How you choose to measure progress can make a world of difference in your recovery. It is a common mistake to judge a practice session as a failure if you feel too anxious. This is a mistake for at least 2 reasons:

1) Facing fear almost never feels good. Especially when confronting a new fear for the first tme.

2) People who suffer from agoraphobia tend to engage in black-or-white thinking and label experiences in extreme terms (success or failure, good or bad).

These two factors make it more likely for a practice session to be regarded as a failure rather than a success. This leads to a negative perception of progress toward recovery and can be very discouraging.

It is far more productive to measure your progress by what you are able to do rather than how you feel while doing it.

If you can venture just a little bit further from your safe zone than the day before, or stay in a feared situation just a little bit longer then you are making progress and your practice session is a success, no matter how you feel.

When you stay in situations despite anxious or panicky feelings, you show yourself that panic and anxiety are not dangerous and will not keep growing worse until you pass out or die. Over time, as you prove to yourself that panic symptoms are not physically harmful, they will eventually lesson.

Only you know your limits. Only you know how much anxiety you can tolerate as you practice facing your fears. But judging your progress according to what you can do, and celebrating each time you are able to do more as a positive victory, despite your feelings, will help you stay on the shortest path to recovery from agoraphobia.

In my last post, I wrote about the value of facing your fears out of order instead of creating the tradiitonal a “Fear Heirarchy” and working on overcoming your fears from least to greatest.

Now I am going to pass on another agoraphobia recovery tip from anxiety disorder expert, Dr. Reid Wilson - change the conditions under which you practice desensitization.

If you usually practice in the morning when it is light outside, try practicing at night after dark.

If you usually plan your practice sessions far in advance, try practicing spontaneously.

Try practicing in both cold and warm weather. Practice with people sometimes, and at other times, alone.

You get the idea, the more you mix up your desensitization practice, the more your practice will model real life, and the more likely you will be to prepare yourself for unexpected challenges that come your way.

Desensitization therapy for agoraphobia may be more effective if it is not so systematic - or so an article I just read by Dr. Reid Wilson suggests.

Dr. Wilson is a professor at the University of North Carolina and an internationally recognized specialist in the treatment of panic and anxiety disorders. His book, “Don’t Panic,” helped me tremendously in my own recovery from agoraphobia.

In a recent article called “How to Keep the Fear from Returning,” Dr. Wilson challenges a traditional assumption of systematic desensitization, which is considered to be the most research-proven treatment for agoraphobia today.

The traditional systematic desensitization method is to face your fears in sequential order, from least to greatest. The logic is that you will gain confidence for overcoming larger fears by first conquering smaller ones.

Dr. Wilson suggests that you try just the opposite, to face feared situations randomly. Instead of working all the way through a lesser fear before working on a greater one, work on all of your fears at the same time. Choose randomly which fear you will face on a given day.

Dr. Wilson says that doing “random and variable practice” will send yourself the message that you are capable of handling a variety of situations and “add into memory a larger number of cues” to associate with positive learning. In other words, if you mix up the order in which you face different fears, you will better generalize your success to different situations.