Facing your fear increases anxiety?

I find that often facing even MINOR fears (checking my email when I expect unpleasant responses from people, playing a competitive game with someone, for example) makes me MORE anxious to face them next time because I have even less energy or patience to deal with it the next time. I feel like every time I face the fear, it adds one more traumatic experience to the pile of proof I have as to why I should be anxious, and the anxiety just gets worse...to top it all off people close to me judge me as weak and tell me I have to face my fears, but it /doesn't work/ for me. For example, if I feel like I've failed, it will make me SURE I will fail the next time, and I am aware the entire time that I'm causing the failure to happen again and again because I'm so demoralized by the failures behind me and the pressure to succeed grows greater and greater, until I get the point where I run out of energy and can't face the experience again. I look back and realize I've had this ..complex generating "machine" in my head a long time. Does anyone else know what I'm talking about? It's like failure aggravates further failure into this infinite loop of increasing anxiety until just facing the experience again becomes horrible to anticipate. Then you "face your fear" knowing you will fail, and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy! I think it has something to do with not being able to believe the "same" situation can have a different outcome. It's a mindset of FAIL. T_T

I feel like this a lot, and I think it's mostly due to depression. You probably have a lot of reasons to feel depressed, as I do, and it gets in the way of everything, makes dealing with everything more complicated.

I understand what you mean when you say there is a type of feedback loop going on. I've tried to change my mindset a bit to start thinking of negative experiences as being constructive. Every time you are exposed to something that causes anxiety, this can help by exposing you to it. If you are aware of it, just take a few deep breaths and try to concentrate on what is actually happening. One of the ways of treating avpd is by exposure and desensitisation. So if you can try and look at these experiences as being a constructive way of facing anxiety - instead of a negative anxiety causing thing, it should help you. It's difficult to do this when you are feeling really depressed and hopeless.

Realize that it is your personality that attaches so much meaning to these experiences. Everyone faces annoyances, awkwardness and negativety every day. The difference between them and us is that even the most minor embarrassment can affect us deeply for days. It's not necessarily "proof" as to why you should be anxious. It just affects you in a much more negative way than other people, to the point where you have difficulty functioning. I hope that makes sense. Personally I've decided to try antidepressents for awhile to see if it helps with the hopeless feeling.

Facing my fears doesn't increase me anxiety... but it does increase my dissappointment and hopelessness when it doesn't give the payoff I anticipate. It's like "Okay I worked through all these horrible feelings... for what, again?"

Hi N-Block. I can relate to some of what you've said. There have been some benefits from facing my fears, but I don't know whether they've been worth it. It's hard to appreciate the good things facing my fears have yielded because each step forward seems to involve two steps back. Overall I think I'm moving forward but it's so hard to tell most of the time.

Facing my fears does increase my anxiety, even/especially when things turn out better than I expected. I guess whenever something good happens I'm just waiting for the inevitable letdown. But when I manage to look at things more objectively, the things I worry about overwhelmingly turn out better than I believed they would. Nevertheless there are so many things I'd like to try, but I don't because in my imagination I've already failed at them.

One of my hypotheses about AvPD is that people with avoidant personalities lack the self-serving bias that normal people have. Instead we have a self-defeating bias so that we believe we aren't good enough for x/y/z. The self-serving bias is an annoying phenomenon to observe in people, but it offers a lot of protection from negative emotions like shame, guilt, and self-directed anger. I like what pkd said about how we experience life's setbacks differently from normal people. AvPD people take everything very personally. If you "fail" at something, there are a variety of reasons for it aside from blaming yourself. Try to be more patient with yourself, and give yourself the credit you deserve for trying to overcome your fears even when it makes you more anxious.

Hiya!

Self-serving bias. Oh yes, I know how much of an advantage that can be, I had it once. But, yes, it's incredibly annoying to see in other people, and feels immoral to me, so I forever aim for some sweet balance between self-serving and defeating.

It's hard when the conventional wisdom about fears (facing them diminishes them) doesn't seem to apply with AvPD. It always seems to get worse, you always seem to get more tired and more vulnerable. It does put you in tune with a fundamental truth about the world though - in the end your enemy is yourself. So you at least better be on your side.

I don't know, sometimes I feel so objective that I don't have the necessary self-serving drive to WIN. You know, to succeed, you need to sometimes let go of your inner critic, but my inner critic gets stronger the more I push at the problem. Then I worry that I have the problem all figured out, so I know just how to make myself fail. You're right, it's not irrationality that's the problem but the wrong kind. It's the faith-in-yourself irrationality you need, not the mental-self-flagellation type. *sigh*

Thanks for listening to my rant. (You guys are the only people I /can/ rant to...if I articulated my problems to anyone else they wouldn't understand beyond a millimeter of the depth of my self-torment...)

pkd wrote:The difference between them and us is that even the most minor embarrassment can affect us deeply for days. It's not necessarily "proof" as to why you should be anxious.

Yeah. I think I'm quite "fundamentalist" about failure in that to me it's a fact (e.g. I LOST to so-and-so) that I MUST consider the implications of. Trying to forget the fact that made me feel like a failure hurts my sense of integrity, same with trying to explain away the failure as my own misinterpretation - if I do this too much I'll feel like I'm being dishonest and biased and have to "get real" again. The biggest hurdle here is getting over ACTUAL failure, accepting it and moving on so that unnecessary failures don't happen. And if unnecessary failures DO happen, you need the strength to let those go by too, and not get aggravated. I guess you need to try and turn your focus toward the future. One good reason I use to keep that focus is by thinking the past isn't worth my energy, which I'm easily convinced by now that I'm just so damn tired.

N-Block wrote:It's a mindset of FAIL. T_T

Yup. You either face your fears with the mindset that you will fail and then you fail, or you don't face your fears, which means that you already failed. That means you fail either way, maybe you should get used to it.

i think this is true. if you face your fears in the incorrect way it can have a negative effect on you. i found this out from listening to CBT tapes. fighting is also no good, that just feuls the anixiety with something negative, you need to be calm and take things in gradual steps that you are comftable with, then you can build up to more harder things but, as you have taken them in steps, by the time you get to the hard one it wont be as hard, just natural...
you should have a look at some exposure therapy, might find it helpful.

Well facing your fears will increase anxiety of course because you are doing something that causes you anxiety and you're scared to do however the more you do it, in steps the anxiety does lessen and eventually goes away. I never avoid anything now because of anxiety or fear... because it just makes it worse in the end. Avoidance for the anxious person is never the answer, though it's easier said then done.

Cirvante wrote:

N-Block wrote:It's a mindset of FAIL. T_T

Yup. You either face your fears with the mindset that you will fail and then you fail, or you don't face your fears, which means that you already failed. That means you fail either way, maybe you should get used to it.

what do you actually get out of posting here?