A Psychological Trick to Beat Fear and Anxiety

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. If you're out there and you want to dominate your 2025 New Year's resolutions, I just created a brand new e-book that is 17 pages with a workbook at the end, teaching you how to plan, set, and achieve your goals. So if you want to get that, it is absolutely free at goals2025.com. Once again, goals with an S, 2025.com. Today, I'm going to be giving you a psychological strategy to overcome your fears and any anxiety that you might have about something coming up in the future.

0:46It's quite simple, and I'm going to go through the entire thing with you. I'm going to show you how it works. I'm going to give you examples of how you would use it as well. And this is really important because the thing that I have found that holds people back more than anything else is that most people in this world run from fear and discomfort. If you're listening to this podcast, it's because you want to improve yourself. And you know, if you improve yourself, you will improve your life. And one aspect of improving your life, one of the biggest aspects of you improving your life is you getting past your fears so that you can go and create the life that you want to because the life that you want to is not inside of your comfort zone.

1:27And so what if leaning into your fear rather than avoiding it was the secret? Well, there's a psychological trick that's called the reversal of desire. And it is a mental tool that turns the resistance that you have towards doing something because you have a fear, you have an anxiety, you have a worry around it. It takes that and actually turns into something that could be empowering for you. It could give you some motivation to actually start taking action. And so it's basically rooted in the idea of cognitive reframing. in reframing your relationship with fear or discomfort. So the reversal of desire helps us kind of approach challenges with, instead of this feeling of dread or this feeling of fear or worry or anxiety, it allows us to approach challenges with a sense of eagerness rather than the dread.

2:26And so the psychology behind it is this, the reversal of desire is grounded in the understanding that our brains are wired to avoid pain or discomfort. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know I talk about this all the time. That is an evolutionary trait that is designed to keep us safe. And it is an amazing mechanism for us over the course of the past 2 million years that humans have been on this planet. But this mechanism right now keeps us away from actually taking action towards the life that we want. It leads us to avoid physical pain, but it also leads us to avoid emotional and psychological discomfort.

3:05And over time, this avoidance that we have towards fear, we avoid fear, we avoid discomfort, we avoid anxiety. This avoidance builds patterns within us of procrastination. And when we reframe discomfort as a signal of growth and deliberately embrace this discomfort, we recondition our brains, which makes turning a negative stimulus into an opportunity of a positive stimulus or maybe some sort of a reward that can come from it as well. And the technique is really effective because it addresses two really critical aspects of human psychology. Number one, fear, and fear amplifies through avoidance.

3:49So when we avoid discomfort, the fear around it tends to grow. So over years and years and years, if you're 20, 30, 40, 50 years old, and you've been avoiding discomfort, well, then you might've like, if you're 50 and when you were 20, you kind of avoided some discomfort, but it became a stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger pattern. Now, 30 years down the road, that fear towards discomfort is way stronger than it was because it is a deeply rooted habit to avoid your discomfort. And so your fear around this discomfort amplifies when you continue to avoid it. So that leads to more discomfort, more discomfort, more fear, and we don't take any action.

4:35So when we decide to actually consciously, consciously lean into discomfort, it shrinks the fear, improves to our brains that the pain that we were anticipating isn't ever really as bad as we think it's going to be. The second thing that's really important for us to understand that's a, you know, part of human psychology is action dissolves anxiety. When you take action, it replaces anxiety with a sense of accomplishment. And gradually, if you do it over and over and over again, it starts to rewire our emotional response to challenging situations. And so let me teach you how the reversal of desire actually works and the actual practice itself.

5:22It's very simple, okay? What you want to do is you want to identify the source of discomfort or resistance. Whatever fear is there, whatever worry is there, whatever anxiety is there. And here's where it gets really interesting. You're going to actually sit down. You're going to close your eyes for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever it is. And you're going to visualize the uncomfortable experience playing out as vividly as possible. If you have the fear of failure, you're going to visualize yourself failing as awkwardly as you possibly can. And so instead of avoiding it, we're literally visualizing this thing happening to us.

6:05And then what you're going to say to yourself is some sort of empowering statement. So it can be like, bring it on. I want this. I got this. I was fucking made for this. I can do this. It's some sort of positive affirmation when you visualize yourself going through it. And then what you're going to do is you're going to visualize yourself breaking through and past that discomfort and what it would look like and what it would feel like to succeed. Because most of the time, our brain is already visualizing the future. It's just unintentionally visualizing the failure after the fear that we have.

