Anxiety as self-Reinforcing and Pavlovian

I had a therapist a long time ago that recommended I read The Worry Cure by Robert Leahy, Ph.D. It was a helpful book, albeit one of those self-help books that you don’t have to read all the way through. It gave me an analogy that I think about often: worrying about something is like carrying an umbrella every day, without checking the forecast. Because, eventually, it’s going to rain, and you will think, “Thank God I had this umbrella!” The point is that, as long as we worry about something, as long as we carry around our anxiety like an umbrella, something will happen that reinforces the necessity of our anxiety, and we will attribute value to our anxiety. And the truth is, it’s totally faulty logic. It’s almost like Pavlov’s dog/bell scenario. A client recently was processing his own feelings about his girlfriend’s anxiety around her job. The girlfriend worries about an upcoming presentation, calls my client in a tizzy, gets him all upset, and then of course the presentation goes well. This is a great example of how anxiety is self-reinforced, and also gets associated with an outcome. If the presentation goes well, she assigns value to her anxiety. If the presentation were to go poorly, she would think she had been correct to worry in the first place, therefore assigning a different type of value to the anxiety. Do you see how we need to question this logic?