Anticipatory Anxiety

Question 1

What is Anticipatory Anxiety?

Answer 1

Anticipatory anxiety is the fear that you might become unable to successfully accomplish what you set out to do.

Question 2

What is the Metacognitive Perspective?

Answer 2

Is essentially the awareness of your own cognition.

Question 3

Why use the Metacognitive Perspective?

Answer 3

1. It allows you to understand that each worried anticipation or avoidance urge is a repetition of a process that keeps anxiety going.
2. You create the opportunity to strengthen your ability to interrupt and make changes.
3. This increases your confidence to cope more comfortably with uncertainty.

Question 4

Is anticipatory anxiety based on the future or present?

Answer 4

Anticipatory anxiety is based on your imagination about the future about something that has not yet happened.

Question 5

What is the Therapeutic Attitude Shift?

Answer 5

1. It means changing the way you react to your anxious thoughts, feelings, memories, and sensations.
2. Observing your thoughts and feelings in a nonjudgmental manner.

Question 6

What are the components of the Therapeutic Attitude Shift?

Answer 6

1. Expecting is the opposite of hoping you will not be anxious.
2. Accepting anticipatory anxiety makes you susceptible to avoidance and striving toward accepting those feelings without regret, shame, anger.
3. Allowing the anxiety is the process of nonaction and therapeutic surrender.

Question 7

What is the Worried Voice?

Answer 7

1. Worried Voice is the voice of your frightened overactive imagination.
2. It articulates your fears, doubts, and insecurities.
3. It wants answers to questions about the future that cannot be answered.

Question 8

What is the False Comfort Voice?

Answer 8

1. It is the voice of avoidance. The sole purpose of False Comfort is to remove the anxiety that is expressed by Worried Voice.
2. It offers “answers” to unanswerable questions.
3. No matter how skillfully False Comfort argues, Worried Voice always has a comeback that escalates the anxiety.

Question 9

What is the Wise Mind?

Answer 9

1. Wise Mind is the voice of plain common sense.
2. It is a mindful and calm observer of the other internal voices and of the external world and its realities.
3. It does not judge or suppress the other voices.

Question 10

What are the components for shifting perspective & attitude?

Answer 10

Surrender & Commit
Shifting perspective has two components:
1. An observational approach to your emotional life
2. Valuing the present moment
Shifting attitude has three components:
1. A self-compassionate stance
2. Willingness to lean towards anxiety-challenging experiences
3. Therapeutic surrender

Question 11

What is Therapeutic Surrender?

Answer 11

1. Like driving a car with no brakes along a flat road out and you want to stop.
2. Simply surrender: take your foot off the gas, do nothing except let time pass and it’ll stop naturally.