Halloween: A Spooky Time
By Tom Horvath, PhD
We do not get spooked just at Halloween. It happens all day long. We often do not even notice. Much of the time our anxiety management system keeps the spooky experience largely or mostly out of our awareness. On Halloween we play-act feeling startled and scared, but we are just acting out a regular experience.
We are commonly concerned about whether we will be liked, be good enough, or get what we want. Opportunities for these experiences happen multiple times per day. Furthermore, it is easy to catastrophize about them. In an instant we can be thinking that we are unlovable and unworthy, and about to be completely unsatisfied and frustrated.
Our play-acting at Halloween may be helpful (even if only as a pleasant distraction), but there are steps we can take all year long also. Our minds are continually working to identify threats, predict what might happen, prevent these problems if possible, manage our anxiety in the process, and accomplish all of this while trying to get the other things we want. That’s a lot of work! The following are some suggestions for how to keep our anxiety management system from needing to work excessively.
–Accept what is out of your control. If you can, you won’t waste energy to attempt to control the uncontrollable.
–Work on what you avoid, by approaching it, even if that approach is in small steps. Continuing to avoid keeps anxiety higher.
–When you have internal conflicts, think them through. If you can make some decisions and stick with them, you will spend less energy on negotiating these conflicts each time. You can revise the decisions in the light of future experiences.
–Collapse big decisions into smaller ones you can focus on, one step at a time.
–Accept that you will feel uncomfortable at times. Like a craving for an addictive behavior, this discomfort will start diminishing in minutes (typically) if you do not act on it.
–As with internal conflicts, if others are violating your boundaries, clarify for yourself what these boundaries are, and decide how you will enforce them. Simply telling others your boundaries may often not be sufficient. You will probably need to be the enforcer but get clear on how you will do so.
–Remind yourself about how much you have coped with already! You do not need to anticipate every possible problem. You have coped before; you will do so again.
–Stay in the now. Anxiety is mostly about the future. Of course, you need to think about the future regularly. But not all the time!
It may also be obvious that if you have had addictive problems (addiction at some level), your substance or addictive activity is a great (short-term) method for managing anxiety. By using the methods just mentioned you could prevent or cope with anxiety without having to endure the side effects of the addictive problem.
May your Halloween have all the spookiness you want, and the rest of the year as little as possible.
