How To Control Your Anxiety Before It Controls You

Foreword

If you are reading this book, the probability is high that you or someone you care about experiences anxiety. Anxiety is one of the most common difficulties people experience at some point in their lives. The good news is that in 1959, Dr. Albert Ellis developed Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, the original Cognitive Behavior Therapy, which has been proven to be effective for problems with anxiety.

This book is in many ways a special tribute to Al himself. As he discusses in this book, as well as in most of the self-help materials he developed throughout the course of his life, Al, too, was afflicted with anxiety. He utilized the principles of behaviorism to overcome both his public speaking anxiety and his social anxiety, particularly as it related to women. All of Al's books were written with passion and purpose; however, I believe this book in particular was close to Al's heart because he himself experienced anxiety and found means to overcome it. What better testimony is there than that Albert Ellis himself conquered his own anxiety by applying the principles and strategies he outlines here?

One of Al's main goals was to ensure that his clients and the general public learned the tools to become their own therapists. Reading this and his many other self-help books, including How to Control Your Anger Before It Controls You, How To Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything, Yes Anything! and How to Keep People from Pushing Your Buttons, will surely get you on your way to becoming your own therapist.

I had the honor of being a pre-doctoral intern at the Albert Ellis Institute and being mentored by Dr. Ellis. After my training, I stayed on at the Institute as a full-time employee, traveling the country with Al to conduct professional trainings and public lectures. He dedicated his life to helping individuals with their emotional and behavioral problems. He treated thousands of clients with anxiety difficulties, many of whom are presented as case examples in this book. Coleading therapy groups with Al, I observed him first-hand using the same strategies with his clients that he recommends in this book-and I watched his clients get better!

Al made a distinction between feeling better and getting better. Feeling better can be the result of telling your therapist, a friend, or a family member about your anxiety. Getting better results from using tools and strategies to overcome your anxiety and develop your conviction in a different way of looking at things.

If you or someone you care about suffers from anxiety, this book will be a guide through the theory of what contributes to the problem and a source of proven strategies to tackle it head on. The reader will find this book especially helpful because it provides cognitive, emotive, and behavioral strategies to control anxiety. It offers so many suggestions that you are bound to find several that will work for you. In addition, the tone in which this book is written allows the reader to find the humor in anxiety without minimizing how painful it can be at times.

On one of our road trips throughout the country, I was driving Al to our next venue and I asked him what he would like to have happen once he was no longer here. Without skipping a beat, he said he wanted the Albert Ellis Institute and REBT to continue. Having How to Control Your Anxiety Before It Controls You relaunched in a new print edition as well as an e-book is exactly what Al would have wanted. I believe he would be proud that his work continues to help the lives of individuals throughout the world.

Kristene A. Doyle, Ph.D., Sc.D.
Director of the Albert Ellis Institute

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Sample Contents

Why I Am Convinced That You Can Control Your Anxiety Before It Controls You

Until the age of nineteen, I was an extremely anxious individual. In fact, I think that I was probably born with a tendency toward making myself anxious. My mother was like that: She was a generally happy person but she also made herself quite anxious about little things-money, for example. During my childhood and youth, she never really wanted for money. At one time, my father, who was a promoter and a great salesman, literally had a million dollars-and that was a great deal of money back in the 1920s. But she always worried about expenses, and whenever he left a fifty-dollar tip for a waiter, she would secretly take it back and substitute a much smaller tip. She saved her money in a separate account and had thousands of dollars in it. But she always worried about not having enough.

After my father lost his first million in the stock market, was on his way to making his second one, and the family really was doing well financially, my mother still worried about money-and several other relatively unimportant things-and kept saving and saving. She wasn't entirely wrong about this, for in 1929, my father lost his second million and couldn't pay her the regular alimony he was supposed to pay. But we got through the Great Depression all right because my brother, sister, and I started working and supporting the family. Still, my mother worried incessantly-till she died, with savings, at the age of ninety-three.

You could say that I probably learned how to worry from her, but that would hardly be accurate. My brother, who was nineteen months younger than I, also was raised in the same environment, and he was almost a pathological nonworrier. He took risks and did all kinds of "dangerous" things, and he never seemed to worry about the outcome. If these turned out all right, fine; and if they turned out badly, he was never thrown for a loop. He just went on to risk the next venture, whether it was social or business. In fact, he did very well for himself-just because he rarely worried about anything.

