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The "What If Technique" to Untangle the Source of Your Anxiety
•Jon Brooks
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When you are anxious, the fear is usually hiding underneath a vaguer worry. The What If technique is a way of following the thread down to whatever you are actually afraid of, so you can deal with the real thing instead of the fog around it.
It comes from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, the science-backed approach that grew out of Stoic philosophy. This guided meditation is one of over a dozen in my course, Stoic Anxiety Mastery. Find somewhere quiet before you begin.
It's very difficult to work on our anxiety if we aren't quite sure what the root of our anxiety is. Sometimes there is a deep, terrifying fantasy that is fueling our surface level anxieties. And if we can locate that hot thought or the terrifying core fantasy beneath it all, we'll be able to make much faster progress in overcoming anxiety in general. So in the guided meditation that's going to start in a moment, we are going to be exploring the what-if technique. This meditation is taken from Stoic Anxiety Mastery. It's one of over a dozen meditations that come with the experience. And this is something that I like to instruct people to do very early on. It's a very simple guided reflection, but it's also the same reflection that Dr. David Burns, who's a legend in the field of cognitive behavioral therapy, he wrote a book called Feeling Good. It's the same technique that he did when he thought his baby son was dying in hospital. Okay. So it's a very, very powerful technique. It's simple, but it's very powerful. And by following this technique, you will be uncovering the source of your terrifying fantasy. And also by uncovering it, you'll be slowly facing it. And therefore the fear will start to ease because of something called psychological exposure. So give this meditation a try. And if it is helpful, then you can learn more at stoicanxiety.com. So with all that said, get comfortable. And now let's do the what-if technique, guided reflection. Stoicism is a 2300-year-old complete philosophical blueprint for living with wisdom and happiness. But it's estimated that 95% of Stoic writings have been lost. This means we have an incomplete understanding of what we know was a complete system for life. Most of what we know has come from three key individuals, Epictetus Seneca, and the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. The stories of the ancient Stoics are deeply inspiring. Epictetus was an uneducated slave who gained freedom and began attracting many wealthy students in his enlightening dialogues. Seneca was a statesman, playwright, and tutor to the psychopathic Emperor Nero, who later ordered Seneca to take his own life, which Seneca did, the stories say, without any outward signs of distress. Marcus Aurelius was a reluctant emperor who faced grueling wars and plagues and family tragedies, and in the midst of all of this chaos wrote a journal to himself for guidance. This journal is known as the Meditations and has been read by millions of people and is a favourite among world leaders. While Stoicism contains a lot of mystery, intrigue, drama, and heroics, the core idea behind this philosophy is simple. When we don't use our reason, which human beings have been gifted with, our world becomes distorted and we suffer. But when we do use our reason to interpret reality, we gain closer access to the truth, and suffer less or not at all. This is the very idea that inspired cognitive behavioral therapy, which proposes that our thoughts determine our mood, and if we alter our thoughts to be more accurate, our mood will follow suit. When it comes to anxiety, it can be useful to separate how the Stoics thought about strong emotions, like anxiety or fear or distress. A fully actualized stoic, also referred to as a stoic sage, is someone who still feels negative emotions, because some emotions, especially knee-jerk reactions, are simply unavoidable. If one is shocked or unexpectedly frightened, a sudden, strong emotion can arise. But where a stoic sage would be different from a non-stoic is in the second part of the sequence of events. After feeling the initial and pleasant emotion, instead of feeding that story with fear and irrational projections, they would use judgment and reason to try and see the situation as clearly as possible, and thus reducing any unnecessary suffering. So if our aim is to reduce our anxiety, as a practicing stoic, we first must learn the skill of self-inquiry. If we aren't well practiced at navigating our emotions, why we feel something, what triggered it, what associations there are, what knee-jerk reactions and images show up, etc., then it will feel very overwhelming to try and use reason when an anxious event or panic attack comes on. Before we can start working with our anxiety, we must learn to see it clearly. Anxiety is an unpleasant emotion that brings up strong feelings of aversion, and so it's hard to understand it if we're feeling flustered. Throughout this course, we will be revisiting the important names in Stoicism and learning very powerful techniques to work with our anxiety. But none of that matters if we can't see the problem clearly. So in today's contemplation, we will use a Socratic questioning method called the what if technique. The what-if technique helps you to see your irrational beliefs that make you vulnerable to anxiety. There may be a terrifying fantasy that is the trigger of your anxiety, and it is only when we can confront and challenge this source anxiety that we can begin to defeat it. It is very often the case that the surface-level worries we have are being driven by deeper core anxieties that we aren't consciously aware of. A fear of getting arrested, for example, might really be the manifestation of a deeper anxiety about your children growing up without your support. This is known in cognitive behavioral therapy as the hidden emotion model, which is a theory that proposes our anxieties are the carryover from hidden emotions or situations that we aren't addressing. So now let's begin today's contemplation by reminding ourselves of why we are here. What is your goal and motivation for spending the time practicing today and doing this course? Are you willing to work diligently with the contemplations here and take a step closer toward greater well-being? If you haven't done already, you can close your eyes. Ground yourself in the present by noticing the cloud-like sensations of your body. The sounds that are effortlessly heard. And the mind that is moving and calculating all on its own. Is it a specific thing or a general thing? Is it more of a sensation in your body? Is it linked to a thought? Is there an example of your anxious pattern playing out in recent history? Try to put yourself back into this anxiety-inducing situation. Now I'd like to ask you a question. What is the worst thing that could realistically happen? What are you most afraid of? And what if this were true? Try to really connect to what your real worry is in this situation. Then allow the answers to naturally arise. I'll ask you again, what is the worst thing that could realistically happen here? What are you most afraid of? And what if this came true? You should have a new anxiety develop. For example, if you are anxious about giving a presentation and failing, the new anxiety might be that your boss loses respect for you. But going back to your new anxiety, what if this new anxiety was also true? What would that mean about you, your life, your world? Another name for this technique is the downward arrow technique. We are going deeper and deeper down to the source of the anxiety. So after asking yourself that question, we go down to the new anxiety. And what if this new anxiety were true? So allow this new anxiety to play out. Imagine all of the details. And once again, what if this were true? What is the worst thing that could happen?
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What would it mean?
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If you have an anxiety around danger or death and you die in your fantasy, that's not the end of the technique. You can keep going. We all carry many layers of hidden anxiety around death. We can even ask ourselves the question, if we died, what would that mean? But when you have your new anxious fantasy, ask yourself the same question again. What if this new anxiety came true? What would that mean? What is the root of your fear? We'll stop the what if technique there. If you want to practice on your own time, you can go deeper and deeper, and you could also journal and do a downward arrow leading to each new anxiety. The idea here is to gain a greater understanding of the unconscious drivers of our anxieties. The goal is to, as Socrates said, know thyself. The experience of this inquiry might have felt uncomfortable, it might not have felt particularly profound, it may have even stirred up some anxieties. But it's really important that we do this on day one. It will make all of the principles and techniques that follow throughout this course much more effective. For the remainder of the day, try to be mindful of the ways your root anxieties are showing up in your life. Remember to congratulate yourself for completing day one of this stoic meditation course. Working with your anxiety can be uncomfortable, but learning to be okay with discomfort is a stoic principle that will greatly aid our resilience and one that we will be coming back to. I'll see you here tomorrow for day two of the anxiety melting stoic meditation course.
