Just A Thought — Anxiety 01

“Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far.” — Jodi Picoult, “Sing You Home”

Come to a new country, don’t speak the language, do three months of training, get dropped in a random pueblo for two years — ”Ok! Go change the world! You’ll do great! Oh, and here’s seven manuals in case you forget anything!”

Peace Corps has given me the most anxiety-inducing moments of my adult life. And I know I’m not alone in saying that. Between the forced interactions, language struggles, and cultural differences, we all face them. It’s inevitable.

This entry, we’re talking about anxiety. Not anxiety as it relates to stress (don’t worry, we’ll get to that) but more so anxiety in the way of concern, worry. What situations give us that anxiety? Why do we react that way? What could we do differently to help?

Anxiety as Self-Defense

There’s a lot of unknowns in our job. A lot of adjustments. We feel that we don’t know what we’re doing, and we feel guilty. Anxiety is our self-defense mechanism. It’s our attempt at saying “hey, I know I don’t know what I’m doing right now, so before you think me a lazy idiot, I’m going to show you that I want to do a good job by being stressed”. If I’m incompetent, at least you can see I’m trying. In our culture, anxiety is so often correlated with hard-work that the absence of it can make it seem as if one does not care. If you aren’t stressed, if you aren’t anxious, then you aren’t working to your full potential. And if we don’t feel we’re working to our full potential, then anxiety, our self-defense mechanism, kicks in to make up for it.

But what are we defending ourselves from? Let’s stop and think: has anyone told us we’re doing a bad job? Peace Corps, teachers, equipo de gestión, friends, or otherwise? Has anyone looked us in the eyes and told us they wish we would work harder? Or has that come from us?

Ironically, it’s almost a paradox: We’re protecting ourselves from our self-inflicted guilt. We’re defending ourselves from ourselves. What kind of self-care is that? Like an endless hamster wheel, it’s just going to zap all of our energy. And where does all that energy go? Where could it be better spent?

Awareness

In school, we became accustomed to a system that was achievement-based. We could care about a test, study hard and long for the test, WANT to do well on the test…and still fall short of what we wanted.

But service doesn’t work like that. Life doesn’t work like that. There are no grades, there is no pass/fail. You’re here. That’s it. Nobody will be at your COS looking at you with a disappointed face.

So what’s the game then? How do we know whether we’ve done a “good” job (whatever the heck that means)?

Just to sound fancy, I’ll call it the “Theory of Awareness”. The Theory of Awareness states that the more aware you are about an undesirable trait, the less likely you are to manifest it. That is to say, if you’re worried about doing a bad job, you probably aren’t the one doing a bad job. It’s the lazy people in the office that aren’t worried about seeming lazy. It’s the overly talkative people that don’t worry about talking too much. If they were concerned by it, they probably wouldn’t do it. If your brain just has a simple awareness of where it doesn’t want to go, it won’t go there. If you really want to do a “good job,” you will. Your actions will follow through.

Comparison

It hardly needs to be said how much we compare ourselves to each other nowadays; internet, social media, influencers, we get it. But what does this look like in our context?

In the effort of wanting to do a good job (which, again, definition please?), we might find ourselves in an arms race to start whatever club or group in order to show others — or really ourselves — that we’re doing something, that we’re being productive (VRG-itis, perhaps?). In our culture we’re so used to making our time count that if we’ve been at our site for X amount of time and feel we have nothing to show for it, it feels shameful to admit. Who wants to admit they’re doing a bad job? But if I can be blunt, we aren’t special enough to be doing a horrible job — chances are, as with almost everything, we’re just about average, and that’s ok. The mistake is thinking that it is only happening to you.

In my experience, open communication with fellow volunteers (especially the same cohort/sector), have proven the most relieving. To know that you aren’t the only one who’s gone to school and sat in the same place all day, or tried to give a charla to a classroom of screaming kids who never hear a word — it grounds you, and lets you see that false dichotomy you had in your head for what it is.

Comparison only separates and isolates. Putting someone else on a pedestal only puts more distance between you and them. Focusing on the belief that somebody else has something only emphasizes the belief that you don’t. Talking about our worst days with each other has led to the most comforting conversations.

Inputs/Outputs

You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. — Marcus Aurelius

When asked what one wishes to accomplish during service, a lot of volunteers will say “doing a good job”. Which is great, no flack against that — but what does that mean? What has to happen for it to become “good”? What keeps it from being “bad” and, if you wanna shoot for the moon, how do you do a “great” job? How do you “impact” a life, and how many charlas do we have to give before a life is thoroughly “impacted”? These terms are in the right direction, but seem too vague.

So what do we do? Well, we can set goals. Write down tangible steps to get from point A to B to X to Y to Z. Things can be a little more defined, and we can have a tactile list to check off. But it may also be helpful to change the way in which we think of our actions — from outputs, to inputs.

A lot of our thinking is output-based. We start by saying what we want the effect in the world to be, without first considering what the cause is to give that desired effect. When our thinking is output-based, our locus of control is external — we hang up our sense of accomplishment and well-being on external objects and conditional events that we can’t control.

When we internalize our locus of control (input-based), not only do we put our goals in terms of things we can control, but the goals become more defined, too. We change our way of thinking from outputs to inputs. “I want to do a good job” turns into “I want to do a good effort”. “I want to have good relationships” turns into “I want to build good relationships”. Not only does this shift the focus into things in our control, but it makes us focus on the process of what we’re doing rather than the end product. Not doing these tasks to achieve something, but investing in them for the sake of investing in them.

We don’t need to defend ourselves from anything. If we’re worried about performing poorly, we probably won’t. Everyone else is in the same boat, and we can only control what we can control.

When it comes to dealing with these anxieties, perhaps it’s not so much a learning of new strategies or frames of mind — perhaps it’s more of a letting go, a discarding of an unhealthy voice in our head that only appears necessary.

Just a thought.