Compassionate Living Psychology

Anxious feelings could come in the form of an inner voice that keeps raising questions, highlighting dangers in the situation or making negative predictions no matter what we do. This pessimistic inner voice usually focuses on safety from physical and social threat.

Physical threat is not limited to life and death issues like accident or illness. Our anxious self is concerned with all “physical” threats that can jeopardize our stability in lives. Feeling uncertain of our own capability to sustain or attain a higher living standard, we might become anxious about potential failures whenever we need to demonstrate our skills or exercise our judgment. For example, the inner voice might say “I won’t be able to handle this” before we attend an important interview or “How do I know if this is the right choice” when we make decisions.

Protecting us from social threat means that our anxious self endeavours to ensure we are free from social ridicule and exclusion. Therefore, the anxious inner voice might focus on potential embarrassment and become preoccupied with what-ifs like “What if I say something wrong? What if no one likes my idea? What if I raise a point that everyone else already knows?”

Eager for social acceptance, our anxious self is also sensitive to potential disastrous social events like loneliness and losing favor. The anxious inner voice may therefore say things like “What if my date finds me boring and dull” before going on a date or “What if no one talks with me” before attending a social gathering.

Common to the anxious self’s concerns of physical and social threat is that we cannot tell if the feared situations would happen or not. In other words, it reflects apprehension towards the unknown and uncertainties because these implies that there is no guarantee to our safety.

This could lead to conflicting motivations in our mind when we would like to step into the unknown, considering that there is a chance that we could achieve a desired goal if we take the risk, yet our anxious voice keeps holding us back and telling us “STOP! Don’t do this! There MIGHT be dangers ahead…”

Ideally, to resolve the conflict we could recruit the compassionate part of our mind and reassure ourselves that “It’s alright. We don’t have to act immediately. Let’s look at the situation again.” The rule of thumb is, do not pursue new plans blindly but at the same time, do not assume that the anxious inner voice is always right.

Bear in mind that learning to tolerate a healthy degree of risk taking in life is beneficial for our personal growth. We could try the following strategies to help to keep our anxious self in check and objectively review if we may have exaggerated the potential physical and social threats such risk-taking act entails.

1. Collect relevant evidences regarding how plausible and feasible our plan is, for example, experience sharing from someone who did something similar in the past or reflecting on our previous success or setbacks when we tried relevant tasks.
2. Make a list of our available resources.
3. Make a list of potential problems we might encounter.
4. Evaluate the impact of these potential problems and rate our capacity to cope with them.
5. Brainstorm if we have a back-up plan in case our new pursuit is not as successful as we wish.
6. Whenever possible, discuss with a trusted person regarding the plan.
7. Repeat the above regularly for continuous assessment if we decide to try implementing the plan.

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