Anxiety Happens, page 3
Energy costs. How has the effort to manage your anxiety affected your energy levels? Do you pour mental energy into worry, stress, fretting over distractions, checking, and negative thinking? Does the struggle leave you feeling drained, discouraged, fatigued, frustrated, or worn out?
Emotional costs. Has trying to get a handle on anxiety cost you emotionally? Do you carry regrets and guilt because of what you have done or failed to do as a result of your anxiety struggles? What about shame, feeling as though you are broken? Do you feel down, depressed, prone to anger and irritability?
Financial costs. How much money have you spent on managing your anxieties and fears? Consider money you’ve spent on psychotherapy, medications, doctor’s visits, self-help books, audio or video recordings, or seminars. What have been your costs in terms of lost wages or expenses related to missing important and enjoyable events (such as tickets that you ended up not using)?
Costs to freedom. How have your efforts to control worry, anxiety, and fears limited your ability to do what you enjoy and want to do? Can you shop, drive near and far, take a train or plane, or go for a walk in your neighborhood, the park, a mall, or a forest? Is your day arranged around avoiding feeling anxious, panicky, or afraid?
Answering these questions with honesty is a crucial first step in a new direction. It’s important that you know, and allow yourself to feel, the real impact of your struggles despite all your efforts to change. It takes courage to face the costs squarely.
When people do this exercise, they often end up with a deeper awareness. They see, perhaps for the first time, how all the effort they’ve poured into managing and controlling anxiety hasn’t really worked. More deeply, they become fully conscious of how the struggle itself has damaged their lives and continues to do so.
If you find yourself in a similar spot right now, don’t despair. This is exactly how it should be. The point is not to feel bad or beat yourself up, but to empower you to take steps in a new direction from this point forward. You cannot change the past. But the future is yours to create.
7
The Struggle Trap
You likely opened this book with the hope of finding a better way to manage and control your anxiety so that you can get on with living your life the way you wish. This makes sense so long as you, just like so many people, continue to see your anxiety itself as the problem. But what if the very act of seeing anxiety as the problem is the problem? Our intention in this book is to help you connect with this possibility, however backward that may sound.
You don’t have to trust us here, either. Go back to all the costs of anxiety management and control you explored in the previous chapter. Ask yourself which has cost you more—the presence of anxiety and fear, or the desperate effort to make it stop and avoid it altogether?
Research and years of wisdom teach us that the struggle itself is a trap, one that will ensnare you when you actively resist and avoid your own experience. This isn’t the time to blame yourself for struggling. It’s a very natural response to pain and difficulty. But the key question you must ask yourself is “Has it worked?” Or, more boldly, “Has the struggle itself created more problems than it has solved?”
The next exercise will help you discover for yourself if this is so.
Is the Struggle Working?
Think about every approach you’ve tried to manage and control your anxiety—each coping strategy, each method you use to avoid or reduce your anxiety and fear. If you like, you can write them down on a piece of paper or in your journal. Then reflect on the following three questions and answer each with a yes or no. Do so as openly and as honestly as you know how. Listen to your gut—it knows the truth of your experience.
Are my anxiety-management strategies working—meaning that I am less anxious and happier with my life? Think long-term.
Has being an anxiety manager moved me in directions I want my life to take?
Have my anxiety-management and anxiety-coping strategies cost me in the sense of time, missed opportunities, regrets? In short, have they gotten in the way of things I want to do, what I care about? If you need help in finding the answer, revisit the costs you identified in Chapter 6.
Many people answer the first two questions with a No, and the third one with a big YES. But that’s exactly what we would expect. We know of no healthy way to eliminate anxiety and fear without significant costs. Your gut probably tells you as much. Your gut is right on!
The secret to your freedom is to let go of trying to manage anxiety, because the effort eats up your time, energy, and resources and gets in the way of what you want to do. You’re already on this path now. But only you can decide to stop trying to fight against anxiety and fear. We hope that you will make this choice right now, if you haven’t done so already.
8
Letting Go
When you look at anxiety as a problem, it will naturally require a solution. But what if the solutions you’ve tried are actually making things worse? Let that possibility sink in for a moment.
You’ve learned from previous chapters that all your attempts to fix your anxieties haven’t solved anything. Each so-called solution––each attempt to stop or at least stem the tide of your anxieties—has left a deep mark on you.
The following metaphor will help you connect with the costs and tremendous strain involved in struggling with your anxieties. It also teaches a surprising way out of the struggle so that you can get on with living your life.
It’s Time to Drop the Rope
It may seem like you’ve been fighting a tug-of-war, with a team of anxiety monsters pulling at the other end of the rope. You’ve got both hands firmly clenching the rope, and your feet are dug in, stuck in the same position. Back and forth it goes. Yet no matter how hard you’ve pulled to defeat them, they’ve always come back stronger, pulling harder.
