Members,

Don’t forget to pencil in your exposure work. Below are ten tips to help you along:

1. Learning occurs at moderate levels of anxiety and arousal. In planning your exposure work don’t make it too easy or too hard. If you pick something that doesn’t cause you any anxiety (a fear rating of 1 or 2) you can’t experience a drop in your fear rating because there’s really nowhere for it to go. As a result, you won’t unlearn anything. On the other hand, if you pick something that causes you a fear rating of 9 or 10 it may be difficult for you to do a long enough exposure to notice a reduction in your fear.

2. Exposure should be predictable. Plan your exposure work in advance and stick to the plan. Unplanned exposure does not work as well in part because when we plan an exposure, just having planned it makes it a bit more controllable and a little less frightening.

3. Set a goal for the exposure that you can reach. Set a goal for the exposure session such as staying in the situation for at least a certain amount of time or until your fear rating drops by a certain amount. Setting a reachable goal will give you something to aim for. Achieving your goals step-by-step will allow you to feel good about what you are accomplishing.

4. Stay in the situation until your fear goes down. This can happen in two ways. First, if you pick a situation for an exposure that causes you a fear rating of a 3 to 8, then after an hour you should be experiencing a drop in your fear rating. If not, maybe it was harder than you thought. However, there is another way to experience a decrease in your fear rating, which is to repeat the exposure again and again. So for example, if your anxiety doesn’t come down from an "8" in the first hour, try it again the next day. Eventually, if you repeat the experiment every day, it will start to drop. Keep track of your fear ratings during your exposure work by using the Exposure Worksheet.

5. If something is too hard, pick something just a little bit easier. If you end up having a fear rating of 9 or 10 for an exposure experiment, try to figure out what you could do that would be almost the same but would result in a fear rating of 7 or 8 instead. You can also consider adding a step to your treatment plan.

6. Keep track of your anxiety during exposure experiments by using the Exposure Monitoring Form. Every 5 minutes record how much fear you experience on a scale from 0-10.

7. Expect to experience some fear. If you're choosing experiments that cause you a moderate level of anxiety, expect to feel some fear. Don’t judge your success based on your experience during the exposure. YOU WILL FEEL BAD. Judge your success based on your ability to complete the exposure task. If you stayed in the situation as planned, you’ve succeeded in reaching your goal for that exposure.

8. Go with your fear. In an exposure experiment, you want your fear to happen. You plan the exposure experiment so that you experience some fear (but not too much). You can only experience a reduction in your fear if you let it happen. Try not to avoid your fear during exposure work by trying to distract yourself. Just let it happen and watch it go down. Common distraction strategies include reading, watching TV, listening to music, talking on the phone, or talking to a friend. TRY NOT to distract yourself during exposure work. Allow yourself o experience fear and a reduction in fear.

9. Exposure experiments work best when exposures are repeated often and are spaced closely together. The more you can repeat an exposure exercise and the more closely together you can space the experiments, the faster you will unlearn your fear.

10. Use the strategies you’ve learned to challenge your anxious thoughts during your exposure experiments. See what happens when you challenge your anxious thoughts during exposure.