Coaching practices for Anxiety Hierarchy

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Anxiety Hierarchy, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• My list of no-go situations keeps quietly getting longer as the fear spreads, and the whole thing feels too overwhelming to face head-on
• The fear feels like one solid wall I either climb all at once or not at all, so I keep not at all
• I’m finally ready to face this fear, but when I picture confronting the whole thing head-on I freeze
• I’m terrified of facing the feelings that set me off, and the whole thing feels like one giant wall I either crash into all at once or run from completely
• The thing I’m scared of sits in my mind as one giant wall of dread, and just thinking about facing it freezes me

Practices that may help

1. Build an avoidance hierarchy and work through it systematically
   List all the situations you avoid because of anxiety, from least to most frightening, then work up the list.
   Safety Behavior Fading, Made Practical
2. Build an anxiety hierarchy
   List feared situations from least to most distressing before any exposure begins.
   Counter-Conditioning and Systematic Desensitization
3. Build a fear hierarchy
   List feared situations from mildly anxiety-provoking to most feared, then work up from the bottom.
   Exposure Therapy: Facing Fears to Shrink Them
4. Build a personal sensation hierarchy
   Map which panic sensations frighten you most, then order them from mildest to most feared.
   Interoceptive Exposure for Panic
5. Build an exposure hierarchy
   List every feared situation and rank them by distress (0–100) before you do anything else.
   The Fear Ladder: Graded Exposure Made Practical
6. The Fear Ladder: Graded Exposure Made Practical
   A fear ladder ranks feared situations from least to most distressing and has you face them in order, from bottom to top. Repeated, systematic exposure to each step without avoidance teaches the brain that the feared situation is survivable, gradually extinguishing the anxiety response. This is one of the best-supported techniques in the anxiety literature.
7. Scale the catastrophe on an actual severity scale
   Rate the feared outcome on a 0–10 severity scale, then compare it to things you know are 10/10.
   Decatastrophizing, Made Practical
8. Build an avoidance hierarchy
   List the situations, places, people, and thoughts you avoid — ordered from least to most feared.
   Prolonged Exposure Therapy: Principles, Practices, and the Evidence
9. The 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique
   Name five things you see, four you hear, three you feel, two you smell, one you taste.
   The Anxiety Toolkit, Made Practical
10. Add interoceptive rungs for bodily fear
    If you fear the physical sensations of anxiety itself, include exposures that deliberately induce them.
    The Fear Ladder: Graded Exposure Made Practical

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.