And as this battle plays out, you’re getting more and more worked up—your chest tightens, your breathing becomes shallow, your teeth are clenched, your face is red, with pearls of sweat welling up on your forehead, and you’re gripping so hard your knuckles turn white. You’re stuck in an endless and exhausting fight for your life, or so it seems.
Your options appear limited. Your mind may tell you to pull harder, try harder, or dig in more. Maybe your mind suggests that there’s a better medication or a new coping strategy that’ll give you the strength to win. Yet isn’t all of this more of the same—old wine, new label?
Here’s another possibility: you don’t need to win this fight. Suppose you just decided to give up fighting and drop the rope. Think about that.
Notice what happens to your hands and feet. They’re free, right? And you’ve regained some mental space and options that were impossible to even consider while you were in the middle of the battle. You’re now able to use your mind, hands, and feet for something other than fighting anxiety.
To help you see how this might play out in your life, imagine that something or someone you care deeply about is on the sidelines next to the tug-of-war, watching and waiting for you to finish and the fight to end. Suppose it’s your child waiting for a hug, or a friend wanting to spend time with you. Or perhaps it’s a project, a vacation, or something spiritually uplifting. See if you can visualize that important thing in your life on the sidelines, just waiting…waiting for you to finish fighting. Would you just keep at it? Or would you drop the rope and give your time and energy to whatever or whomever was waiting for you?
Now, consider what happens when you drop the rope. The anxiety monsters haven’t gone away just because you’ve stopped fighting. They’re still there, taunting you with the rope, hoping that you take the bait and grab hold for another round. And you could certainly do that. Sometimes you will, mostly out of habit.
But the important thing is to notice when you’ve grabbed the rope, and make a choice to let go. Making this choice will give you the space and energy to attend to something you care about—important things in your life waiting on the sidelines.
Dropping the rope and ending the struggle creates an opening and room to do something else in your life. If you aren’t consumed with reducing and controlling anxiety, avoiding the next panic attack, stemming the tide of another painful memory, or pushing away disturbing thoughts or “what-iffing” worries, then you create a window of opportunity. You create space to move toward the life you’ve put on hold. One of our clients captured this moment very well when he told us, “When I drop the rope, I’m free.”
9
Flip the Switch
Why are so many people reluctant to drop the rope? Why do we keep struggling with anxiety and fear when it hasn’t really worked well and has cost us so much? The answer has to do with what we’ve learned about control.
From a very young age, you’ve learned that control—doing something—works in the world around you. It’s what helps you get your laundry done. It’s what you do when taking out the garbage, driving your car, texting a friend. It’s also helped keep you safe and alive, and it certainly helped keep our ancestors from being eaten by lions and tigers and bears. If something outside of you threatens your health and welfare, it makes sense to take action.
Because control works so well in the world around us, we naturally try to control—do something—to change what’s going on inside us. The rub, though, is that control doesn’t work as well when you apply it to the products of your mind and emotional life.
Why might this be? The next exercise will help you experience part of the answer.
The Trouble with Control
Start by getting into a comfortable position. When you’re ready, do the following: make yourself as happy as you know how to be. Go ahead and try it now. Really work at it. But don’t cheat by bringing to mind something that makes you happy. This isn’t what we’re asking of you. We want you to just flip the happiness switch and be super happy for the sake of it. Can you do it?
Now, try to make yourself feel really anxious or afraid. Do it without thinking of something really scary or painful. Try really hard. Just flip the anxiety switch. Can you do it?
If you’re still not convinced about how impossible this really is, then you can go on to try one of the following:
Make yourself fall madly in love—meaning genuine, deeply felt love—with the first new person you see.
Using your willpower, go ahead and make your left leg numb, so numb in fact that if it were pricked with a sharp needle you wouldn’t feel a thing.
Pick a memory of something that happened to you last week, and then just delete it so that you’re 100 percent sure that it’s gone for good.
Without covering your eyes, ears, or nose, stop seeing, hearing, and smelling.
We hope this brief exercise helps you discover that emotions, and many of our mental and bodily functions, have no on-off switch. Nobody has that switch. It’s next to impossible for anyone to feel one way or another just because they want to.
Emotions just happen—they are part of your history that gets conjured up as you interact with your world. When you try to flip the “no more anxiety” switch, you’ll activate every aspect of your nervous system that keeps you feeling anxious and afraid. And you’ll do things that end up keeping you stuck and miserable. You’ll get more of the very thing you don’t want to feel and think.
10
Do the Opposite
Thoughts and feelings of anxiety and panic are unpleasant, intense, overwhelming at times, and even terrifying. But they’re not the real enemy. The real enemy is rigid avoidance.
