[thinkharder]

When you were thinking about fear, were you thinking about an actual threat, or an imaginary one? Was it something realistically possible, something that has caused you fear in the past, or something theoretically possible, like getting in a car accident. I tried the exercise and it took me about 30 seconds to work myself into a minor panic attack, and a couple of minutes to walk that back. I'm in the process of buying a home and didn't leave myself enough time between the offer and when I needed to deliver the earnest money check to make the bank transfers into the checking account I needed to do so the check will clear. Thinking about that creates enormous anxiety in me. Working out of it involves logically walking myself thru the steps, the possible outcomes, and what I need to do in the event of each outcome. Basically, if I deliver the check today and they deposit it same day, it won't clear until tomorrow, giving the transfers just enough time to get completed. I"m still slightly nervous about it, but it was easy to ramp that way the hell up. It was less easy, but completely possible to ramp it back down by thinking it thru.

"Emotions play a huge role in anxiety and really cannot be ignored or just reasoned away. They need to be experienced. They need to be felt and expressed. And once they are, logic is a useful tool, as you said, to dive into them and think more about why you are feeling that way."

You are totally right there. What i learned in CBT: you experience emotions. Period. You have no control over whether or not you feel them, and if you try to repress them they will force their way out in weird and inappropriate ways. Emotions cause physical feelings in the body. Fear gives you that pit in your stomach, the FFF reflex fires up and your body prepares to flee, fight or freeze. As you experience the physical sensations, it provokes cognitive thoughts, and the combination of feelings and thoughts will produce actions. Each of these things feed back into each other either reinforcing them or diluting them. You may take actions that produce more fear, or actions that make you feel safer. Your thoughts may reinforce your emotions or calm them down.

For me the big revelation was that there was a separation between emotions and feelings. To me they were literally the same thing. Understanding this concept has allowed me to find a tiny bit of space between experiencing the emotion and the physical sensations it provoked. That allows me (sometimes) to drive a wedge of logical thought in between them and experience the emotion, without it uncontrollably driving physical sensations that then uncontrollably drive thoughts that feed back into the emotion, creating a vicious cycle. It's true that you can't just tell yourself "stop being afraid". But there are a lot of cognitive things you can do to temper and interrupt the anxiety cycle. For me, it's not easy, takes a ton of work, but it DOES work, and it has changed the way I view life and my place in it in enormous positive ways.

[devilsavocado]

I was thinking about something that I didn't already fear. I should have been more clear. Your example is exactly the type of thing I also stress over, but it also sounds like it is something that it is healthy to have at least some fear over.

I can also 'reason' myself into a panic in these situations. But afterwards I usually realize I was experiencing some type of cognitive distortion, and I wasn't being quite as logical as I thought I was.

Sounds like we learned a lot of similar stuff in CBT. Really changed my life for the positive as well. But It's still a struggle.