The second death of the ego: Anxiety
This is the second of my four part post about the death of the ego. The first death of the ego was about releasing shame. The second death of the ego is about releasing fear. This ego, which remember is just a deep belief that the brain wants to hang onto, goes something like this:
“I feel anxious so I MUST be in danger! Yes, I am DEFINITELY in danger! I need to AVOID this dangerous thing!”
To kill this ego, we need our brain to take on a different belief, something like “When I’m afraid 99.9% of the time it’s an overreaction of my brain. I’m not buying it, brain! I’m not eating what you’re baking”. But how do you get your brain to do that? How do you get it to let go of being scared? Well, the most powerful and effective way to kill this part of the ego is to face your fear. You often can’t talk your way out of it; you have to SHOW your brain that it’s wrong.
I had to do this in February this year, when I gave a talk for Psychology month at the Central Library. I certainly don’t enjoy public speaking but my rational self is fine with it (yay rational self!). I agreed to do the talk because I was asked many months ahead of time. That meant my brain didn’t see the threat coming and so didn’t give me a strong reaction.
I remember feeling some mild discomfort as I contemplated whether to do the talk, but then I said to myself “why not? I would love to share what I know and help people who may not be open to going for therapy.” But as the time for my talk got closer and closer, my anxious brain started sending me stronger and stronger fear signals. It had detected … a threat to my survival? Huh? How is giving a talk a threat to my survival?
Well, my theory is that since we are a social species that relies on being part of a group for survival, my brain became worried that I would humiliate myself and be kicked out of “the group”. That would mean I would be on my own trying to survive and the brain believes that this isn’t a good option for humans.
On the day of my talk, I was really anxious. My hands were shaking, my knees were shaking, and my voice was shaking. But I told my emotional brain “back off – there’s no danger here so I’m doing this regardless of what you want.” This didn’t make the anxiety go away in the moment, but it helped me do the thing I wanted to do, which was give my talk. I also used the self-disclosure technique and told the audience “I’m super nervous right now – you can see my hand shaking - even though I am excited to be giving this talk”. That got my brain to back off even more; it got confused that I wasn’t afraid of my audience kicking me out once they knew I was anxious.
Shame attacking exercises are a fun way to practice killing this part of the ego. These are practices where you bring on anxiety with the sole purpose of pushing through it. I’ve done some myself. One was to walk into a hair salon in downtown Calgary and ask if I could buy a beer. Now this may not seem that scary, and again, when I first agreed to do it, I didn’t think it would be. But when it was time for me to walk over to the salon, my heart was pounding with fear; the fear of humiliation, the fear of conflict, and so on. I was really anxious! But I forced myself to do it and the lovely stylist there said “I actually have some beer in the fridge here if you want to come back at closing time and we can have a drink!” We all had a good laugh and I fessed up that I was doing a therapy exercise. I felt on top of the world after I did that! And that is the feeling of rebirth that comes from killing this part of the ego – it is a feeling of being fearless and joyful.
