Secondary Anxiety and Trading Performance

A while back I wrote about performance anxiety as the most common emotional issue faced by traders and covered some of the techniques that are most effective in combating performance anxiety. There is, however, another variety of anxiety that affects traders that receives almost no attention. Psychologists call it secondary anxiety.

Let's say a person has a panic attack, an overwhelming experience of anxiety and dread that isn't connected to anything obvious. That panicky feeling may be so frightening that the person develops a fear of the attacks. That is how panic disorder patients often develop agoraphobia: they assume that their attacks are caused by something in their environment, so they avoid going places that (they think) might trigger further attacks.

Similarly, I've worked with students who have suffered from test anxiety, a very common form of performance anxiety. They become so fearful that they'll become anxious during a test that they generate the very fear that they hope to avoid!

When people become anxious about their own anxiety, that is called secondary anxiety. It is a particularly thorny problem, because it sets up a vicious cycle: more anxiety leads to more fears of anxiety leads to further nervousness.

A key element that perpetuates the cycle is avoidance of situations that might trigger anxiety. As long as we try to avoid what we fear, our fears control us. Psychologically, the only cure for anxiety is to directly confront our fears *while we remain under control*. That way, we learn in our experience that threatening situations are manageable.

What happens with traders is that they respond to losses (or threatened losses) with disruptive anxiety, often because they are trading excessive size/risk. As a result, they develop a fear of these disruptions and avoid situations that could lead to repeat incidents. One trader I worked with never increased his size in a way that was commensurate with his skills. He made money, but never as much as he should have. It turns out that this was his way of coping with large, painful losses early in his career. His small size was his way of keeping secondary anxiety at bay; he wasn't simply afraid of losing money, but was also afraid of losing his mind.

Another trader I worked with was so afraid of going on "tilt" that he overanalyzed trading opportunities, often missing good trades. The "tilt" that he feared had its roots in anxiety: losing control over trading, because of losing emotional control.

The approach I've found most helpful for such secondary anxiety is guided imagery, aided by biofeedback. In intensive sessions, I will have traders mentally rehearse scenarios of losing money *while they keep their bodies under control*. Heart rate variability biofeedback has been especially helpful in this regard; the Freeze Framer program that I refer to in this post is now known as emWave and has worked well for me.

The key is to use the biofeedback as a training device to help yourself stay physically calm and collected, even as you visualize the anxiety provoking situations that would normally trigger secondary anxiety. By repeating these situations in your mind again and again until you sustain physical control, you literally train yourself to master your responses, eliminating secondary anxiety by building self-efficacy.

We cannot avoid feelings of nervousness, fear, and anxiety, especially in situations that involve performance under conditions of risk and uncertainty. We can, however, avoid become nervous about our nervousness and fearful of our fear. We will always have emotions while trading; we don't have to be controlled by them.
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