Not so I! I was afraid of all kinds of unseen eventualities. I was a definitely shy, conforming, and hesitant child and adolescent, and I rarely took any great risks-or, if I did take them, I worried about them. I especially had a great fear, and a real phobia, about public speaking. I was bright and talented enough and was often asked to make a little speech, be it in a class play or speaking out in class and giving answers to questions that the teacher felt sure I could answer. But, I voluntarily held myself in much of the time; and I particularly avoided public presentations.

Let me give you a typical example. I was a good speller, often the best in the class, but I avoided participating in spelling bees because I might make a mistake (which I practically never did) and thereby "make a fool" of myself. When forced by the teacher to participate, I would almost always outspell all the other kids and become the winner; but I was exceptionally anxious while doing so, and I didn't enjoy the spelling bees at all. I only enjoyed winning. Briefly.

Another example: Once in a while, we had to memorize a short poem and repeat it in front of the class the next day. I was terribly anxious that I would splutter and stutter while presenting, even though I was excellent at memorizing. Reciting the poem publicly was terrorizing for me. So the morning of the day I was supposed to recite the poem to the class, I would make myself get a splitting headache, and put the thermometer next to the radiator to show that I had a fever. This induced my mother to let me stay home from school that day. What, me recite badly and show the teacher and the other kids how anxious I was? Never!

One time, when I was about eleven years old, I won a medal in Sunday school and had to go up to the platform, at assembly time, to receive it and merely thank the president of the school as I received it. I went up and got the medal and thanked the president, but when I sat down again, a friend of mine said, "Why are you crying?" I was so anxious about appearing in public that my eyes were grandly watering and it looked like I was crying.

I also had extreme social anxiety-when meeting new kids, when talking to people in authority, and especially when meeting new females. I was most interested in girls ever since the age of five and a half, when I was madly in love with a neighborhood charmer. After she disappeared from my life, I kept falling passionately in love, practically every year, with the most attractive girl in my school class. Yes, passionately in love: a real obsessive-compulsive attachment. But no matter how much I adored these girls, and how constantly I thought about getting intimate with them-which I did practically all the time, for hours on end-I never spoke to them or actually tried to get close to them. I shyly, fearfully stayed away from them, shut my big mouth, and only looked lustfully at them without any verbal contact. I was scared to death that if I did approach them and try to become friendly, they would see my failings, rightly reject me, and make me feel impossibly small. I didn't exactly see myself falling through the floor if I actually got rejected, but very nearly!

Even into my teens, up to the age of nineteen, I never really approached any of the women to whom I was attracted. About two hundred days a year, I went to the Bronx Botanical Gardens, a lovely place near my home, and sat on a bench or on the grass in order to read one of my many books, and to look at the attractive women (of all ages) and flirt with them. But I never approached them or said a single thing to them. Typically, I would sit on one stone bench near the Bronx River Parkway, and a girl or a woman would sit on another bench, about ten feet away from me. I would immediately look at her (I was, at that age, interested in all females, yes, about a hundred times out of a hundred), and sometimes she would look back at me. I would keep sneaking looks at her, obviously flirting with her, and often she would flirt back at me. Some of them were definitely interested, and presumably would have been receptive had I approached them and started to talk to them.

Not me! I always copped out. I made up a million excuses to myself-she was too tall or too short, too old or too young, too smart or too stupid. I had all kinds of excuses and rationalizations. So I never talked to a single one of them-no matter how interested in me they appeared to be and how presumably receptive. Then, when the object of my passion finally got up and walked away or I had to get up and leave myself, I cursed my foolishness in not approaching, not taking a risk, put myself down severely for copping out, and resolved to try-really try-to approach the next suitable prospect. But I never did.

HOW I OVERCAME MY PUBLIC SPEAKING ANXIETY

Then, at the age of nineteen, I decided to get over my anxieties. First, I decided to rid myself of my fear of public speaking. At that time, I was actively immersed in a political organization, a liberal group of which I was actually the youth leader. It was only a small organization, and nearly all the young members were friends of mine, so I didn't have too much trouble speaking to eight or ten of them at a time. I didn't consider that a public kind of performance. On the other hand, I was supposed to speak to other organizations and groups, to tell them about my particular society and to try to get them to join it. I was supposed to be, especially as their youth leader, a public propagandist for my organization. But I was too afraid to try to fill that role, so I refused many invitations to do so-invitations that came mainly from the adult section of our group, New America, which ran the youth section, Young America. As usual, I copped out.

