Learning to live alongside anxiety: a work in progress
Why do I have anxiety, anyway?
Anxiety, can’t live with it, can’t live without it. Yep, you heard that right. We are biologically and evolutionarily predisposed to experience some semblance of anxiety for survival purposes. Anxiety’s main goal throughout history was to keep us safe from impending predators. Now, in the modern society in which we live, the part of our brain where anxiety lives (known as the amygdala) hasn’t evolved to be able to decipher what is real danger and what is imaginary.
In times way before even our great-grandparents lived, our brains had to make a split second decision to keep us and our village safe through either fighting off a predator “fight” or running away from the danger “flight.” Even though we now live in a much different environment, those signals can still fire in situations much less threatening to our survival.
For example, an impending presentation at work might create a similar fight or flight response even though we are not in “true” danger. In this situation, the more prehistoric aspect of our brain is firing a false alarm. Sort of like the amygdala saying “well better safe than sorry, fire the cannons!” There is hope, though! By learning to manage your anxiety, you will begin to slowly quiet that area of the brain. Your body can gradually adjust to recognizing real threat from false alarm, hence lowering your anxiety and increasing your sense of of “ok, this isn’t so bad. I feel relatively calm.”
How can I make my anxiety better?
Anxiety is not something we can stop or make go away, but there is hope! Instead of fighting and resisting anxiety we can learn to relate and live with it differently. I know this sounds counterintuitive but trust me… the more we see anxiety as the enemy the louder more aggressive it will become. Alternatively, a useful approach can be to live alongside it, and connect to what gives life meaning instead of avoiding it.
A type of therapy that I utilize in my practice, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, likes to use the tug of war metaphor to highlight this helpful approach to anxiety.
The metaphor is as follows:
Imagine you're facing a monster in a perpetual game of tug of war.
You pull tighter so as to not fall, all your efforts go towards tugging this rope.
However, the harder you pull, the harder the monster pulls.
Everything you do, the monster does.
You’re exhausted for continually putting all your energy towards this tug of war.
Your brain urges you to pull harder, to find that it gets more and more stuck.
However, one day you decide to stop, you’ve had enough.
You let go and wait to fall into the fiery pit but you find the opposite happens.
Instead the monster falls, toppling over due to the change in force.
The fight is over.
Years go by and the monster fades into the background as you are participating in life again and engaging in activities that are uplifting and fulfilling. You find that the monster at times will join in, but you pay less and less attention to it. It no longer has power over you. You reframed your need to win against the monster and have instead accepted and moved on regardless of its relationship to you (1).
Tips for managing anxiety
Anxiety hates uncertainty and loves control. With this knowledge in tow, try challenging yourself to notice when your anxiety signal starts to fire. Is it when you’re in social situations? Is it when you notice an unfamiliar bump on your skin? Or is it more generalized meaning your anxiety centers around a multitude of triggers?
Understanding and recognizing your common triggers can be a useful step in changing your relationship with anxiety. To start, keep a journal for a week and keep note of when and why anxiety starts and its associated thoughts and behaviors. This may give you more insight into the patterns of your anxiety.
Stop fighting and start living
It is our natural inclination to ward off discomfort and as we know, anxiety likes to create a lot of it at varying levels. Typically we spend excess time fighting and misunderstanding anxiety thus leading to avoidance and further discomfort and dissatisfaction with life.
At its core, anxiety is truly trying to keep us safe, think of it like a false alarm similar to the fire alarm that goes off when trying to make a meal in your apartment. Annoying, but both keep us out of harm's way. Understanding that anxiety is something that we all experience to various degrees aids in normalizing the experience thus allowing us to move forward rather than against it (2).
Instead of seeing anxiety as good or bad, reframe it as it just is. Often, anxiety wants us to live small and in conflict with our life values. The first step in living might mean reflecting on what is of value to you in this life, are you living in alignment with these values? If not, decide what will be necessary to get you closer to those particular values.
Accept versus avoid
Avoidance is a common tool used to temporarily lower anxiety. But when we avoid to try to lower anxiety, it reinforces to our brain that the trigger or situation is something to be feared rather than accepted. Anxiety and avoidance are friends, in a way, as they need each other to thrive. To understand their interconnection, take a moment to reflect on a situation that generated that feeling of anxiety, or worry. What happened next? If the anxiety was high, you may have found that there was an internal motivation to avoid it.
Let’s say you followed through and avoided the situation due to the intense feeling of anxiety, you probably noticed anxiety took a nosedive and you felt a bit more at peace. Good right? Well, you likely found that the sense of peace didn’t last very long. In fact, if put in that situation again you might notice anxiety to be even higher!
The reason behind this is our response to such situations creates new neural connections - so if we listen do something to try to avoid the anxiety, our brain has learned that that experience is unfavorable and unwanted and should be subject to anxiety in the future.
Notice the impact that avoidance has on your life. Then challenge yourself to approach rather than avoid, working from smaller to bigger things. It can be immensely helpful to work with a therapist on this journey as well. This will aid in teaching your brain that previously avoiding situations are “safe” and with time your body and mind will slowly start to accept these once distressing situations (3). Acceptance doesn’t mean submitting to your fears, but instead understanding their “why” and being able to move through life knowing that you have control. You can direct the course of your ship instead of anxiety being the captain.
Find coping tools that fit you
Experiment with calming and soothing strategies that work for you.
The simple act of lighting a scented candle can act as a grounding exercise when we feel “out of body,”
Creating a calming or energetic playlist may help you get unstuck.
Taking a hot or cold shower may help reset your day.
Journaling and challenging dysfunctional thought patterns can be useful too.
Here is a list of beneficial coping tools that are known to be useful. Create a bank of tools you know to be effective in the face of anxiety so that when anxiety catches you off guard, you’ll be prepared.
Think of coping skills as useful tools in your toolkit when anxiety becomes overwhelming. I emphasize tools here as they are a small element of managing anxiety, but at the end of the day it's you who will overcome and relate differently to the anxiety you experience. Breathing and grounding strategies are highly useful, but they are not everything. The most useful and powerful tool will be acceptance in the face of anxiety. Think of it this way: the more negative or positive attention you give to something, the more likely you are to see it. The same is true with anxiety, though we don’t want to totally distract ourselves, we essentially want to tip our hat to it, notice it's there, thank it for assisting in keeping us safe, and then get back to what gives life meaning instead of avoiding it.
As a reminder… you can be feeling both anxiety and engaging in an activity that is uplifting and fulfilling.
Lastly, some food for thought; excitement and anxiety are very similar physiological experiences, they just embody different perspectives :)
Anxiety Therapy can help you apply this approach to your anxiety. You can book an appointment with me here! And if you're specifically looking for a black therapist, we have qualified professionals available to assist you!
1.https://medium.com/accompanied-by-enervation/dropping-the-rope-with-anxiety-cf81290e36da
2.https://psychcentral.com/anxiety/accepting-and-overcoming-anxiety
3.https://ocdmn.com/cycle-of-avoidance/
https://positivepsychology.com/coping-skills-worksheets/
