Blog Posts Tagged "Social Anxiety".

I have started making some free Cognitive Behavioral Therapy videos and putting them on YouTube.

Short link for sharing: http://youtu.be/ZkA7Y1xXoyA

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Using the Primacy and Recency Effects To Your Advantage

What Are the Primary and Recency Effects?

If people are presented with a list containing lots of items and asked to recall as many items as they can remember, they typically do best at recalling items that were at the beginning or end of the list (as opposed to in the middle of the list).

Better recall of info presented first = Primacy Effect

Better recall of info present last = Recency Effect

How Might This Be Relevant For Social Communcation?

Try to grease the social wheels at the beginnings and ends of your communication.

Examples:

- When you greet someone for a meeting, pay attention to doing it warmly. Use your speech, body posture, voice tone, and facial expressions to communicate warmth and at least mild enthusiasm/energy.

- A little trick university lecturers use is saying “That’s a great question” when someone asks a question. This is a little trick because it boosts the student but it also gives a few extra seconds for thinking how to answer!

- I often (but not always) start emails with “Thanks for your email” and end emails with something like “Will look forward to meeting you.”

- When I write a list of examples, I (sometimes) try to put the strongest examples – the ones I want people to remember the most- at the beginning of the list. I also make sure the example at the end of the list is a strong example.

- Use sandwich feedback when giving feedback (positive, something to work on, positive). Priming a sense of positive acceptance usually helps people constructively hear the ‘something to work on’ message.

- For couples, when you part in the mornings and reunite in the evenings, create some moments with positive tone (e.g., a goodbye/hello hug, or telling your partner about something that went right in your day before you tell them about anything that went wrong)

Try to take advantage of primacy and recency effects in your face to face communications, phone calls, and emails.

If you’re not naturally good socially (there isn’t any shame in it!), a few simple tips and a little bit of effort can go a long way to enhancing your social communication. A belief you can get better at it is important, or else you’re not likely to bother trying (This is called a growth/fluid mindset vs. a fixed mindset in which you believe something is unchangeable).

Hit me up on Facebook if you have any primacy/recency effect tips of your own. You’ll need to “like” the page in order to get the option to leave a comment. Or, Tweet me.

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This article contains a very basic version of the instructions for a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) technique called “Situation Exposure”

I’m going to use an example of how I used this in my own life last week (Additional examples included at the end). The reason for offering my example is to show that these techniques aren’t just useful for “disorders” – anyone can use them.

My Goal: Becoming More Comfortable with Sleeping in a Tent

What I Did (I’ve already briefly mentioned doing this on Facebook):

Step 1: Got all the tent parts out of the stuff sack and set up the tent on the lawn with help.

Step 2: Set up the tent on the lawn on my own x 2 (one day and then the next day).

Step 3: Set up the tent in the lounge and slept in it for 3 nights.

Step 4: Slept in the tent in the garden.

How it Works

I repeated each step until doing that action no longer triggered more than 2/3 out of 10 anxiety/uncomfortableness, and then moved on to the next step. Repeating a small behavior until it no longer triggers significant anxiety is called “habituation.” What’s great about this procedure is that it doesn’t involve becoming overwhelmed.

Results: I’m now far more comfortable about tenting than I’d be if I’d just gone out and tried sleeping at a camp ground or in the woods.
Thought change:
Before = “I don’t think I’ll be able to get a good night’s sleep in the tent” or “I think I’ll be scared by noises”
After = I did get a good night’s sleep and I wasn’t scared of bumps in the night.

Why parents tend to be good at this

The skill involved in this technique is in breaking something down into small enough chunks.

Parents can often do this for their kids but don’t think about doing it themselves. For example, if a child is having a hard time with multiplication tables, parents don’t say “Don’t worry about multiplication.” They say – “Let’s break this down into easier bits and practice the first bit. Let’s not worry about the hard bits until we’ve done the first bit”. (Parents also typically recognize that harsh criticism isn’t likely to help their child make progress, but might use harsh criticism or self flagellation to try to motivate themselves. If that was going to work for you, it would’ve worked already).

How Therapy Clients Use This

This technique is very flexible.

All of the following examples are things that more than one client has decided to include in their situation exposure plans.

- Sending coffee back and asking for it to be hotter.

- Potentially mildly annoying someone e.g., asking for 200g of ham at the deli and then changing mind and asking for only 100g when the person has already started weighing out 200g.

- Making a phone call without rehearsing.

- Doing a task without double or triple checking.

- Asking a question when the answer might be No.

- Asking for something special e.g., the McChicken Sauce on a Big Mac.

- Asking a question in class.

- Doing something less than perfectly (e.g., leaving a typo in a doc)

- Someone with an eating disorder practicing eating forbidden food (e.g., eating 7 grapes if their rule is 6 grapes)

Several of these are designed to show the person that even if something negative happens, they’re able to cope with it. Actually HAVING the experience of that tends to be more helpful for starting to believe it vs. just talking about it.

Which Therapy Techniques Give the “Best Bangs for Your Effort Bucks”

As a VERY general rule of thumb (with exceptions), research has shown that therapies that include exposure techniques work and therapies that don’t include exposure techniques don’t work as well.

This example is of “Situation Exposure” but there are other types such as “Interoceptive Exposure” and “Imagery Exposure.” Sometimes exposure is also called “Behavioural Experiments.” Usually more than one type of exposure is used in therapy.

Exposure techniques work because they impact the big four of: Behaviour, Thoughts, Emotions, and Physical Responses (such as physical spikes of anxiety in response to triggers).

Research has shown that these techniques tend to be more effect in changing thoughts than writing or talking about thoughts.

If you’d like help coming up with a situation exposure plan, you can just give someone a call and let them know that’s what you’d like. Most CBT-trained clinical psychologists should be able to easily help with this as it’s a core technique.

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