It’s that time of year. New Year resolutions. Tips on motivation and habit change. Life hacks for cooking healthy meals, fitting in exercise, and taming the clutter.

If you’re looking for such advice, please check out other blogs or previous posts in my archives.  Today I will be talking only about the most important New Year’s goal to set for yourself if you struggle with anxiety.

 Do more exposures!

An essential component of evidence-based practices for OCD, social phobias, generalized anxiety, panic disorder, and even more common anxieties, such as fears of public speaking and flying, is Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP).  In brief, ERP involves putting yourself in a situation that spikes your anxiety while refraining from engaging in “safety behaviors” (eg, carrying a bottle of water or antianxiety medications “just in case”) or compulsions to make yourself less anxious.

Sound scary? Yes! But that’s the point.

Instead of avoiding your triggers, seek them out. Make yourself anxious. You don’t have to jump off the high dive to plunge yourself into the anxiety pool. If slow and steady is more your style, you can dip in just a toe, or a foot. But don’t avoid getting wet.

Here’s the good news. Unlike going to the gym or stocking up on healthy groceries, exposure practice doesn’t require you to carve out extra time in your already over-packed schedule. You can do exposures anywhere or anytime, even while you’re building those new habits, say, going to the gym or stocking up on healthy groceries. Just look for opportunities to get anxious; a little or a lot, it doesn’t matter.

Once you start to move towards these challenging situations, you’ll find it’s not as bad as imagined. You might even start looking for opportunities to face your fears: by approaching, rather than avoiding, your anxiety triggers, your world will open up.

Now wouldn’t that be an incredible way to enter the new year?