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Areas › Worry and anxiety › Facing it a step at a time
Moving on too early turns the ladder into a run of narrow escapes, and each escape teaches that you got out just in time. The marker worth waiting for is the shift from getting through it to barely thinking about it. That usually takes several goes at the same rung, which is dull, and the dullness is the actual work.
Facing a fear in steps works, and it works best with someone guiding the ladder. Read this as an explanation of how it works, and take the steps themselves to a therapist.
The moment you are freed (Quran 94:7), the instruction is to work on, so the next step follows one that was finished rather than one that was abandoned.
الشرح
فَإِذَا فَرَغۡتَ فَٱنصَبۡ
The moment you are freed [of one task] work on
Qur’an 94:7read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Animal work on fear extinction mapped roles for the infralimbic prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus and the amygdala, establishing extinction as the preclinical model sitting behind exposure therapy. Recordings in animals also showed coordinated theta activity between prefrontal cortex and the amygdala and hippocampal pathways during successful extinction. That is where the confidence in repetition comes from, and being animal evidence it explains the principle rather than telling you how many times to walk back down the same corridor.
Barad M. (2005). Fear extinction in rodents: basic insight to clinical promise.. Current opinion in neurobiology doi
Lesting J, Daldrup T, Narayanan V, Himpe C, Seidenbecher T, Pape HC. (2013). Directional theta coherence in prefrontal cortical to amygdalo-hippocampal pathways signals fear extinction.. PloS one doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Repeating a step until it is unremarkable is what tells your body the thing you feared is not coming.
Being shown a breathing technique is not the same as being able to use one. Practise it while nothing is wrong, often enough that it runs without you having to remember the order.
Coming back after a bad patch is quicker than getting there was the first time. Most people expect the opposite, which is why a setback feels so final.
If you are helping someone with their sleep and eating, ask rather than instruct. The moment you sound like their mother you have lost the part of you that was useful.