Self Motivation – Playing With Anxiety
We often face situations where it’s hard to do something we don’t feel like doing, yet doing it anyways is an important aspect of being effective. I’ve always been decent at self motivating but recently I learned a whole new perspective, related to my 12 year old son, which has taken me to the next level.
One of the key concepts of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey is that effective people deal with things they “don’t want to do” but they do it anyways. Stephen writes that in order to do this you must have something greater to motivate you but stops there. I’ve recently learned a lot more about this area in an unexpected way, and its been a game changer for me.
Learning from a 12 year old
I’ve always counted myself decent at self motivation. I would look at the thing I needed to do and think of the positive side that I could get excited about. For example, cleaning the house, I would think about how nice it will be to have a clean house. That would be enough to get started and once started it always seemed easier to continue. Amusingly, I’ve never been able to motivate too well about taking care of paper work or paying some bill except to think how nice it would be when it’s out of the way.
My son has been having some challenges with homework. For example, he would think about how many math problems he has to do, 8 problem sets, each problem set being 7 problems, and get overwhelmed. We tried to help him by telling him to “take one thing at a time”, “it’s not really that much”, “its nothing to get stressed out about”, and reassuring him that “everything will be ok”. I think this is the typical thing we tell ourselves or others when we or someone else is struggling or having issues. It turns out, this strategy actually has the opposite effect. It actually makes things worse.
Playing with anxiety
In the quest to figure this out and help my son, I read a book that was recommended by a friend called “Playing With Anxiety”. The book is focused on how to help kids learn about anxiety and ways to handle it.
It turns out that “Avoidance” of doing certain things that we think are unpleasant, where we feel anxiety, is one way people deal with anxiety. When we avoid the “anxiety causing” task, activity, or situation, we feel better, but only for the moment.
Anxiety is normal and expected
Feeling anxious turns out to actually be a normal and expected thing. The emotional side of our brain is connected to our fight or flight response. You may have experienced this before when you perceived some danger. For example, if you where walking in the woods and heard the sound of an animal. You may have started feeling your heart racing, your mind focusing on the sound you heard, and your body getting tense.
These feelings and response are meant to protect us from danger. When we are high up and might fall, or there is an animal in the woods, its very helpful.
We can think ourselves into anxiety, and that is normal too
These feelings and mechanism can also be triggered by our thoughts. Imagine yourself in a scary situation, let’s say on the edge of a high rise building, looking down, and seeing how high up you are. If you really try to imagine this, you’ll start feeling a little nervous or anxious. This is also expected as it is meant to helps us avoid future dangerous situations that could cause us to get hurt or killed.
Harmless thoughts however…
The problem is that this response can also occur when we think about overwhelming things like lots of math homework or something new we are doing that we’ve not done before. Is there a danger from doing a lot of math homework? Can we be hurt or killed by doing lots of math? No, of course not. But the emotional side of our brain does not know that. It listens to the intellectual side and its worries and does what its meant to do, which is to pump adrenaline and get us ready to fight or flight. This in turn makes it worse because we feel things which increases the intellectual talk that something is wrong, and increases the feelings. This is a self re-enforcing cycle.
Understanding
The key is to recognize that this is happening, that it’s normal to feel worried or anxious, and that it’s the way the emotional side of our brain is trying to keep us safe
Whats the worst case?
Thinking about what is the worst case is helpful to understand the feeling better . If we realize that the worst thing that can happen, if we do a lot of math, is we will learn more math, then we can feel comfortable in our choices to move forward since that is not a bad outcome.
Choosing a response
We know the stimulus, the emotions we are feeling and roughly why we are feeling them. We recognize that this is happening, that it’s normal to feel worried or anxious. We think about the worst case, usually there is very little chance that will get hurt or killed, and so we do the activity anyways.
As we do the activity, we re-train the emotional part of our brain to see that nothing bad has happened and the fight or flight response then diminishes after several such experiences. We can also accelerate managing these feelings by having our intellectual side remind our emotional side of our past positive experiences.
Choose to be uncomfortable on purpose
If there is a certain activity that makes you feel uncomfortable go out of your way to do it on purpose. You can use this as practice to train your emotional part of your brain that imagined bad outcomes usually don’t happen. The clinicians call this exposure therapy.
Recent Success
I was recently on vacation with my kids and I have this expensive $1,000 DJI drone that I purchased a few years ago. My kids kept asking to fly it and I could feel my anxiety build up. Given my recent practice with my son, I was ready. I recognized the feelings as my brain trying to protect me. Thinking about it, I was afraid my kids would crash the drone or damage it after paying all that money. I used the above method to recognize why I was feeling the way I was, fear of loosing the drone. I then thought of the worst case, I would loose that money and that I could live with that outcome. I let them fly it, felt the anxiety, and after a while the anxiety diminished. It turned out there were no crashes, no damage, and no anxiety at the end. That was a great experience for me.
Onward
The key to dealing with worry/anxiety is to learn that it’s ok to feel anxious, to understand why we are feeling that way, and to choose a response while we feel anxious. The emotional feelings will diminish in intensity with more practice to train our brain that everything turned out fine.
As I continue the journey of starting a new company, anxiety is a normal part of my journey. It’s a friend that is trying to keep me safe and I am learning to notice it, examine what it’s trying to tell me, think about the worst case, and choose to keep moving forward in an appropriate way.
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