Pressure on me to give public talks for Young America continued, and I finally decided to give in to it and get over my public speaking phobia. I had previously read a great deal of philosophy and psychology, and I was someday going to write a book on the psychology of human happiness, in which I had a great personal interest (because of my anxiety). So I already had an idea based on the writings of that day (1932), on how to handle anxiety and phobias. I had read what some of the great philosophers-such as Confucius and Gautama Buddha-had said about conquering anxiety. I had especially noted what some of the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers-such as Epicurus, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius-had said about it. And since philosophy was my great hobby at that time (from the age of sixteen onward), I had read what many of the modern philosophers, such as Thoreau, Emerson, and Bertrand Russell, had said about dealing with anxiety. Finally, I had read, at that time, most of the modern psychologists, such as Freud, Jung, and Adler, who were also interested in curing people of their anxiety. So I was philosophically and psychologically prepared.

But I had also read the famous behaviorist John B. Watson, on his early experiments aimed at curing children of their overwhelming fears and anxieties. Watson and his assistants took children seven or eight years of age who were terribly afraid of animals (such as a mouse or a rabbit) and actually exposed the children to the feared objects, first at a distance and then at closer range. Meanwhile, Watson talked to the children and distracted them, then he gradually moved the feared animals closer and closer. What do you know-after around twenty minutes of exposure, the children would become unafraid and would actually start petting the animals. This deconditioning procedure, which is called in vivo (live) desensitization, worked very well, and in one or a few sessions, he trained the children to rid themselves of their extreme anxieties and phobias.

"Well," I said to myself, "if it's good enough for little children, it should be good enough for me. I'll try it."

So, for practically the first time in my life, instead of avoiding public speaking engagements, I did just the opposite. Every single week, I set up at least one speech that I was to present in public for my organization, Young America, and I made sure that come hell or high water I presented that speech. I was still as scared as I could be; and I was most uncomfortable making the first few speeches. But I knew from my reading and from figuring out things for myself that my discomfort would not exactly kill me. I also reasoned that the dire things that I imagined were going to happen-including my audiences laughing at me and booing me-in all probability would not occur. I would merely give a fairly poor speech, would not by any means convince my audience that Young America was the greatest political group since the United States rebelled against England, and, at worst, few people would join it. Oh, well, that would be bad-but it wouldn't be the end of the world.

In other words, I used a combination of talking to myself rationally-which I had largely learned from philosophers-exposed myself to what I feared most and was uncomfortable doing, and forced myself to speak and speak in public every week for the next ten weeks. Well, it worked! I was very uncomfortable, then I was less uncomfortable, and then, actually-surprise!-comfortable. My heart palpitations, my sweating, and my stumbling over words went down and down and down. I learned to focus intently on the content of my talks-how great a political group Young America was-rather than on how I was doing at speaking and how anxious I was about speaking. I also discovered, much to my surprise, that I really could be quite a fluent speaker, with just as little trouble speaking in public as I normally had in speaking to one person or to a group of my friends. Actually, I was never really poor at speaking, but, because of my anxiety, just terribly afraid of public speaking. My vocal cords and my ability to make sensible sentences, had always been okay, and now, with practice, they were getting even better.

That experience, of forcing myself-yes, forcing myself-to speak in public no matter how uncomfortable I was until I got comfortable and began enjoying it, made a profound impression on me. It was one of the main reasons that, nine years later, I decided to become a psychotherapist. At the time I gave my first public speeches, I was not at all interested in becoming a therapist but was obsessed with becoming a writer-and possibly a writer on the subject of human happiness. Perhaps I was hooked on becoming a writer just because I could do it without having to speak in public. In any case, I was not interested in being a therapist, just in being a less anxious, happier individual. And in very short order, I achieved exactly that. I became completely unanxious about public speaking-I lost my phobia totally. Seeing that I had conquered anxiety in this area, I also became somewhat less anxious generally.

