Why Expectations and Demands Matter in Anxiety Recovery (Ep 303)

Expectations and Demands – They Matter

Today we’re going to talk about exceptions. Mainly we’re going to talk about always expecting – or probably more accurately hoping – that you will have a calm body and mind. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be calm of course, but if your reality is that you are struggling with anxiety most of the time, then expecting or demanding to be calm and a quiet mind is going to make things a bit harder than they already are.

What I really want to do today is shine a light on how what we expect really has a major influence on what we experience and how we feel. It’s probably more accurate to say that what we insist we must have has a major impact on our experiences and how we feel.

Expectations.  Let’s look at a practical example.

My vision is terrible. Always has been. So I wear multifocal contact lenses or progressive lens eyeglasses. I even have a pair of glasses with lenses designed specifically for working at my desk on the computer. After wearing those glasses for a few hours, I get up from my desk and switch to my other glasses. If you wear glasses or contacts, you know what’s coming, right? There’s that period of adjustment where my eyes and brain have to get used to the other lenses.

When I get up from my desk, things don’t look quite right. I’m looking through the bottom of my progressive lenses because my chin is up a little and I’ve forgotten that I switched glasses. This makes everything blurry in the distance, I can’t really focus properly, which leads to feeling slightly off balance.

The expectation of my brain was clear focus and a steady feeling in my body. I didn’t get that. I got something that did not match that prediction. In that moment, I did feel a jolt of discomfort or anxiety. Maybe it was fear. But it happened. This is where things get interesting.

If this was early 2008, the mismatch between what my brain expected and what it got would have triggered an anxiety/panic spiral. I would have experienced that first jolt of fear or discomfort (see episode 83 of the Disordered podcast for a good explanation of first and second fear). Triggered by this mismatch, then I would have started fighting against my experience. I would have instantly started trying harder to focus, checking rapidly to see if my eyes were working, and I would have likely grabbed on to my desk, declared myself about to tip over, and started treating myself like I was fragile and about to break in some way.

Here’s the important part. When I would do that – behave like I was in danger when my brain misinterpreted the expectation mismatch as actual danger – I would have created more secondary fear. What does fear do?  It creates natural physical responses in the body and kicks the brain into problem solving and self-preservation mode indicated by lots of scary racing thoughts about what disaster awaits me in the next few minutes.

The Demand/Reality Mismatch Spiral

For an anxious person stuck on expecting – or demanding – a calm state even when none is to be found, this is a real problem because the initial mismatch between my reality and my expectation or demand triggers a sequence that creates an even bigger mismatch between what I expect (demand) and what I get!  See the problem here?

The mismatch between expectation and reality makes an anxious person react in ways that create a larger and more prolonged mismatch, which fuels more avoidance and resistance, which creates more mismatch, and the cycle continues.  It’s ugly and kinda evil, isn’t it?

What Can We Do With This?

Well, if we return to expectations or demands, our clue is there. If you are struggling with an anxiety disorder or chronic anxiety that you fear, hate, and are trying desperately to control, fix, or avoid to no avail, how is it helping you to expect/demand a calm body and mind as if something magic is going to happen to make it all go away?

Spoiler alert … it doesn’t help you. It creates the situation I am describing here.

The demand for it to go away is met with the reality that is hasn’t gone away, and things quickly get lit on fire and turn into a raging inferno of fear, anxiety, discomfort, and resistance.

So Expect To Be Anxious FOREVER?!

Does this mean you are doomed to expecting to suffer with anxiety every day for the rest of your life? Must you wake up every day and just expect the day to suck?  No. That’s not what I’m saying. But I think we have to recognize that wanting to feel calm is fine while demanding calm that is clearly out of reach AT THE MOMENT is counterproductive.

If we work in expecting to be anxious, expecting to have anxiety symptoms, and expecting to experience scary or troubling thoughts – BECAUSE THOSE THINGS ARE HERE LIKE IT OR NOT – we give ourselves more of a fighting chance to stop the resistance, achieve an acceptance/surrender posture when needed, and allow these scary and difficult experiences to ebb and flow naturally like all internal experiences do if we let them.

If you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading long enough you already know that that experience – it changes on its own without me forcing it or managing it – is the key experience that turns down the volume on the disordered anxiety and gives your nervous system a chance to naturally regulated itself over time without being forced or coerced into regulating with tricks or hacks.

Enter The Predictive Processing Model

There is science behind this. Predictive processing models of experience describe the creation of a subjective experience as the “math” that gets done when brains try to resolve their predictions and expectations with the data streams they get from the senses. In a non-anxious context, when I get up from my desk I expect my eyes to focus and I expect to feel steady on my feet. When I don’t, my brain takes things into account and adjusts its predictive model to accommodate the fact that I just changed glasses and need a minute or two to adjust. I’m not not focusing right and still not perfectly rock solid but the initial jolt of discomfort dissipates quickly because there’s no second fear because my brain was open-minded and adjusted its expectation.

But in a state of disordered anxiety, we hold on so tightly to the demand to feel a certain way that we pay VERY close attention to our subjective internal experiences and cannot zoom out to take other factors into account. 2008 Drew would have ignored the glasses situation completely. His brain was unable to be open-minded and flexible. It only knew that it needed calm and steady feelings so it hung on like hot death to the original exception or predictive model and I would fight like crazy to try to make that model be the “truth”.

Predictive processing models in neuroscience and cognitive science even have a phrase for this. It’s called precision weighting, which is really just a fancy term for attention. Anxious 2008 Drew was so focused on one set of variables that his brain placed a HUGE value on them, skewing the math and making it almost impossible to adjust expectations to support a more flexible acceptance or surrender posture.

Patience, Please.

These are not switches we can flip. You can’t hear this and instantly be in a state of full acceptance that you will be anxious and uncomfortable for the rest of today. It never works that way. But if you can start to bring your awareness the fact that you are turning hope into a demand without even realizing it, it can help you see when you start thrashing and fighting against your reality, which paradoxically makes it ever harder to get the reality you so desperately want.

Where’s The Part Where I Learn How To Calm Down?

Everything I’m saying here includes a ton of stuff that I’ve covered in other episodes and in my books and many years of social media posts so if you’re new to this kind of thing and are wondering how this fits into learning how to calm down, stop thoughts, prevent panic, or make it all stop by working directly on feeling better, you’re going to want to go back and start listening from the beginning, check out the first 10 episodes or so of the Disordered podcast, or maybe grab a copy of my book – The Anxious Truth.

But if you already understand the concepts and you’re working to implement them in your own work or maybe alongside the work you’re doing with your therapist or counselor, becoming more aware of how exceptions and demands play a role in what your anxiety experience looks and feels like can be one of those missing puzzle pieces that helps you make real change.

It’s OK To Want To Feel Better. But …

It’s OK to want to feel better. I want you to feel better. But wanting to feel better and insisting that this is the only outcome you can accept at any given moment even when your reality clearly does not match that outcome can really make the process of recovery even harder than it has to be.

Links Of Interest

Anxiety Recovery and Second Fear

The Attitude Shift

• My Panic Attacks Explained Workshop
• My Agoraphobia Explained Workshop
• My Panic and Agoraphobia Recovery Guidebook
• Follow me on Instagram
• My YouTube Channel
• Disordered – With Josh Fletcher

 

Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.