dependency.
Consider Cynthia's fear of shopping in large stores. Her solution-always shopping with her husband Hal-has actually worsened her problem. Initially satisfied with him being somewhere in the store, she now needs him directly beside her. She's become increasingly dependent, requiring his presence, phone contact, or waiting nearby. While this arrangement gets the shopping done, it strengthens her belief that she couldn't manage alone and that terrible consequences would follow if she tried.
Support objects function similarly to support people, providing temporary comfort but ultimately undermining self-reliance. These items-medications, comfort animals, water bottles, cell phones, lucky charms, and more-create a false sense of protection that prevents you from recognizing your own ability to cope with anxiety.
Different objects serve different psychological purposes but share the same problematic outcome:
• Medications like Xanax often function as talismans-people feel better just touching the bottle, before even taking the pill
• Cell phones provide constant connection to support people and distraction through media
• Lucky objects represent superstitious thinking that attributes success to inanimate items
• Comfort animals provide emotional support but lead people to attribute their coping abilities to the animal's presence
Recovery requires gradually reducing reliance on both support people and objects-not necessarily all at once, but consistently moving toward independence. The person with anxiety must lead this process; support people shouldn't force changes or create surprises.
The main obstacle is the temporary increase in fear-but this discomfort is precisely why the process works. You're not increasing actual danger (anxiety disorders aren't dangerous), but reducing artificial comfort that perpetuates dependency. Using the AWARE steps can help manage this discomfort. As you become more independent, your relationships will likely change and improve, shifting back to two independent people who enjoy each other's company rather than one needing the other for reassurance.
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Breaking the Shame-Secrecy Cycle
Secrecy and shame work together to strengthen anxiety and worry. The more ashamed people feel of their troubles, the more they hide them, and the more they hide them, the more ashamed they feel-creating a destructive cycle.
Many anxiety sufferers keep their problems secret to avoid immediate embarrassment. While this provides short-term relief, it comes with serious negative side effects. Millions believe they're the only ones with these problems because secrecy is so widespread among anxiety sufferers.
Just as anxiety sufferers anticipate worse outcomes than what actually happens during anxiety episodes, they also imagine more negative reactions from others than would likely occur if they revealed their anxiety problems. By keeping fears secret from supportive loved ones, they miss potential support and remain trapped in self-criticism.
Many accomplished people with anxiety dismiss their achievements because they believe "if people knew my ugly secret of anxiety and worry, they wouldn't be impressed." This fraudulent feeling persists primarily because they keep their troubles secret rather than bringing them into the open where they could be accepted.
Maintaining lies and excuses to hide anxiety creates additional worry about keeping stories consistent. This "stage fright" adds more anxiety as you struggle to avoid contradicting previous excuses. Expressing the truth is often less anxiety-provoking than maintaining fabrications.
When anxiety prevents social participation and is kept secret, relationships deteriorate as friends notice patterns of refusals and implausible excuses. Without honest explanations, friends often conclude you simply don't want to spend time with them, causing friendships to wither.
Self-disclosure means revealing aspects of your anxiety to selected people rather than keeping it entirely secret. This isn't done because others have a right to know, but solely for your benefit. Many clients who have shared their anxiety with someone report they never panic in front of that person. One woman with hand tremors found her hands didn't shake when writing a check in front of someone who already knew about her problem-revealing how secrecy increases anxiety, which worsens symptoms.
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Controlling Actions, Not Feelings
When struggling with chronic anxiety, people often judge their days by how they felt rather than what they accomplished. Anxiety tricks sufferers into trying to control their feelings, which rarely succeeds. The better approach is to focus on controlling actions rather than feelings, since feelings aren't directly controllable.
Like an eye exam where the doctor asks "better here or better here?", people generally feel better when engaged with their environment rather than focused internally on their anxious sensations. When attention is directed inward during anxiety, it becomes a repetitive scanning for trouble rather than productive problem-solving.
The key insight is that feelings follow behavior-confidence comes after action, not before it. Many anxiety sufferers mistakenly believe they need to feel confident first before facing fears, when the opposite is true. They want to "buy a can of confidence" first, but confidence develops through action-just as learning to ride a bicycle comes from riding poorly and nervously at first, then gaining skill through practice.
Anxious people also struggle with control issues, often trying to control things outside their actual role. Fearful flyers attempt to control uncontrollable elements through behaviors like obsessively watching weather reports, scrutinizing pilots, or engaging in superstitious rituals. A passenger's role is simply to sit until arrival-"baggage that breathes"-yet fearful flyers resist this passive role. Conversely, fearful public speakers avoid using the control they actually have (making eye contact, varying pace, directing audience attention), making themselves more anxious.
Recovery comes from embracing the appropriate level of control for one's role in a situation-controlling what you can without trying to control what you can't-and focusing attention outward on engagement rather than inward on anxiety symptoms.
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Feel the Fear and Let It Pass
The most counterintuitive aspect of recovery from chronic anxiety-one misunderstood even by many therapists and health professionals-is that you shouldn't try to get rid of fear during exposure practice. Instead, allow yourself to feel afraid.
The key steps for effective exposure are:
1. Spend time with what you fear
2. Reduce safety behaviors
3. Get afraid
4. Experience the fear without trying to eliminate it
5. Stay until the fear naturally subsides somewhat
6. Review what happened versus what you anticipated
7. Repeat regularly
When considering exposure therapy, first recognize that you're dealing with a fear you want to overcome because it's not serving a useful purpose in your life. People don't seek help for fears that actually protect them (like fearing lion cages). Second, review your actual experiences with the fear to see if it has historically scared you without ever causing real harm.
Though difficult, getting afraid during exposure is essential. Remember your purpose clearly: you're deliberately seeking out fear to work with it rather than against it. Safety behaviors should be systematically reduced, not maintained long-term. Helpful techniques include AWARE steps, journals, Symptom Inventory, humoring what-if thoughts, and belly breathing-all tools that help you work with fear rather than fighting against it.
Effective exposure requires careful planning: work with one fear at a time; prepare with "fire drills"; don't combine exposure with daily tasks; break challenges into small steps; schedule practice a week in advance; decide destinations beforehand; ensure your exposure is relevant to your specific fear; identify patterns if your panic seems random; use thoughts themselves for exposure if thoughts trigger your fear; and remember this is practice, not a test.
An anxiety disorder isn't a disease to eliminate but a condition to recover from by losing your fear of fear. The most counterintuitive aspect of exposure practice is willingly becoming afraid while refraining from responses that interrupt anxiety. It's not about "toughing it out" but allowing yourself to feel afraid, staying in place, and giving fear time to pass. This retrains your amygdala and helps you lose your fear of fear.
While these strategies are clear and specific, they aren't easy to implement. The cruelest trick of anxiety is tempting you to "just get through it" like a scary movie, making bad trades of long-term freedom for temporary comfort. Unlike skipping a movie, which costs you nothing important, applying this strategy to anxiety means you're giving up living your life fully. Don't fall for this trick-this might be your only life.
