Anxiety is not the Enemy, or, 3 Steps to managing your Anxiety
Do you often wonder, “how do I control my anxiety” or “how do I stop my anxiety?”
I get it. Anxiety, especially when experienced at clinical levels, feels awful. The 24/7 tight throat, the gnawing feeling that something terrible is going to happen, feeling like you may bite someone’s head off, the nights spent awake with a mind that won’t.shut.up, and the range of bleh physical symptoms – the digestive upset (that no one talks about!), shortness of breath, shakiness, dizziness, sweating, tense muscles. Ugh. Awful. Yes, let’s stop all of this now!
Some of my clients have come up with strategies to control or stop it on their own. Check out this list and see if you have tried any of these:
being super busy
bingeing Netflix
drinking or using cannabis
eating
avoiding situations that make your anxiety worse
doing the doom scroll on social media Tik Tok, Instagram, Reddit or Facebook
positive affirmations or positive thinking
controlling other people’s behaviour
And these strategies do work. In the short term. Once you finally turn off your phone at night, your mind kicks into gear, and there you lie, with the anxious thoughts and feelings circulating again. Am I right? So, the next day, you try harder to control your anxious thoughts, and maybe slip in a glass of wine at the end of the night to make you sleepy.
If we are persistent and consistent with the above strategies, we should make progress right? Maybe (um, actually no. Research shows it doesn’t). The question I have for you and my clients is…what are you missing in life while you’re working so hard to control your anxiety? What does trying to stop your anxiety cost you in terms of…your health?...your finances?...your relationships?...your time spent alive?...your work?...opportunities?
When my clients sit with these questions, they start to realize the costs of trying to control their anxiety.
I spend too much time online and not engaging in important relationships
I grind my teeth
I spend time and money on massage trying to work out my tense muscles
I get headaches/migraines
I’ve gained weight
I drink more than I want to
I’m busy all the time and not available to the people who matter
I’m exhausted during the day and not able to be my best
I’m missing opportunities to be recognized at work because I avoid presentations
I’m irritable and pick fights with the people who mean the most to me
Do you recognize yourself in there? It’s often disheartening to figure that out. All your Superwoman efforts to control anxiety, and it’s just ended up limiting you. Costing you so much.
The Paradox
What if controlling or trying to stop anxiety is the wrong approach? I know, doesn’t make sense, right? Okay, next step in blowing your mind. What if allowing the anxiety is the way? Wait! Don’t close this tab in disgust and frustration. There’s a massive paradox here that even some therapists aren’t aware of.
The more we push something away, the stronger it comes back. That’s true for thoughts, it’s true for feelings. In the psychology world, we call it the “post-suppression rebound effect.” Here’s how it works:
When people are instructed to suppress their emotions, their physiological indictors of emotion (e.g. heart rate) are just as strong as when people are instructed to actually pay attention to their emotions. And the people who were instructed to suppress their thoughts, can recall these thoughts more easily later on than people who weren’t asked to suppress their thoughts. And this effect has been shown again and again in studies (1). Soooo, suppressing not only doesn’t work, the thoughts rebound even stronger!
And this is one reason my skin crawls when I hear Tik Tok therapists and read Instagram platitudes telling you to think positive thoughts to cure what ails you. It doesn’t matter what the distractor is – Netflix, busy-ness, weed - the feeling/thought is going to come back and come back stronger.
Okay, *sob* so we know controlling doesn’t work. Studies show it, and you wouldn’t be reading this blog if it did work.
What Does Work?
It’s actually kind of wild because what works takes waaaay less effort that all the control strategies we’ve all tried. Okay, so maybe not the doom scroll and Netflix, that’s pretty minimal effort, you got me there. But what is effective, definitely takes away less from the life we want to live, and in fact keeps us present for it.
Before we go there, there is one thing you have to get over. Anxiety is not the enemy. Anxiety is 100% a completely normal, healthy emotion. I know, you want to scream at me, but I’m going to take it a step further. Anxiety can actually be really, um, helpful. It tells us something – that there is something here to fear, something is really scary to you.
