23/07/2024
How to Use Cost-Benefit Analysis to Control and Reduce Your Anxiety
When you become anxious about a particular situation, you generally tend to avoid that situation. This leads to a temporary decrease in your anxiety, but unfortunately, it doesn't solve the problem. It merely postpones it, with the possibility that it might even increase over time.
For example, if you are anxious about using an elevator, even if you've never heard of anyone being hurt in an elevator, you will avoid using it.
When you want to get into the elevator, you'll likely have thoughts like: "If I get in the elevator, something bad might happenāit might fall with me inside, get stuck, or other things like that." "So I must avoid such a thing from happening to me!"
By thinking this way, you only reaffirm and strengthen the irrational belief that terrible things can happen to you if you get in an elevator, and this only increases your anxiety and phobia.
If, instead, you use the elevator multiple times and see that nothing bad or terrible happens, this will contradict your irrational beliefs and catastrophic thinking, giving you a chance to overcome that anxiety and phobia.
To use cost-benefit analysis with this example, write down on a piece of paper the disadvantages of not using the elevator and the anxiety and phobia you feel when you want to use it.
Then, daily use the elevator (initially, together with other people) to convince your subconscious that nothing bad happens when you use the elevator and that you will only experience disadvantages if you continue avoiding it out of fear.
Next, write down on a piece of paper all the advantages you have if you choose to use the elevator: from not having to climb 10 or more floors every time you need to go up in a tall building to getting rid of that unpleasant state of anxiety and phobia.
The cost-benefit analysis technique encourages a person to take some non-dangerous short-term risks to gain a better and calmer internal state in the long term.
Example: Jeny and Driving a Car
Jeny was a woman who could no longer drive due to the anxiety she felt at the thought of having an accident.
Therefore, she always went to work or other places she needed to go by bicycle, bus, or train, even though she had a car and had never had an accident.
Where did her anxiety come from?
From the fact that a good friend of hers had once had a car accident, in which she was injured, but only slightly.
This experience triggered in Jeny a high level of anxiety, which activated every time she tried to get behind the wheel and even at the mere thought of driving.
As strange as it may seem at first glance, anxiety, like any emotion, can be contagious. Even if you haven't gone through an accident yourself, if someone close to you has, you might also feel fear and anxiety. This was Jeny's case.
Jeny's dominant irrational belief about driving was that she needed an absolute guarantee that nothing bad would happen to her and that she wouldn't have any accident if she got back behind the wheel. Which, obviously, no one could offer her.
For this reason, she avoided driving and even being a passenger in someone else's car.
Jeny was taught to reshape this irrational belief and, at the same time, to do a cost-benefit analysis of her avoidance behavior.
She reshaped her irrational belief, concluding that such an absolute guarantee doesn't exist and that the probability of her having an accident was very low, as she always drove well and very carefully, never having had such an accident before.
And even if she did have one, the probability of it being a simple minor accident would be very high because she was a responsible driver anyway.
After repeating this exercise several times, Jeny realized that, especially in the long run, if she continued to avoid driving, the disadvantages were much greater than the advantages she had.
She thus learned that the disadvantages she would feel at the moment if she tried to overcome her phobia and anxiety were much smaller than the long-term disadvantages if she didn't try. And the advantages she would have in the long term, once she overcame these two states, would be much greater than the disadvantages.
Like Jeny, you can also use this cost-benefit analysis technique, whether you are facing a high state of anxiety or other problems.
If you do this several times, you will quickly become aware that it costs you less to endure momentary discomfort by exposing yourself to those situations that evoke fear and anxietyāsituations that are actually unrealistic and non-dangerousāand overcome them, than to accept the long-term inconveniences of enduring that state of fear and anxiety permanently, with the possibility of enduring them for a lifetime.
