Behavioural experiment

In 1932, a painfully shy 19-year-old in New York named Albert Ellis set himself a challenge. For a month, whenever he saw a woman sitting alone on a bench in the Bronx Botanical Garden, he would sit down next to her and start a conversation within a minute.

He approached about 130 women. Some got up and left, but around a hundred talked with him. One agreed to a date, and then didn't turn up. But the disaster he'd predicted never came, and his fear faded. Ellis went on to become a psychologist and founded rational emotive behaviour therapy, one of the forerunners of CBT.

Some fears survive because we never test them. If you never speak up because "everyone will think I'm stupid", you never find out whether they do.

A behavioural experiment treats a fearful prediction the way a scientist would: write down exactly what you expect, try something small and safe, then compare what happened with what you predicted.

Start small. The aim isn't to prove you're brave; it's to gather evidence. Even when things don't go perfectly, people often find they coped better than they expected.

• Stoicism

  Seneca suggested spending a few days living on the plainest food and roughest clothes, then asking: "Is this the condition that I feared?"

• DBT

  Opposite action also tests what happens when you approach something instead of avoiding it.

Think of something you avoid because of what you think will happen.

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You believe "If I ask a question in the meeting, people will think I'm stupid." What's a behavioural experiment?