Fear can be a powerful survival tool. In combat, it is often the soldiers that feel no fear who are the ones who get killed because they don’t see or feel a deadly force coming.
Fear keeps you alert to danger. It helps trigger the adrenalin that allows you to achieve feats of strength and power sometimes necessary to defeat a stronger foe. In everyday life however, fear can have a paralyzing affect, and fear that lingers can evolve into its chronic form of deep-seated worry known as anxiety disorder.
The Great Recession has produced a virtual epidemic of people with severe anxiety disorders -- some over losing their jobs, or fear that they will lose their jobs, to retirees who saw their retirement savings wiped out and now have to return to the work force but doubt their abilities to compete against younger workers.
In the past, some psychologists would advise these patients that the best way to conquer their fears and anxieties was to change their behavior to either address their fears head on or deny them as being irrational. Today, a third approach appears to be gaining ground.
Steven C. Hayes, a professor of psychology at University of Nevada-Reno, calls this approach Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. He says it focuses on mindfulness, or paying attention to the present moment.
In fact, Dr. Hayes says that urging people to stop thinking negative thoughts which only tighten fear's grip and make it worse. A better approach says Dr. Hayes, is to simply observe those thoughts of self-doubt, fear or anxiety without judging them as bad or irrational.
It's this acceptance, says Dr. Hayes, that seems to diffuse their emotional power just enough to allow the patient to explore other options.
Zindel V. Segal, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto who devised Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy says this also allows you recognize that these critical thoughts are really stories you have created about yourself. They are not necessarily true, but they can have self-fulfilling consequences.
Critics originally dismissed mindfulness-based therapies as vacuous and just another new age ploy, but since then dozens of randomized-controlled trials in the past decade have shown that they can be effective in managing depression, panic disorders, social phobias, sleep problems and even borderline personality disorder.
A study of 160 patients with major depression, led by Dr. Segal and published in the Archives of General Psychiatry found that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy was just as good at as antidepressants at warding off relapses of depression.
The National Institutes of Health is funding more than 50 research studies involving mindfulness treatments for psychological problems.
Kindness and accepting your thoughts non-judgmentally doesn't mean having to settle for the status quo. Therapists using the mindfulness approach say that rather than be paralyzed by negative thoughts, you can decide to change your situation, but you do it with a clearer set of options based on what really matters.
Some critics note that such advice doesn't sound any different from standard cognitive-behavioral therapy or being kind to that inner child of earlier Freudian psychotherapy. And some say more scientific data are needed to evaluate its effectiveness, particularly now that it's being applied to such a wide array of disorders.