I had always, for example, had to accomplish, had to succeed-in school, at sports, at looking well, and at other important endeavors. I tried very hard to succeed and was reasonably good at it. I especially studied hard, did my homework, and got along well in school. But, of course, I was quite anxious about doing so-since I had to succeed to be a worthwhile individual, and there was always a chance that I would fail. Horrors!-that would be awful.

Now that I saw that I could be uncomfortable in public, and at times even speak badly and not put myself down for doing so, I became a lot less anxious about success. I still wanted success, but didn't absolutely need it.

HOW I OVERCAME MY SOCIAL ANXIETY

To test myself out, however, I decided to do the second great experiment of my life: to try to get rid of my social anxiety-and particularly my fear of being rejected by women in whom I was interested. This anxiety had plagued me all my life and was much more important than my fear of public speaking. Remember, I was aiming to be a writer and therefore could largely avoid appearing at public presentations. But if I were to continue my interest in women-which indeed I intended to continue-my not being able to approach and speak to those I was interested in would certainly be too restricting! I would be reduced to meeting new women through my friends and relatives, and I would not be able to meet them on my own. What a drag!

So, keeping in mind my success with public speaking, I decided to use the same procedures with my social anxiety. The August before I was about to go back to college to finish my senior year, I gave myself the brilliant homework assignment of going to the Bronx Botanical Garden every day. I would talk to strange women no matter how uncomfortable I felt about doing so. I would, I told myself, walk in the park until I saw a suitable woman sitting alone on a bench, and then I would quickly, immediately, sit next to her. No, not in her lap, but next to her on the very same bench on which she was sitting (instead of a bench away). Then, having accomplished that-which I was afraid to do because I feared that she would reject me and quickly walk away-I would do the most dangerous thing that I had always avoided: I would give myself one minute, no more than one lousy minute, to talk to her. Yes, if I died I'd die! I would speak to her within one minute, no matter how uncomfortable I felt, and no matter how foreboding she looked. That was my brilliant homework assignment to myself. Why was it brilliant? Because if I quickly spoke to her instead of waiting and waiting to do so, I knew I would be less anxious, would get the damned thing over with, and would have a better chance of getting somewhere with her.

Well, I did exactly what I assigned myself to do. No matter how anxious I was, whenever I saw a woman sitting alone on a park bench, I immediately-no debate!-sat next to her on the bench. I allowed no excuses as to how she looked, how old she was, whether she was tall or short, and so on. No excuses! I just forced myself, very uncomfortably, to sit next to her, whereupon, immediately, many of the women I sat next to quickly got up and walked away. All told, I think I approached and sat next to 130 women that month of August. Thirty, or almost a third of them, immediately walked away. Very discouraging! But that left me with an even hundred who still stayed-which was good for research purposes!

Not at all daunted, I spoke to the remaining hundred women just as I had planned to do. I spoke about the flowers, the trees, the weather, the birds, the bees, the book or paper they were reading-anything, just to make conversation. Nothing brilliant or clever. Nothing personal. No remarks about their looks or anything else that might make them afraid of me and make them turn away or leave. Just one hundred ordinary statements.

Well, the hundred women did speak back to me, some very briefly, some for an hour or more. I soon got many of them in animated conversation. When they seemed willing, I asked them about their work, their families, their living arrangements, their hobbies, interests, and so forth. Regular conversations, just as I would have had if I had been formally introduced to them.

As for my primary purpose in talking to them-to ask for a date, see them regularly, go to bed with them, and perhaps marry one of them-I got absolutely nowhere. Nowhere at all. For out of the hundred women I talked with, I was able to make only one date-and she didn't show up for it! She talked with me for two hours, kissed me goodbye when she left, and agreed to meet me later in the park for a date that night. But she never showed up. And, foolishly, I neglected to ask for her phone number, so I never saw her again. How tragic! How disappointing! But I still survived. And thereafter, I always asked for the phone number of the women I met and dated!