Avoidance of experiencing fear and anxiety feeds fear and anxiety, and it shrinks lives. Avoidance is toxic. It is the poison that turns normal anxiety and fear into a life-shattering problem. In fact, the weight of research clearly teaches us that avoidance of your emotional pain—although understandable—is simply bad for you and your life.
Toxic avoidance can take many forms, such as avoiding people, places, activities, and situations that might lead to anxious and fearful thoughts and feelings. Some people turn away by using and abusing alcohol and other drugs to numb out, forget, or dampen the impact of unpleasant and unwanted thoughts and feelings and situations that may trigger them. Others simply cut and run when they find themselves feeling anxiety, fear, and other forms of emotional pain.
Devoting yourself to not having anxiety and fear is quite limiting; it may come to define how you live your entire life. Avoidance gets in the way of the things you want to do and the directions you want to go. There’s no way to approach a vital life while avoiding emotional and psychological pain. Nobody can move toward a full life while also moving away from the inevitable possibility of experiencing pain and difficulty along the way. So what can you do?
You do the opposite! Instead of running, struggling, and avoiding, you decide to stay with whatever is going on inside you. When old habits compel you to pull away, you learn to lean in. When you feel pulled to shut down and withdraw, you open up. You can think of this practice as a way of learning to stay with yourself.
This suggestion to do the opposite may surprise you. So it’s important to be clear about why you’re doing this. You do this not to wallow in the pain of anxiety and just stay there. You do this because staying with yourself and your anxiety is what allows you to move toward what you want to do in your life. So long as you turn away from the difficulty, the upset, the fear, you won’t get to live your life. That’s why you need to confront the avoidance—and change it. The next exercise will help you get started.
Making Life-Affirming Choices
In this exercise, we’d like to help you identify more life-affirming alternatives to toxic acts of avoidance. On a piece of paper, mark two columns. Label the left one “toxic avoidance” and the right one “doing the opposite.”
In the “toxic avoidance” column, list everything you do to avoid feeling anxious or afraid—every action, form of distraction, and coping strategy. Be specific; for example, “I stay in my cubicle to avoid seeing my boss because I’m afraid he will criticize my work.”
Now move to the right column and for each avoidance strategy, write down what would be the opposite; for example, “I won’t go out of my way to avoid my boss; if I happen to see him in the hallway, I can simply say hello and keep walking.”
The next time the toxic voice of avoidance speaks up, think do the opposite. When avoidance demands that you get smaller, think expansion, and then do something, even a baby step, that might be potentially life affirming. You’ll notice that life-affirming alternatives to avoidance are often the exact opposite of what your mind was suggesting at first.
11
Taking a Leap
All choices and actions involve some risk. You simply don’t know what the future holds and what you may find in life. Many people remain stuck because they’re unwilling to risk taking a step, preferring the old and familiar, even if it’s deadening. To get us out of this rut, life is asking each of us to choose to be willing—to risk stepping into the unknown—because that’s how we grow.
In this sense, willingness is a leap of faith. It’s like jumping off a diving board into a pool, not knowing exactly what the water temperature will be or what the experience will be like. This is quite different than wading into the pool, testing the waters, seeing if it is too hot, too cold, too dirty, and so on. Wading isn’t willingness. It’s gradual and conditional, and so you’re left making choices based on how you feel or what you might think or feel.
Willingness as a leap means to show up and be open to experiencing everything that your mind and body may offer, not knowing exactly what you may find from one moment to the next. This stance is arms open wide; it’s the opposite of fighting anxiety with all you’ve got. In fact, if you’re willing, you can actually do it right now.
Arms Wide Open
Stand up for a moment (if you’re sitting, that works too), open your arms as wide as you can, and keep them like that for a while. And while you’re spreading your arms like this, allow all your experiences to come and be just what they are—make no attempt to change them. Open up to them all; really feel them and let them be.
Assuming this posture is great practice and can actually be fun. This willingness posture captures the essence of the LIVE approach you’re practicing in this book. With arms open, you’re receptive. Unrestricted, now you’re allowing what’s there anyway. This stance is needed to LIVE more fully, and without all the limitations imposed by the mind and feelings.
Here’s why we think willingness is so powerful. Many people treat anxiety as their worst enemy. But what if anxiety isn’t the enemy? What if you could learn to develop some kindness and compassion for all your experience—including anxiety—and for yourself? Struggling would no longer be necessary. You’d cut the fuel line to your anxieties, and new options would become available to you.
So when we encourage you to be willing, we’re not asking you to like everything that life offers. As you step forward, willingness is asking you to open up to every aspect of your experience, fully, and without defense, because in opening you gain freedom to do what matters to you. You’re practicing living fearlessly!
12
Voices of Anxiety
The human mind is a thought-generating machine. It’s that voice inside your head, broadcasting twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. That’s what minds do. But not everything you think is helpful. You don’t need to listen to each thought and do what it commands.
