Have you ever found yourself obsessing over some aspect of your life, which you can’t seem to fix? In fact, the more you worry about it the worse it gets? I call these Chinese Finger Lock states. Just like with the classic toy trap, trying to get out of the situation only gets you more stuck. I’m going to present some of these fairly common anxiety scenarios that run rampant among goal-oriented types. People will try their hardest to find a reasonable way out, but the reality is that the way forward is opposite of what the mind wants to do.

Remember the last time you had a sleepless night? You rotated sleeping positions, counted sheep, drank some chamomile tea, but your mind remained alert. The idea of sleep was like salvation, but your body had other ideas. Alertness refused to drop its guard even though your mind knew you needed to be rested for an important meeting the next day. Why oh why is sleep, delicious oblivion, the one function you have no control over?

Nobody enjoys this inevitable scenario, but sometimes insomniacs fall into a cognitive trap much like the finger lock when they encounter this situation one too many times. Instead of taking it in stride and using their lost sleep as a drive to get more sleep the next night, insomniacs will start to worry and anticipate. The thought of another sleepless night is just too much to bare. They start to TRY to sleep. And as soon as sleep becomes something you can try and fail at it becomes a threat. Now the brain’s arousal systems become tied to the idea of sleep. To make it worse, insomniacs will start to revolve their worlds around their sleep, so they don’t even have a life to distract themselves from sleep worries. They go to bed earlier in the off chance that they might catch some ZZZs, but it just means more time that they lie in bed not sleeping and being in a high arousal state. Pretty soon all things related to sleep become triggering to them. This includes just getting in their bed, napping, or even looking at a clock face.

The real way out of this mess is counterintuitive to what insomniacs will tend to do. The most effective recommendations (as per Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) for insomnia are to 1) actually restrict time spent in bed, and 2) not climb into bed until you think you might actually fall asleep. One of the main goals is to maximize sleep efficiency in order to create a strong association in your mind between your bed and the state of sleep.

This is done by increasing the time asleep over time in bed, which means decreasing the amount of time in bed not sleeping and also decreasing the total time you are allowed to be in bed. When you experience this type of restriction, your body will tend to use the time you are allowed in bed more efficiently and overcome some of the arousal that you have associated with going to bed. This counterintuitive strategy is a good part of what releases the “finger lock” state of insomnia. An additional counterintuitive strategy is to start living your life again and stop putting so much pressure on whether you will sleep. The bottom line is that if you get tired enough, your body will sleep. And you won’t die in the meantime.

Another common example of a “finger lock” state is when people become obsessed with a bodily sensation (heart racing, shortness of breath) as in panic attacks or a bodily function (sweating/blushing/shaking) as in social anxiety disorder. A panic attack starts off with a physical sensation related to arousal, perhaps during a time of stress. Our bodies have physiologic changes under stress that can feel strange given that we are no longer chased by lions. This can lead you to believe that feeling heart racing must mean that there is something wrong with your body. Then worried thoughts about your body activate more arousal systems and more of the sensations that come with arousal, which cause more worry. This is a positive feedback loop that escalates into a panic attack. You feel like something terrible is happening, but in reality a panic attack cannot actually harm you.

In social anxiety a person may be sweating in an uncomfortable social situation and start to worry that others may notice and judge them. This leads to more sweating and then more worry. Another “finger lock” feedback loop. The way out of both panic attacks and social anxiety is not to try harder or care more, but to just let it happen and not give weight to the worry thoughts. In fact, treatment may involve exposing you to more of these situations and sensations in order to desensitize. That is the real way out of the finger trap, which is the opposite of what people tend to want to do.

The intrusive thoughts associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), also called the doubting disease, is yet another “finger trap”. A classic example is driving down the highway and running over an amorphous blob. You’re pretty sure it’s a garbage bag, but you just can’t be sure. Some part of the brain keeps nagging you that it could have been a body. The uncertainty that you might have run over a person is so distressing that it takes over your thoughts. How can you not pay attention to the possibility that you have run over a human being with your car????

These obsessional thoughts can encompass all sorts of taboos from fear of contamination to thoughts of harming a child. The more you try to avoid thinking about it the more it intrudes into your thoughts… like telling someone not to think of a pink elephant. This “finger trap” feedback loop is very distressing and hard to treat. In reality, the thought is just a thought with a negligible possibility of being true. The uncertainty feels important, when in fact the thought does not deserve any importance. The way out of the “finger lock” in this case may involve using mindfulness techniques to observe the thought (but not avoid it) and strip it of its importance so that it loses its power.

From the examples above you can see how the concept of Chinese finger lock states can apply across a range of anxiety disorders. The cause of many of these situations stems from placing importance on distressing thoughts whether it be the thought of having a sleepless night, the thought of something being wrong with your body, the thought that someone is judging you, or the thought that you can’t be sure you won’t do something awful. It seems important to pay attention to these worries, and it seems like you should attack these worries the same way you would attack any other problem in your life. But for some reason these thoughts don’t have the same properties as other problems in your life and you have to rethink your strategy. So, the next time you wonder if you might be making your own anxiety worse, consider taking a counterintuitive strategy. Take a good look at your thoughts, lean in, relax into it, and let the trap release.