6:44And then what you do, you get done, you open your eyes, and you immediately take action and move towards whatever the discomfort, the thing that you were afraid of. And so let me give you an example of exactly what this would look like, okay? Let's say that someone's a procrastinator, right? Let's say Jane. Jane's a freelance writer, and she procrastinates like crazy. She struggles to start her projects. when she sits down at the computer and she's seeing that cursor just blink and there's a blank page and she's got to get all of this stuff. She's got to figure it out. It's in her head. How's she going to put it on the page?

7:17The blank page just feels really overwhelming to her. So in order to, what she tends to do, and usually procrastination, what I prefer is using the phrase avoidance behavior because whenever you're procrastinating, you're avoiding it by doing something else. And so instead of taking action in writing, she finds herself avoiding her work by scrolling through social media. And then when she's done, you know, scrolling through social media because she works at home, she titers her house up, right? And so the way that she would use the reversal of desire and action, instead of avoiding this, the discomfort of starting, Jane acknowledges it head on.

7:55So she's going to imagine, she's going going to close your eyes and imagine the feeling of sitting down and trying to start writing. The awkwardness, the uncertainty, the not knowing where to begin, the initial frustration of creating a rough draft, of creating something, and maybe there's some fear behind it that comes up, and maybe that fear is finishing the draft, presenting it to her boss, and her boss is like, this is terrible, rewrite it, whatever it is. And she's going to notice herself, see and feel and experience the fear and the frustration of overwhelm and all of that. And she's going to tell herself the empowering statement, bring it on.

8:34I want to feel this awkwardness of starting because it is the first step of making progress. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. And then she's going to visualize herself finishing the project that she's working on, what it would feel like to finish the project, what it would feel like to then take it, a final draft, give it to her boss, her boss being like, this is amazing. We're going to publish it on the front page. And then by embracing this discomfort, she finds that the hardest part of starting is over quickly. And she gets used to the discomfort. Over time, this like emotional weight of her avoidance just kind of diminishes a little bit.

9:19and writing becomes less of a daunting task over time. I'm going to tell you why all of this and the psychology behind why this works in just a few minutes, but let me give you one more example, right? Let's say somebody has social anxiety. Let's say there's a guy named David and David always feels nervous in social situations, especially when he goes to like an event where there's people he doesn't know and he's got to meet new people. So he avoids like networking events. He prefers to stay at home and stay in his comfort zone, but he knows he needs to get out there. So what David's going to do is he's going to sit down and he's going to visualize what it feels like to start a conversation.

9:57He's going to visualize the awkward pauses, the feeling of saying something wrong or saying something awkwardly, the fear of looking like an idiot. And then instead of like retreating from this feeling, he's going to lean in and he's going to say to himself, this nervous energy is a sign that I'm growing. I know I'm growing. I'm getting better. I'm getting more outgoing. Bring it on. I want to feel this awkwardness. And so the idea is to, in both these situations, is to embrace the thing that you're feeling, to embrace it, to feel it, to visualize it, and then visualize meeting somebody new, working through the awkwardness, and then making new friends with somebody.

10:39So then he goes to his next event. He approaches somebody new. He starts talking to him and that expectant feeling of being nervous isn't really there as much. The conversation isn't as uncomfortable as he thought it was going to be. And then he ends up leaving the event, he feels good about it, right? And each time he repeats this process, his social anxiety will get smaller and smaller. He's going to become more confident whenever he goes to these types of things. So why does this work? Like in psychology, this is literally something psychologists have their patients do when they're sitting down on the couch with them, is visualizing all of the stuff that they fear and they're anxious about.

11:17Number one, the thing that it does is it reframes discomfort as a positive signal. So humans were wired to avoid pain. As I said, like this is an evolutionary trait. It was really good for our ancestors. But in modern life, discomfort is more so a signal of opportunity or growth rather than danger. And so the reversal of desire flips the narrative. Instead of associating discomfort with fear or with failure or with pain or with death, you begin to see it as evidence that you're stretching yourself. You start to see this and this shift kind of taps into a motivational principle known as the cognitive reappraisal, where we reinterpret a negative experience in a more positive light.

