Following up again, your response was

“If you were willing to experience anxiety, embarrassment and humiliation, then you would be willing to go all in on your relationship and you would reduce your anxiety in social situations.”

So is it similar to Byron Katie’s work where I go to the worst case scenario in my mind and make peace with how I’d feel then? And I feel and process the emotions that come up for me as I imagine the worst case scenario?

And the reason we want to do that is because our primal brain wants us to move away from pain and towards pleasure. So when I think about moving in with my boyfriend and I feel fear because I am thinking about the possibility of our relationship not working out, my primal brain wants me to avoid feeling the feelings that would come up for me if that were to happen, right? So the actions I might take might lead me to decide not to move in with him because I’m afraid of how I *might* feel one day in the future, thus I sabotage myself ahead of time. Because if I let myself know what my answer is to moving in, it would be yes. But then there’s fear, so my brain tries to confuse me because confusion is safer?

So, then, in terms of making decisions, using being afraid as a reason to decide whether or not to do something, would have negative results. Sometimes. But also isn’t it true that sometimes being afraid is an alert to something being dangerous? Like a hot stove or something. So how do we know when to trust negative emotions such as fear?