We talked before about how challenging it is to focus or pay attention to anything besides your own feelings or fear when you’re under high anxiety or panic. This combined with the rapid dump of chemicals into your brain makes it extraordinarily difficult to think clearly, use logic, or remember how to perform even simple tasks. Anything that hasn’t been practiced and learned to the level that is unconscious and automatic suddenly becomes very difficult, as cognitive overload kicks in and the amygdala shuts down your frontal cortex and takes over control of your body. This lack of availability of high functioning mental processing presents an interesting dilemma during treatment.
You can learn all you want about how to best cope with and handle your anxiety, but if you can’t remember it or slow your mind down enough to put it to use when you’re actively going through your fear response, what good is it?
You need a way to enlist the help of anxiety control techniques when it’s MOST DIFFICULT to use them, and you can do this by incorporating two strategies
into your treatment plan...The first, and what I consider one of the most important things, is to ensure that the techniques you’re going to use when you’re experiencing anxiety are going to be optimally effective when you need them, and one of the most obvious but often overlooked aspects of that is making certain you know and can remember what they are!
When you’re sitting at home reading a book or manual, or even this report, it’s deceptively easy to think you can predict what you’ll do the next time you feel those feelings of fear and panic you’ve felt before. Maybe you tell yourself, “The next time, I’ll just ignore them” or “That’s it! I’m not going to worry about THAT anymore”.
It’s simple to make those well intentioned plans and
commitments when you’re at ease, but terribly difficult to stick to them once your self-preservation instincts kick in. That’s why more is needed and why anxiety treatment PLANS are so useful and effective. You need to know in advance specifically what things you’ll do to bring your anxiety levels down and bring peace to your amygdala.
Most every book you may have read on anxiety will have some advice on things you should do, and some of their advice is actually pretty good. They’ll tell you to breathe deep, accept your feelings, and go about your life anyway, all good things. But it’s not enough. They’re missing a key component.
Let me tell you a little story to illustrate my point...On January 15, 2009 US Airways Flight 1549 departed New York bound for Charlotte, North Caroline. Everything was going smoothly as Pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and Co-Pilot Jeffrey Skiles made the takeoff into the crisp afternoon air. At 3200 feet, suddenly and without warning, the plane flew through a large flock of Canadian Geese. They lost power to both their engines virtually immediately at a very low altitude...a worst case scenario to be sure.
Sullenberger and Skiles had just a few moments, literally minutes, to decide what to do, what order to do it in, and to then execute the plan. If they didn’t choose right, or choose the wrong order, or were too slow to act, it would be too late for them and the 155 passengers and crew.
What do you think they did?Did Captain Sullenberger and Skiles turn to one another and start discussing the possibilities? Weighing the pros and cons and trying to think back to what they read in their manuals during flight school?
No. They immediately pulled out their emergency checklist and began following its procedures. Because of the checklist they knew what was needed quickly, without thought, and with certainty.
You probably know the ending to the story. Flight 1549 made an emergency landing in New York’s Hudson River and all 155 people aboard survived, making it one of the most amazing examples of perfect execution in aviation history. Do you think Sullenberger and Skiles attribute the “Miracle on the Hudson” flight’s success to their own uncanny abilities, quick thinking, and intelligence?
When the situation is critical and high levels of stress will make important decisions challenging, almost every industry relies of the use of checklists so they can plan what to do BEFORE the need arises. Aviation doesn’t let their pilots decide how to respond when an engine fails, they prepare
a checklist so the crew KNOWS what to do
should the need arise. Power plants don’t
HOPE they figure out a solution if
something goes wrong, they have a
checklist. Surgeons and hospitals have
them. The Red Cross has them.
Anywhere you look, when it’s important,
there’s a checklist.
Ridiculous, right? There’s no reason to NOT plan out beforehand what you’re going to do if you begin to experience anxiety or panic EXACTLY AND IN WHAT ORDER prior to ever needing it! The easy to remember and execute “checklist” type of treatment strategy is one the primary reasons the programs I develop are so effective against even the most severe anxiety, it takes the thought out of the equation, which only makes sense to me because thinking when you’re anxious is almost impossible!
Trying to accurately remember 150 pages of jibber-jabber about positive thinking, complicated rituals, procedures and whatnot when you’re anxious or having a panic attack WILL NOT WORK. Like we talked about and you know from your own life, when you’re under high anxiety or during panic, only the most automatic and basic functioning is possible. To expect to remember what you need to know to feel better during that time is setting yourself up to fail. You need a checklist. Something that you can easily call into your memory that says, “Do this. Then do this. Then this. Ahhh, ok, it’s over.”
If you can’t stop reading this sentence right now and tell me EXACTLY what you’re going to do the next time you get anxious and in what order you’re going to do it in, or if it takes you more than five steps to accomplish, you need something different. You’re simply asking your brain to function at a level it’s incapable of during a stress response.