As you’ve no doubt noticed, our anxieties don’t often respond to mere reasoning.
Two of the most common sources for this type of anxiety related to behavior are:
A judgment about the “kind of people who X” (e.g. ask for help, bother other people, etc.)
A self-concept about what one does or doesn’t deserve or have the right to
Narrowing it down begins with checking how you feel about other people doing whatever X is. For example, if you picture someone else bothering a person of high status by asking them for help, how do you feel?
If the response is a negative judgment, empathetic embarrassment, anxiety, etc., then it’s very likely you have a learned “behavior X = bad person” type of rule in your brain.
Direct negative judgments are usually fairly straightforward to get rid of: in the simplest case, by just letting go of the rule if you no longer endorse it on any level. More complex methods for more stubborn cases include those of Crane (“releasing” technique) or Byron Katie (The Work).
If the judgment is more indirect or only applies to yourself, the techniques involved are more complex, and typically involve investigation into the specific circumstances that created the anxiety. The good news, though, is that usually some information about that will surface during the failure of the Work or releasing, which is why I try to start there first.
Successful intervention would mean that you no longer feel that particular anxiety when imagining the need to ask someone for help.
This is a different approach than the traditional one, in which one is told to fake it until you make it, i.e. keep doing the thing and maybe the anxiety will go away… eventually. Given my experience of dealing with various sorts of anxieties for years or decades with no change, I am not particularly satisfied by that sort of advice. It is definitely possible to do better: to change our minds in at least some areas, instead of just having to live with them.
As you’ve no doubt noticed, our anxieties don’t often respond to mere reasoning.
Two of the most common sources for this type of anxiety related to behavior are:
A judgment about the “kind of people who X” (e.g. ask for help, bother other people, etc.)
A self-concept about what one does or doesn’t deserve or have the right to
Narrowing it down begins with checking how you feel about other people doing whatever X is. For example, if you picture someone else bothering a person of high status by asking them for help, how do you feel?
If the response is a negative judgment, empathetic embarrassment, anxiety, etc., then it’s very likely you have a learned “behavior X = bad person” type of rule in your brain.
Direct negative judgments are usually fairly straightforward to get rid of: in the simplest case, by just letting go of the rule if you no longer endorse it on any level. More complex methods for more stubborn cases include those of Crane (“releasing” technique) or Byron Katie (The Work).
If the judgment is more indirect or only applies to yourself, the techniques involved are more complex, and typically involve investigation into the specific circumstances that created the anxiety. The good news, though, is that usually some information about that will surface during the failure of the Work or releasing, which is why I try to start there first.
Successful intervention would mean that you no longer feel that particular anxiety when imagining the need to ask someone for help.
This is a different approach than the traditional one, in which one is told to fake it until you make it, i.e. keep doing the thing and maybe the anxiety will go away… eventually. Given my experience of dealing with various sorts of anxieties for years or decades with no change, I am not particularly satisfied by that sort of advice. It is definitely possible to do better: to change our minds in at least some areas, instead of just having to live with them.