Most of the time, the really scary thing for my clients, is judgement. Judgement of themselves, and the judgement of others. And when we break that down even more, it’s “I don’t want to lose the respect/love/connection with this person or these people, or myself.” We all want to belong – that is fundamentally human.
And anytime the risk of losing that respect/love/connection with others or ourselves, we will feel anxiety. Anxiety exists to tell us that this is important to us. The problem happens when we get stuck in that anxiety, or when we do things to perseverate the anxiety.
Living with Anxiety
So, let’s assume we’ve accepted that anxiety will pop up in our lives. We’re human, we feel, we fear. How do we live with it without it becoming problematic? Acceptance and Commitment Therapy teaches you how to do three overall concepts: being present, opening up, and doing what matters.
Being Present
Being present is the skill that is required for the other two concepts. Guess where overthinkers and overachievers spend most of their time in their minds? Yep, in the past (why didn’t I do that, what was I thinking? I should have done this, etc.) and the future (what if this happens, what if this doesn’t happen, etc.). And usually, when their minds are focused on the present, they are spending trying to push away a painful thought or feeling.
Clients often describe guilt and shame over their feelings and thoughts. “I shouldn’t feel this way.” “It’s terrible for me to think this way.” Or, they have been told to subscribe to toxic positivity. “I know, I should think more positively.” “I have a great life; I shouldn’t feel so awful.”
In therapy, you learn to get your mind out of the past and future, and into the present. You learn to watch feelings rise and fall. You learn to observe thoughts coming and going. And you learn to do this without judging these feelings and thoughts. Being present is the process that underlies the other two, opening up and doing what matters.
Opening Up
Opening up refers to opening up to your feelings and thoughts. Not suppressing them. Not avoiding things that feel really uncomfortable. Feeling your feelings. Thinking your thoughts. ALL of them. Sound scary? I hear ya, and I got ya.
Overthinkers and overachievers want to avoid the feeling of anxiety that arises from failing. Ironically, to feel “good enough,” overthinkers and overachievers tend to set unrealistic goals for themselves. If they fail to meet these standards, they will push away the anxiety, double down and even work harder to achieve the goal. This is why we tend to get stuck on certain thoughts.
For example, there was a time I could not walk into a room in my house without noticing all the things that were out of place or “wrong” with it. I would move through my day noticing and feeling compelled to fix to make everything look “perfect.” If someone came over when things were less than perfect, I’d come up with new strategies to make sure I could always maintain a perfectly clean and tidy house. I’d do any amount of work to avoid feeling not good enough. I believed if I just worked hard enough, my house would be perfect, and I’d stop feeling so anxious.
So, how does opening up look for an overthinker? In therapy, you learn skills to simply observe your feelings and thoughts (and I mean “simply” in the way that it’s so much easier than all the overthinker’s avoidance and suppression tactics mentioned above, not because it’s something you pick up in a day) and not feel compelled to push them away. Thoughts of failure, thoughts of not being good enough, feelings of anxiety, are all part of your experience, so you learn to open up to and accepting all parts of your experience as a human.
Doing What Matters
Often, we are on autopilot. We go through the day without a lot of conscious intent, reacting to situations or habitually moving through our routines. Think about how many times you have picked up your phone today without thought. This year’s power and Rogers’ outages may have brought your attention to that habit.
Similarly, most of us react to our closest loved ones without much thought. We are caught up in dynamics that we don’t notice or that cause us pain and we don’t know how to change. And we respond to ourselves in very thought-less ways, too.
Clients who are overthinkers and overachievers are often stuck in two modes: maintaining their strict standards or avoiding failure. These actions are driven by fear – fear of feeling not good enough or fear of being rejected.
When we are aware of what is most important to us, we can step out of these two modes and into behaviour that is aligned with our values. The you can choose the way you react, choose what you focus your energy on, and be intentional about the way you live your life.
Therapy allows you the luxury of stepping back, looking at your life, and figuring out what really matters to you. When you know what your core values are, you can stop reacting or acting out of habit, and make decisions with intent.
Let me know if you want me to join you on this journey.
Kira
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