Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Worry and anxiety › Being seen and judged
One young woman said what moved her was not the distress. It was working out how much she still leaned on her mum, and wondering who would make the phone calls once she was living away. Feelings are hard to aim at. A task has a shape, you either did it or you did not, and doing it happens to be the exposure anyway.
and ease my task for me (Quran 20:26). Moses asked about the task in front of him rather than about his feelings, which is the same direction being suggested here.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A review of the experimental evidence on exposure argues that it works by building a new memory which competes with the old one, that the feared outcome did not happen, rather than by wearing the fear down. A real errand is a natural version of that test, because it comes with its own prediction about how it will go. The account is theoretical, built from laboratory work, so it is the best current explanation rather than a proven recipe.
Craske MG, Treanor M, Conway CC, Zbozinek T, Vervliet B. (2014). Maximizing exposure therapy: an inhibitory learning approach.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A concrete errand gives the fear something to be tested against instead of something to be talked about.
Try this with someone you trust. They say a word, you say the first word back, fast, ten or so in a row. Black, white, mum, dad, sky. Then notice that nothing strange came out of you.
If you grew up praised for turning up rather than for how it went, the first time something you did is properly judged can feel like the floor giving way. Avoiding it afterwards is not weakness. It is what most people would do.
If most of your talking happens somewhere everything gets counted, likes, views, replies, then of course a room full of people feels like a scoreboard too. The habit was learned somewhere real.