I’ve written about exposure as a cognitive-behavioral strategy for anxiety in previous posts. Today I’m going to suggest another way to think about it.

If you were training for a marathon, you’d need to put in the miles. You might have to endure shin splints and muscle soreness, but that’s what you’d expect. No pain, no gain. Just do it.

The same goes for practicing exposure exercises. Living with anxiety is an endurance event, and getting in shape mentally to withstand it involves discomfort. You have to be willing to make yourself anxious to build anxiety-tolerance muscle.

No matter how often I repeat this message in the beginning phase of treatment, there always comes a point, usually two or three sessions after starting exposure practice, when a patient says, “It didn’t go so well. I felt anxious.”

The idea of making yourself feel worse to get better is a hard one to embrace. I understand why people don’t want to do it. But there’s no easy way around it. So instead of feeling defeated when you become anxious during exposures, look at each exercise as a strength training session. Would you get upset if you were drenched in sweat after lifting heavy weights for an hour? Probably not. In fact, you might even brag about how hard you pushed yourself. So try viewing the anxiety as the result, like sweat, of a really strenuous workout and, in time, you might even come to wear it as a badge of honor.

In my next post, I’ll share some exposure exercises for social anxiety that you can do without leaving home.