Within that month of getting rejected by a hundred women, I completely lost my social anxiety and, especially, my fear of encountering strange women in strange places. For I saw, cognitively, that nothing terrible happened as a result of my rejections. None of the women I talked to took out a knife and cut my penis off. None of them vomited and ran away. None of them called a cop. No, no terrible thing, which I had so often imagined would happen, actually occurred. Instead, I had many pleasant conversations with these women, enjoyed having them, learned a great deal about women that I had not previously known, got increasingly less uncomfortable and afraid to talk to them, and had several other fortunate results. Best of all, I almost immediately got over my fear of approaching women, and for the rest of my life I have been able to speak to and try to date literally hundreds of them whenever I chance to meet them in parks, on trains, at airports, and other public places. I now have no fear of doing so, and even though I normally get rejected for sex, love, and marriage by the vast majority of them, my social anxiety has gone for good. Nothing ventured, nothing gained! My fear of doing poorly with women and being rejected was gone!

Now can you see why, as I note in the title of this chapter, I am so sure that people can control their anxiety before it controls them? It is because I have done this so thoroughly myself, in the areas of public speaking and social anxiety, and I did it without help from anybody, including a psychotherapist. I have indeed used my experiences to learn how to control anxiety and have, as a therapist, taught thousands of people to do so over the last fifty-four years. Moreover, I have put the experience of conquering my own anxiety into my therapeutic theory and practice over the years, and most probably would not have originated Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy had I not experienced it. Knowing that I had been exceptionally anxious about many things, and that I could make myself into a person who now had great trouble becoming tense or anxious about even the most difficult situations, has spurred me to help other people with my therapeutic theory and practice.

The most important thing of all, however, is that I overcame my own overweening anxiety entirely by myself. To be sure, I used the writings of many philosophers and therapists and learned much from them. I also used the experiments of John B. Watson, who was not really a therapist himself but who conducted several therapeutic experiments. With these aids, and by forcing myself to bite the bullet-make myself very uncomfortable and talk to myself about the futility of my anxiety and phobias-I think I can honestly say I was able to become one of the least panicked people in the whole world. Many unfortunate things have happened to me since that time when I was nineteen, which is now some sixty-five years ago. I am still concerned about doing well, accomplishing many things, winning certain people's approval, and being comfortable in life. But I have taught myself merely to be quite concerned, sorry, and disappointed when bad things happen or could happen in my life, and I am practically never anxious, depressed, or enraged.

From being, in other words, one of the more easily disturbed and disturbable people in the world, I have made myself into one who is very rarely seriously upset about anything. As the title of one of my popular books indicates, I stubbornly refuse to make myself miserable about anything-yes, anything.

I still insist, however, that I mainly did it by myself, with no counseling or therapy, with no support group, with no friends and relatives to help me and push me to do what I did. I made remarkable inroads against my anxiety and have maintained this unanxious tendency since that time.

In the meantime, moreover, I have gone on to become a busy psychotherapist and to see perhaps more clients than any other therapist in this country. I have originated a form of psychotherapy that is among the most popular and widely taught and that has been shown in experimental studies to be unusually effective. In various ways, it stresses what works effectively for other systems of psychotherapy-that is, changing people's self-blocking ideas and inducing people to do what they are afraid of doing.

Best of all, perhaps, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), which I created in 1955, and Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), a similar form of therapy which followed REBT in the 1960s, are probably the most efficient forms of self-help therapy that have been devised. Hundreds of books and materials have used REBT, or something very similar to it, to show readers and listeners how to help themselves overcome their serious feelings of depression, anxiety, rage, self-downing, and self-pity. This is because this self-help therapy can be put in simple terms so that almost anyone can understand it, and it can be used by almost any determined person who will take pains to apply it to his or her own personal disturbance. It works!

From my own experience, then, and from the experience of tens of thousands of people who have used the main elements of REBT and of CBT, I am quite sure that you, the reader of this book, can control your anxiety before it controls you. There are no guarantees, of course, that if you use REBT or CBT it will help you remove your anxiety. But there is a high degree of probability that you can succeed if you really work at it. I did it myself, without much help, and without the over fifty years of research and practice that have now been added to it and that make it more effective today than ever. If you attend carefully to the following pages, you can train yourself to do it, too.

Do you tend to be anxious on many occasions and about several things? Yes, practically all people are. Can you work and think differently to minimize your anxiety? Yes, practically all people can. Will you use the thinking and the action that I have used to minimize whatever anxiety you do have? Try REBT and CBT and see for yourself!