You are wonderful. You are beautiful. You are healthy, happy and have the coolest haircut in the world.
If those are not typical thoughts that run through your head, you may be missing out on a helpful way to help beat stress and alleviate your vomit fears. Positive self-talk can be helpful in general for making you feel better and thus improve your life all around, and a specific type of positive self-talk can go even further. A technique known as “implementation-intention” can help you deal with stress as well as fear, disgust and all those other emotions associated with emetophobia.
Implementation-Intention Explained
The fancy term of “implementation-intention” refers to a pretty basic concept you may have learned back in logic class. Remember the if-then clauses?
If it rains, then I’ll get wet. If I get wet, then I’ll miserable.
The trick with using the if-then clause to your advantage is to kick out things like the misery mentioned above and replace it with something positive.
If it rains, then you may still get wet. But if you get wet, then you’ll feel refreshed.
Disgust and Fear Studies
Study results published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that having an if-then plan in place did wonders for dealing with disgust as well as fear, two emotions that typically run high in the emetophobia arena.
One study presented stimuli meant to induce disgust while the other did the same with fear. Each study broke the participants into two groups. One group had an if-then plan for dealing with the stimuli while the other group had no such plan.
The group that had an if-then plan in place, or what the study author’s refer to as the implementation-intention participants,” were able to effectively decrease their reactions of disgust and fear, unlike the other group that had no such plan in place.
How to Get Started
You already got a bit of a practice run using the if-then clause with the rain scenario. Now it’s time to apply it to real-life situations you encounter. Opt for those that normally fill you with fear, dread, disgust or otherwise exacerbate your vomit phobias and you may notice an improvement from the get-go. Examples may include:
Instead of:
If I go to the party, then I will be afraid of everyone there who could make me sick.
Try:
If I go to the party, then I will be so happy to see my friends.
Instead of:
If I meet my boss for lunch, then I will spend the whole time worrying.
Try:
If I meet my boss for lunch, then I will have fun getting to know her better.
Go for broke by using the if-then clause not only to help your emetophobia, but to alleviate any type of uncomfortable emotion or stress.
“Simply decide what kind of response you would like to have instead of feeling stress, and make a plan that links your desired response to the situations that tend to raise your blood pressure,” says Heidi Grant Halvorson, associate director of Columbia University Business School’s Motivation Science Center.
If the technique can help alleviate your vomit fears, you can probably bet it can work equally well in all areas of your life.
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