Let’s say I misguidedly tried to treat your phobia of spiders by locking you into a room full of spiders against your will. It wouldn’t help. Even if I locked you in there for a week. In fact, it would give you a phobia of spiders if you didn’t already have one because that’s a trauma. Exposures have to be voluntary. You have to go into the room yourself and/or ask me to put you in there.

In particular, it's not just the activity that has to be voluntary, it's also the anxiety that has to be voluntary. What I mean by that is, let’s say you held a small spider in your hand voluntarily, but the whole time you looked away, or meditated, or pretended it wasn't there, that's not actually an exposure. That would be you practicing relaxation techniques. It's helpful, but it's not an exposure. An exposure is where you would hold the spider and try to feel bad. You would look at the hairy legs, the fangs, the eyes. You would pretend that it’s going to bite you. You would try to feel the emotion.

An exposure is a strange activity because you are trying to feel anxious. For example, in college, I tried going to lots of parties in order to get over my social anxiety, but it didn’t work. Parties still made me feel bad. But that's because I was doing it wrong. I would try to keep calm. I would stay with my friends. I would drink beer. In retrospect, that wasn’t an exposure. That was me practicing relaxation techniques, which weren’t strong enough for that activity. Later in life, when I did social exposures, I would go to a party and I would try to feel anxious.  I would talk to whoever intimidated me the most, I stand right in a group where I didn’t know anybody. An exposure is a strange activity because you are not trying to have fun, you are trying to feel anxious. It does give you a good feeling, but it’s more of a proud feeling than a fun feeling per se.

The easiest way to make sure an activity and the anxiety are voluntary is to learn how to do sentence, sensation, anger, or sadness exposures (which can all be found on the previous page) and then do one of those while you are doing a real-life exposure.

Let’s say you held a small spider in your hands, voluntarily, and you tried to feel bad; but then, within ten seconds you threw it down because it creeped you out too much. It’s not long enough. What the studies have shown is that when you start an exposure, you should feel more anxious at first (because you are trying to feel anxious), but you have to sustain the exposure until the anxiety at least starts to go down. Preferably, you continue the exposure until the anxiety is totally gone.

Another way of putting it, you have to sustain an exposure until the anxiety goes down against your will. You are trying to feel bad. It’s your intention to feel bad. But, after a while, you just can’t feel bad anymore because it gets too boring. Your mind starts to wander or your brain starts talking back to the anxious thoughts spontaneously.

The optimal exposure is usually a low-intensity exposure. Something that’s only just outside your comfort zone. You can do something really hard if you are feeling gung-ho and in the right mood, but you have to be mindful about it. If the anxiety becomes too intense, then it may no longer feel voluntary, in which case you should stop. The correct decision is always to stop an exposure that feels too intense, and the best way to prevent that is to err on the sie of exposures that might be too mild. A high frequency of low-intensity exposures is usually the quickest way to make progress (because it helps avoids set-backs). T

Whenever you do an exposure that is voluntary, sustained, and mild it's like taking a stick and poking out your comfort zone in this direction and that direction, gradually expanding your comfort bubble.