Practical Tools for a Less Anxious Life - Donald Robertson - #1050

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
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What do you wish more people knew about how anxiety works and what causes it from your perspective?

**Donald Robertson** (0:50)
Gosh. Well, anxiety used to be my specialism, although now I focus a bit more on anger these days. But they're both, they're two of my favorite emotions. The main thing I think that people should know about anxiety is it's, we tend to think of emotions in a very simplistic way in our society. We have very simplistic language for emotions, and most people buy into something that psychologists sometimes call the hydraulic model of emotion, which is the idea that emotions are just like a blob of energy that wells up inside you, and you can try and push them down, or you can vent them or whatever, and that's wrong. It isn't how emotions work basically, it's massively overly simplistic unfortunately. That's what we sometimes call the folk psychology or default psychology. So we get off to a bad start by not having the faintest idea of how our emotions work in the first place. So the main thing I would say is, I think of an emotional anxiety more like a recipe for baking a cake. It's got milk and sugar and eggs and raisins and whatever else you want to put in. So the thoughts, actions, feelings, mental images, memories, all these things get mixed together and that bakes the cake of whatever type of anxiety that you've got. The main thing people should know about treating anxiety, I'll hammer this home because it really is one of the main things. I like to call this the most robustly established technique in the entire field of psychotherapy research.
How would you like to hear about that? That's no exaggeration. There's a thing that we use in CBT that we've known about for well over half a century. Maybe it's cracking on like 70 years or more now that it's been used in therapy called exposure therapy.
It's probably the most reliable type of therapy that we have basically. It's used for phobias and other types of anxiety as well. So, Chris, what would happen if you take someone that's got a cat phobia? Animal phobias are generally considered to be pretty much the simplest type of anxiety. It's pretty straightforward. There's other types of anxiety. It comes in flavors like social anxiety, panic attacks, PTSD, stuff like that. But we'll start off with a nice easy snake phobia or cat phobia. So you get someone with a cat phobia and you sling them in a room with a bunch of cats. What's going to happen to their heart rate for a start?

**Chris Williamson** (3:21)
It's going to go up a lot.

**Donald Robertson** (3:23)
It's probably going to almost double, Chris, like as if you're sprinting or something like that, and it will do that in less than five seconds. That's a pretty robust measure of anxiety, generally speaking, certainly for phobias, it is. That's easy. We start off with an easy question to lure you in, buddy. Now I'm going to ask you a slightly trickier question. What happens next?

**Chris Williamson** (3:46)
Does it stay there?

**Donald Robertson** (3:47)
Forever.

**Chris Williamson** (3:49)
What, until the cats are removed?

**Donald Robertson** (3:51)
Until the cats are removed. What goes up must come down. We could wait as long as we like. Is it just going to stay there forever? It's probably going to start to come down eventually. It will return probably to almost its starting level if we wait long enough and nothing catastrophic happens. Actually, the first thing that will happen is this cat phobic is going to want to get out of the room desperately. But they can't because we locked the door, so tough.
But they'll be an urge. This is why people often don't overcome their fears. Because there'll be a powerful drive to avoidance, obviously. So, interestingly, what's one of the main things that would encourage somebody to stay in the room even though they desperately want to run out the door would be the presence of another person encouraging them to do it. Now, that might be somebody that's getting paid money for doing it, like a therapist or whatever, you know, good for them. But back in the day, when you were just little Chris, it might have been your mum or dad, basically, that was encouraging you to do things that were maybe making you feel unnecessarily anxious at first. They were saying, Chris, it's going to be okay, you don't need to be scared, it will be fine. You know, you'll get used to, you know, playing a sport or petting a big dog or whatever, as you're a bit nervous about initially. So the presence of another person can be a game changer in getting people to stay there for longer. So the heart rate is probably going to come down, right? How long do you think that might take?