10 Steps to Mastering Stress by Barlow David H. Rapee Ronald M. Perini Sarah

Author:Barlow, David H., Rapee, Ronald M., Perini, Sarah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

PREDICTION TESTING

By now it should be almost second nature for you to ask yourself, “How likely is it?” when you notice a stressful thought. To come up with a realistic probability, you need to take into account as much realistic evidence as possible. But people who are stressed often have trouble assessing evidence; they focus on the negative and ignore the positive. Take our case example, Rhani. Rhani wanted to attend a friend’s birthday party at which she knew only a couple of people. She was anxious about attending because she thought that she would have no one to talk to and appear out of place. Rhani had trouble finding evidence to challenge this thought. When she got to the party she did end up talking to a range of people, but she was so focused on her anxiety, and the times when she felt awkward, that she came away from the party convinced that her negative thoughts were true.

You can see that Rhani’s tendency to focus on the negative prevented her from looking objectively at what had actually occurred when she went to the party. To help her look at the evidence more realistically, we suggested that Rhani try a technique called prediction testing for her next social event. In prediction testing, you predict what you think will happen in a certain situation. You ask yourself beforehand: What evidence will I need to look for to see if these predictions come true? Then, when it’s over, you compare your predictions to the evidence you collected. Doing this over and over will give you an accurate perception of reality, based on real evidence.

The next time Rhani attended a party, she made similar predictions. She predicted, “I will have no one to talk to,” and “People will think I don’t belong.” We asked her to consider how she would know if her predictions came true. That is, what evidence would she need to look for? Rhani found this a challenging question. Normally, she just focused on her own feelings and used these as evidence—if she felt awkward, she assumed she looked awkward. But we didn’t accept this and encouraged her to consider the facts. How would she really know if her predictions came true?

The first prediction was easy enough to test. She would count the number of people she talked to. If the number turned out to be zero, she would know her prediction was correct. The second prediction was more difficult. How would she know what other people were thinking? Like the rest of us, Rhani could not read minds—although she often tried to! We encouraged her to look only at the most reliable evidence. Did anyone say she looked out of place? Did anyone ask her what on earth she was doing there? Rhani agreed to take note of these facts, and competed the first three columns of her Prediction Testing Record:

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