Learning to be BOLD
Guest Blog by Jen Moyer, LPC
In the last two blogs, you learned how to recognize when anxiety is keeping you stuck in a cycle of avoidance and now to use motivational skills and committed action to break the cycle of anxiety and live more aligned with your values.
Decreasing avoidance and increasing value-based action is a learned behavior. It’s something that can be taught and practiced.
When you are feeling anxious, your amygdala (the threat center in your brain) is turned on. The emotion center of your brain is metaphorically screaming at you to avoid any situation that triggers anxiety. With your brain in this mode it’s quick and easy to run from the trigger, to stay in your comfort zone, to react exactly how anxiety wants you to react.
However, when doing so conflicts with your values and takes you away from your goals, the BOLD skill from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) can help you to slow down this process, calm your nervous system, and take action based on being the person you want to be and living a life that is meaningful to you..
It goes like this:
B: Breathe deeply and slow down
First take a big deep breath. Exhale for longer than you’ve inhaled if possible. Remind yourself you are here in the moment, alive, breathing.
O: Observe your feelings, thoughts, and physical sensations
Pretend you are viewing your experience from the outside. There’s no judgment in this space. There is no right or wrong, good or bad way to feel. Just notice the anxiety that is present. Perhaps other emotions are present as well. Notice what you are feeling pulled to do or not do.
Now notice any physical sensations you are having. Anxiety, like all feelings, is just your body having sensations. Anxiety tends to produce sensations such as sweating, pounding or racing heart, upset stomach, and dizziness. These sensations, while uncomfortable, are not dangerous.
Next, notice the thoughts you are having. Thoughts are influenced by emotion. They are just like little memos that pop up in your brain’s inbox. Some are helpful and others are not. Some are accurate and others are not. Your job is not to open, investigate, or read these thought memos. Your job is just to observe that they are there.
In anxiety parent group at our center, I’ve heard dozens of examples of how a teen's avoidant anxiety would then trigger their parent’s anxiety. I experience the same anxiety domino-effect with my own kids. This anxiety response, in both teens and parents, is so physical and can happen so quickly. Commonly parents in group would observe their anxious teen raising their voice, crying, giving reasons why they cannot do what is making them anxious, and verbalizing catastrophic thoughts. The teens would commonly observe their parents responding to their avoidant anxiety reactions by verbalizing their own worst case scenarios and jumping in to try to “fix.”
After learning using the B and O skills, the same parents and teens began to be able to create some pause before they reacted out of anxiety.
L: Listen to your values
Remind yourself what you ultimately care about. What kind of person or parent do you want to be? What is best for the future? Taking this time to tune into your values is already doing something significant to break the anxiety cycle; it’s giving yourself a compass for how to navigate out of the cycle of anxiety and get closer to what matters most.
In anxiety parent group, parents said they valued modeling resilience and courage for their teens. They also valued finding balance between parenting and self-care in their own lives.
The teens identified values such as independence, creativity, and socializing.
D: Decide how to act
Now that you’ve taken a step back to breathe, observe your anxiety and remember your values, you are better able to make a decision about how to respond. In this regulated state, your decision about how to act is now less likely to be driven by anxiety. Your action is more likely to be aligned with your values.
Some BOLD actions parents in group decided to make included:
Refraining from emailing their teen’s teacher when their teen was anxious about doing it themself
Taking a yoga class even though they felt pulled to constantly be available for their teen
Some BOLD actions that their teens decided to make included:
Starting to advocate for themselves in school
Finding a way to cope with distress when their parent was at yoga
As with any skill, using BOLD takes practice. It’s an effective way to break the cycle of anxiety and will result in more ease and values-aligned actions through repetition.
Have compassion toward yourself as you apply the knowledge and skills you learned from this 3-part blog series. Give yourself credit for your wins, however small or large they may seem. You’ve got this! ✨