Most of the time, Anxiety is the last thing any of us want to feel. The buzzing, tightness, dizzy, heart-pounding, hands’ sweaty emotion that typically signals the need to escape or avoid some kind of threat is experienced by everyone at some point in their lives, and reported as a “problem” by 19.1% of adults in the past year, and 31.8% of adolescents (https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disorder). Anxiety evolved as a bodily response to get us away from danger by making it very uncomfortable to be where we are. Its the urge to move, to act, to solve a problem, and contributed to the overall success of the human race up to this point. It served us well in the constantly dangerous world our early human ancestors navigated, helping us spot lions in the bush, scan for wildfires at a distance, and anticipate life threatening social exclusion from the tribe.
These days however, if we are lucky enough to live in a first world country, we rarely experience constant threat like this; yet we retain the same nervous system, meaning our ability to spot dangers far exceeds the current need most of the time. This results in a tendency to see danger in things that aren’t necessarily there, and even when there is acute danger present, we modern humans tend to worry about it far longer than is helpful. At its worst, anxiety begins to keep us away from the lives we want to live. We start to worry about what others think about us and to avoid that worry we begin to isolate ourselves. We notice our heart racing during a test and begin to panic about passing out, leading us to drop out of classes to avoid that fearful situation. We can even start to have anxiety about having anxiety itself, leading to painful vicious circles of fear that seems to come from nowhere. Our lives can become smaller and smaller as we try harder to avoid feeling this way.
Mental health experts call this process “experiential avoidance” (https://stevenchayes.com/hard-won-wisdom-in-dealing-with-anxiety/). It makes sense, if you don’t like a thing, find a way to avoid it or get rid of it. Unfortunately, this process backfires when we try to apply it to things inside us, like thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories and urges. Where can you go where the possibility of fear isn’t present? What could you remove from yourself to get rid of a painful memory? What works on the outside just doesn’t work on the inside, it usually just makes things worse.
Luckily, we’re not stuck and the situation isn’t hopeless, and the answer is closer than you probably think. Rather than avoiding and turning away from our painfully anxious thoughts and feelings, we in fact need to turn toward them. We stop trying to feel better and instead focus on feeling better. We adopt a stance of willingness to our experience, essentially telling our anxiety “hey, I see you, I may not know why you’re here, but I’m going to feel you as you are, at least for right now”. Think of it this way, when you were a kid and were fearful of the monster in your closet, did it help to keep the door closed or to hide away from it, or did growth and change come from being willing to take a look, to open the door and step inside, facing the fear that had built up inside you, helping you realize that maybe it’s not so bad after all? You likely felt empowered, and if you’re parents helped, they probably encouraged you as a result. You showed you were bigger than the fear. In this same way, we throw open the door to our anxiety and shed light on the fear so we can see it for what it is.
This can definitely still be painful, and it often is especially at the beginning. But that’s why the kind of relationship that we develop with anxiety matters. Here are some metaphors to demonstrate the relationship kind of relationship that reverses experiential avoidance and helps us open up to what was previously intolerable:
- Throwing open the curtains and letting the light into a dark room
- Holding your anxiety/pain like you would a cactus, lightly and with care
- Laying back in the ocean and letting yourself float, rather than trying so hard to tread water
- Casually refocusing on your work at the coffee shop while an annoying patron at the other table blabs on about a political viewpoint different than yours, allowing their voice to become background noise
- Continuing to gently and lovingly hold a baby even after it spits up on your shoulder
- Watching a game of chess play itself out without getting too hung up on one side or the other winning
- Allowing the pendulum of our emotions to swing back and forth without trying to keep it on one side.
- Imagine anxiety like a big, inflatable beach ball, instead of trying to hold it under the water away from us, we let it just float around us at the surface
- Allowing a butterfly to undergo the painful transformation from a caterpillar without trying to speed it up or hurry things along.
- To feel your feelings much as you might literally feel the texture of a textile sweater
- To remember your memories like you might take a friend to see a movie you’ve already seen
- To respond to your bodily sensations by sensing them like you might do during an all-over stretch in the morning
In this way, we experience our anxiety without holding on too tightly, without taking it too literally, without believing it too fully. We stop our struggle fighting with our feelings, and instead use that energy to move more completely toward what matters to us. To have thoughts of what are my friends thinking of me, I feel like such a loser and to go to the party with them anyway, to feel sweaty palms and a racing heart during a test and to simply notice them as sensations you’re having right now instead of getting caught up in the story about the sensations.
When we get close, open up, and move in to anxiety, we come to find we are bigger than our thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and we can get back to what means most in life.
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