Anxiety: The Best Friend You Never Knew You Had?
“Anxiety is BAD! I need to get rid of my anxiety! All my problems would be solved if I never had to feel anxiety again! I have so much anxiety…what’s wrong with me!?”
These are sentiments I have felt in my own life and often see reflected back at me when I’m sitting across from a new client. It makes sense why we feel this way! We have been taught that fear and discomfort are terrible things that should be avoided at any cost. However, there is another side to anxiety that often gets overlooked and I think it’s only fair to shine a light on why anxiety is actually more of a friend than a foe.
You CANNOT convince me that anxiety is good…can you?
The reality is, we need some amount of anxiety to survive and thrive as human beings! Without it, we would most certainly be dead. Anxiety is a direct response to a perceived stressor. When we experience anxiety, it simply means our sympathetic nervous system (or fight or flight response) is activated.
Why? Because anxiety alerts us to threats in our environment and prepares our bodies to react.
Think about if someone was walking toward you with a bloody chainsaw...if you had NO anxiety, there would be nothing telling your body to be fearful and get away from that person.
Consider how we evolved as human beings. It is evolutionarily advantageous for us to be able to notice and anticipate threats in our environment that could endanger us. Your brain’s only job is to keep you alive and that often means preparing for impending stressors or reflecting on stressors from the past so we can learn from them. Anxiety helps us forecast the future and prepare for the wide range of scenarios that could negatively impact us.
We can experience anxiety when there isn't a clearly identifiable trigger, but many times our anxiety is about something specific that often hasn’t even happened yet (and may not):
What if I fail this exam? What if I get laid off? What if I’m alone forever?
Those things would really suck if they happened, and your anxiety wants you to be prepared, either emotionally or practically, for hard things to happen to you.
OK, but sometimes my anxiety does feel really really awful! How can that be helping me?
There is a distinction I like to use between the types of anxiety that might show up in our lives. I prefer to veer away from terms like good and bad and instead ask myself if the anxiety feels helpful or unhelpful.
Helpful anxiety has an action associated with it, helps us meaningfully plan and react to the future and addresses the perceived threat. For example, “I’m worried about this test coming up! I’m going to allow my anxiety to mobilize me to study more and/or differently to prepare to increase my chances of passing.”
Unhelpful anxiety is rumination (repetitive worry) paired with inaction. We often feel frozen or helpless with unhelpful anxiety, and sometimes life stress really is out of our control. For example, “What if I don’t pass? I’ll have to redo the course. All of this studying will have been for nothing! What if I have to do summer school!”
How can I use this in my life?
Here is a process I like to use when anxiety starts to feel unhelpful.
Notice the anxiety and remind myself it’s actually trying to help me out by trying to anticipate what could go wrong. It’s not there to try and hurt me or cause me discomfort.
Is this threat happening to me right now? How likely is it to happen at all?
Is there anything I can do to actually address the threat? An action I can take?
If there is nothing I can do, am willing to do, or it’s out of my control, I practice putting down the worry by trying to be present with what’s happening in the here and now of my life.
The key word here is PRACTICE! Is this foolproof and 100% effective 100% of the time? No! But with practice, it gets easier and easier to notice and pull ourselves out of a loop of unhelpful anxiety so we can get out of our heads and engage with our lives again.
