You’re More Anxious Than You Think, and It’s Not As Bad As You Fear
How do you keep anxiety at bay? Perfectionism, procrastination, people-pleasing, overthinking, repeatedly checking your phone, and stomach issues can all be symptoms that anxiety is hiding under the surface. Although many people experience anxiety, it’s not normal. At the same time, our negative emotions, like anxiety, are not bad – they’re just pieces of information that something important is going on. Insight therapist, Joshua Medeiros, points a spotlight on anxiety and shares encouragement for how to use it to benefit our lives.
Transcript
I want you to think of a time when you’d been listening to a piece of music. Maybe it’s classical, maybe otherwise. But at some point during that piece of music, you recognized it’s too loud, and you reached out and you had to turn it down.
It starts off with some simple melody, and then it evolves—maybe a counter-melody or a harmony comes in. There may be some percussion and a bassline. Maybe it’s a guitar. Maybe distortion is added. The tempo increases, and even though none of the instruments are playing any louder, the simple addition of more makes it feel more—makes it feel, at a certain point, overwhelming enough that you have to make an adjustment.
Anxiety isn’t always some dramatic panic attack that we might see portrayed in media, or we think that is what’s necessary to go seek help about. The truth is that anxiety exists on a spectrum—from somewhere between rest, to helpful, healthy stress that motivates us to do the things that we know need to get done, to panic, to eventually just shut down, because our systems won’t allow ourselves to override that anxiety anymore.
It shows up in little ways, like perfectionism—the drive to do more because we feel like, in the face of adversity, we’re called to prove ourselves. But we fail to draw the boundary and understand the line about where that is.
It might show up in procrastination—avoiding tasks because of an underlying worry about failure. Or maybe because there’s so much anxiety in our life already that we need a deadline tomorrow to increase the anxiety and the value of doing that work now instead of the week ahead of time.
Maybe it shows up in people-pleasing—a constant need for external validation, maybe driven by a social anxiety or a fear that my opinion or taste won’t be accepted by those around me. And so I need to fold, or be amenable, in order to be loved or accepted or seen.
Maybe it shows up in things like rumination—this endless loop of thoughts, maybe about things that have already happened, or things that are going to happen. Like, you have to go give a talk in front of a room full of people this afternoon. Maybe you have to have a difficult conversation with someone you love, or a regular conversation with a difficult person.
There’s no need, necessarily, to have that conversation twice—once in your head, and then once in real life. You could just have that conversation.
The other and I think maybe the more subtle one that we don’t always associate with this is the physical symptoms: tightness in your shoulders, the stomach issues, the fidgeting, the nail picking or biting, or the inability to sit still or focus on something for any extended amount of time without checking something else in order to help divert our attention and alleviate the stress of the focus.
It’s easy to think of all these states and think, “I,” or probably more likely, “someone I know suffers with this, struggles with this.” And if we do, it’s easy to think, “Well, I’m not the only one, and this is normal.”
And I want to be the one to tell you tonight that negative emotions—suffering, struggling—in no case is normal. Normalize doesn’t mean we make it okay.
It’s not normal.
Suffering is abnormal. If it was, we would have bred it out a long time ago. We wouldn’t experience it as a negative emotion anymore. Suffering is universal, it’s not normal.
And so why care? Why not just brush it off? It’s not killing us; it’s helping us to move and to do.
Carrying around even a little bit of extra anxiety or stress—anxiety being our internal reaction to external or internal stressors—reduces our ability to experience joy. By suppressing negative emotion, we necessarily have to suppress the equal and opposite positive emotion. Because if we expect to be happy and it doesn’t happen, we might get sad. And so I won’t expect to be happy to protect myself from feeling sad, as a basic instinct.
Because it’s burnout or exhaustion. It takes energy to worry. It results in missed opportunities and our avoidance behaviors and procrastination, because we spend that time not doing something—but not really doing anything else more productive or useful or helpful or growth or developing in ourselves.
It delays our seeking help—by casting off our negative emotions as “normal” and “everybody deals with it,” we don’t reach for the help that we could use until we need it. And there’s a difference between “could use” and “needing.”
Negative emotions are not bad. They’re just useful signals. They point to the fact that something’s not right. And if we can view it as a signal—not an actual sign of danger—it’s a helpful way to move around our brain’s misinterpretation.
When we recognize that there’s nothing to fear, maybe we learn to relabel the emotion we’re experiencing not as anxiety but as excitement or anticipation or twitterpated, whatever the emotion may be.
Learning to speak about our emotions in a granular, specific way can be really helpful in fighting the resistance that we sometimes feel of admitting that we’re stressed or feeling anxious. And treating those negative emotions like anxiety as just good information—maybe valuable information about our own values, or where our boundaries are, or maybe should be, or maybe that something is just important.
So, to begin doing this, we can cultivate in ourselves—and help others around us cultivate—self-awareness.
If you recognize that when you’re stressed, you remember that it’s time to take a deep breath to try and calm down because the tension has built up to such a point—I often say this: if the only time you take a deep breath is when you’re stressed, then taking deep breaths is going to stress you out.
It’s important to do the good things when we’re not in a state of needing. We practice it when it doesn’t feel like our life is on the line so that when it’s time to do it, it actually means something, and it taps into something deeper.
Name it! I said before—learn to differentiate anxiety from excitement or anticipation or genuine fear or surprise or dread of conflict. There’s a difference. And the more specific you can be about what it is that you’re experiencing, and how those things show up in you, the better off you’ll be in being able to deal with anxiety and all of its daughters.
Challenge your anxious thoughts. If you find yourself arguing with a significant other or spouse or partner or friend or family member in your head, ask yourself, “How do I know that’s what they would say?” And you might quickly respond, “Because we’ve been married for 40 years—of course I know what you’re going to say,” when the truth is, more often than not, vulnerability begets compassion.
Take the little steps to cultivate small acts of courage and the opportunity to take them. Step out of your comfort zone just enough to prove to yourself that things aren’t as bad as you thought they would be. It’s not as bad as you fear. But also to increase and stretch your window of tolerance to be able to deal with anxiety in a healthier way, so that the “could use help” gets more and more the case than “absolutely need it.”
And then finally: seek support. Look for people around you—friends and family, or professionals—who you can be vulnerable with about the things that bring you angst.
Not so that they can fix it. So that they can know. So that they can relate. So they can listen. So you aren’t the only one facing it.
Understanding and accepting our feelings, we can learn to navigate them more effectively. It leads to greater self-compassion, greater relatability and compassion for others, and overall a richer life.
How many of us would like to spend less time worrying and more time doing the things we’re worried about?
When you think of that piece of music that we began with, understand that just because you might be standing there in front of the orchestra—maybe you’re the composer here—just because they’re all looking at you doesn’t mean they all need to play their instruments at the same time or at the same volume.
Setting the boundaries and understanding what melodies and counter-melodies and harmonies play best in your own life and in your own own flourishing, you come to understand that anxiety’s place should be a thing of your past.