How to Overcome Anxiety
Stop Letting Anxiety Control Your Life
Understanding Anxiety
In order to overcome anxiety, it’s important to understand it first. Anxiety is not a personality trait and it’s not a permanent part of you. In fact, anxiety isn’t even a bad thing. It’s a useful emotion that helps us detect danger.
Unfortunately, society has taught us that anxiety is unnatural, so we resist and avoid it, which reduces our tolerance to being anxious. Don’t view anxiety as a bad thing. You don’t have an anxiety disorder, you have an issue with how you respond to anxiety. You fear anxiety, and that is the problem. Your negative response to anxiety is what is harming you. Once you change your relationship with anxiety, your anxiety problem will start to diminish and ultimately lose its power over you.
When you feel anxiety, that’s your brain and body asking for help or attention. By avoiding or resisting your anxiety, you’re basically giving your body the middle finger. Instead, treat your body with compassion. Let it be heard.
There’s an excellent Ted Talk by Tim Box called “How to stop feeling anxious about anxiety” that illustrates this beautifully. In his talk, he asks you to think of your body as the crew of your ship that’s warning you of potential dangers. You are their captain and the more you ignore them, the louder they get. Once you start listening to them, you’ll be surprised how quickly they calm down.
Often times, anxiety starts with a specific fear such as public speaking. After having a bad experience with that fear, your nervous system becomes sensitized because it’s looking out for danger to make sure that the bad experience doesn’t happen again.
The problem is that this not only makes you more likely to be nervous the next time, but it also makes you susceptible to becoming sensitized to other fears because you are already on-edge. This eventually can spiral into a situation where you have many fears and can result in general anxiety.
The Anxiety Cycle
Every time you resist anxiety or distract yourself from it, you’re engaging in a fight-or-flight response where resistance = fight and distraction = flight. The fight-or-flight response is a fear response, so whenever you do that, your nervous system learns that the current situation is something to fear.
Because you resist or distract yourself from anxiety, your body has learned that anxiety is something to fear, so when you feel anxiety it triggers the fear response to try to protect you from the anxiety. This turns into a cycle where your body becomes more and more sensitized as you resist anxiety, which makes the anxiety more extreme and causes you to resist even more.
The below image from the Therapy in a Nutshell YouTube channel illustrates this cycle very well. You can see how when you interpret a stimulus as a threat and feel your fight-flight-freeze (FFF) response, you have two options: either avoid it or face it. Avoiding it gives you temporary relief, but also reinforces your anxiety in your brain (in other words, sensitizes your nervous system). Now that you are more sensitized, your nervous system is more alert and is more likely to enter the FFF response the next time you encounter a potentially dangerous stimulus.
The only way to break the cycle is through facing your anxiety with acceptance. Facing your anxiety can seem very scary at first, but after you do it a few times, you soon realize that facing and accepting it is not nearly as bad as you think it is. And accepting it often actually reduces your anxiety. So acceptance has benefits both in the short-term and long-term. It benefits you in the short-term by alleviating your anxiety now AND it benefits you in the long-term by reducing the overall sensitivity of your nervous system.
However, your symptoms will not always go away right away, and if they don’t go away and you find yourself asking why they’re still there, then you haven’t truly accepted them. True acceptance means you are ok with the anxiety being there or not. If you keep at it, the anxiety will eventually dissipate. Each time you accept your anxiety, your nervous system desensitizes a little bit because you start to prove to it that the anxiety is not a threat. The more you do it, the more you desensitize your nervous system until you eventually overcome your fear of anxiety.
So the next time you’re feeling anxious, give acceptance a try! You may find that it’s easier said than done, but it’s worth it.
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