This week on the Being Well Podcast, Dr. Rick and Forrest continue last week’s conversation on avoidance coping, this time focusing on how to face the fear you keep avoiding and move from insight into meaningful action. They explore why self-awareness often isn’t enough to create change, focusing on common impediments like ambivalence, shame, and the difficulty of seeing our patterns in real time. They then unpack the practical science of change: surfacing predictions behind avoidance, testing them through right-sized experiments, and fully internalizing the outcomes. Other topics include scaffolding, state-dependent learning, the HEAL process, and what to do when the dreaded experience actually happens.

Key Topics

• 0:00: Intro: why awareness isn’t enough
• 4:54: Ambivalence to change
• 13:50: Other impediments to change
• 22:00: How to want to change
• 28:42: Creating predictions
• 32:26: Setting up an effective experiment
• 43:26: Linking new outcomes to old memories
• 1:01:51: Recap