12:08So that's the first thing that it does. the second thing it does is it neutralizes your fear through exposure so there's something that's that's called exposure therapy so exposure therapy is a psychological technique that is used to treat anxiety disorders so it's kind of like somebody who is afraid of a snake right if you're terrified of snakes the best thing to do is to have somebody come into the room with a snake that's as far away from you as possible and you can just they can it can be in a box it can be locked up there's no way can get to and you might feel the nerves and you just do it over and over and over again.

12:40They might get a little bit closer, a little bit closer, a little bit closer. And if you spend, you know, it might not be five minutes, but if you spend 20 minutes, an hour, two hours in a room with the snake, the exposure therapy makes your anxiety go down. The more you do it, the less that you'll start to feel fear around it. And so, you know, if you're afraid of rejection, deliberately putting yourself in situations where rejection is possible and surviving and not dying teaches your brain that rejection isn't fatal. Even better, if you visualize it, you don't even have to leave your couch.

13:14You feel like you've done it even though you haven't. So that's the next thing. The next thing that it does as well is it activates your brain's reward system. And so it creates what's called a positive feedback loop. So what you're doing is you're embracing the discomfort. You act and achieve the result that you want in your brain. So it's like you see the discomfort, you tell yourself, I was made for this, I'm doing this, bring it on. Then you visualize yourself accomplishing the goal that you want. And then you actually go out and do it, your brain will reward you with dopamine. Dopamine is the chemical of motivation.

13:52It's also one of the most addictive chemicals that's inside of our brain. So it reinforces the behavior, which more likely makes us want to lean into that discomfort again. Another thing that it does is it starts to allow you to rewire your brain. So if you've been listening to this podcast long enough, there's something that's called neuroplasticity. It is the brain's ability to reorganize itself no matter how young or how old you are. When you repeatedly respond to discomfort with curiosity and with action rather than responding with avoidance, which is what you have been, you start to create new neural circuits inside of your brain.

14:31And the more that you do it, it more so reinforces that behavior and starts to become stronger and easier for you to do later on down the road. Most people feel fear. They feel some sort of fear and they back away and that has become a habit. And it's so habitual, most of the time you don't even notice that you're avoiding pain and you're avoiding fear and you're avoiding discomfort. You just do it and then you realize, oh my God, I've been procrastinating for two hours. I didn't even realize it. So actually being consciously there, pushing yourself to do something that you never done before, pushing yourself to do something that you fear, visualizing it, all of this allows you to start to break the habit and build a new one, which is to feel fear and to step forward confidently when you feel that fear versus back away.

15:18And with practice, this behavior that you were so afraid of and it was just so outside of your normal self, what you used to struggle with, it'll start to become a lot easier, start to become more automatic. And so it doesn't have to be anything huge. What I would recommend is just like start small. Find something that you've been avoiding for a while. Maybe it's something like, oh, I've been afraid of public speaking. Maybe it's about making cold calls at your company that you're at. Whatever it is, and you've visualized yourself doing it, feeling the fear, going through it, and succeeding on the other side.

15:54And what you do is you commit to this repetition to do it over and over and over and over and over again. And realize that what you're actually doing is you are changing your relationship with this fear. You're changing your relationship with your anxiety and starting to say, you know what? When I feel this, instead of backing away and not taking action, like I've been doing my entire life, which has gotten me none of the results that I want to, I'm going to do something different. Because Einstein says to do the same thing over and over again, expect different results of insanity. I'm going to do something different to make my life different.

16:29And when you can use this reversal of desire, it makes it so much easier to take action the way that you want to. So that's the way that you do it. Figure out what is it you want. Visualize yourself going through it. Visualize the feeling and the fear and what you're afraid of. Visualize yourself coming through on the other side and do it over and over and over again. And it'll be easier to take action in real life in the future. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me at RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. Also, one of the things I'm going to start doing very soon is answering your guys' questions on these podcast episodes.

17:08So I'm going to do a Q &A session. If you have any questions for me, you can go to MindsetMentorPodcast.com and you just fill out a quick form with your information and you can actually take a video on that website and submit that video to me. The video has to be under two minutes. So if you want to ask me a question, maybe hear yourself and see yourself on the podcast later on down the road, go ahead and submit it at mindsetmentor.com. And with that, I'm leaving the same way I leave you every single episode, make it your mission, make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you. And I hope that you have an amazing day.