Anxiety Is Your Friend
Do you think of anxiety as your enemy? I get it. Anxiety isn’t likely to be on your party guest list. But what if it’s actually the friend who MOST has your back? What if it’s you who’s treating anxiety unfairly?
After all, it’s not bad to have anxiety. Anxiety doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with us; it means there’s something wrong with the situation we’re in.
We all experience anxiety at times. That’s because anxiety is our built-in warning light system and every good machine comes with one of those, right?
Except anxiety doesn’t feel great, so it’s gotten a bad rap even though it’s truly just the messenger. I’ve never heard someone refer to their anxiety in any way other than negative- never in glowing, or even neutral, terms. Just once, I’d love to hear, “Thank goodness all that anxiety kicked in because it got me to realize I was in a bad situation when I couldn’t see it on my own!”
“Just tell me how to get rid of it!”
It’s easy to think of anxiety like you think about mosquitoes. This is so annoying and pointless and I can’t stand feeling this way so how do I get rid of this feeling? When the better question -the only question, really- is “How do I listen better to my anxiety?"
Because circumventing the built-in warning system isn’t a real solution. Sure, we can try to numb our perceptiveness to how loudly the alarm rings. We can let it ring and ring and still choose to stay right where we are instead of moving toward safety.
But don’t make the mistake of thinking anxiety is pointless. Our warning system doesn’t actually come with a red blinking light, unfortunately. Knowing the alarm is on takes a little more understanding of the system at play. Anxiety IS the alarm. It’s responding to a problem- but it isn’t THE problem. And solving any problem requires you to step in.
Anxiety doesn’t show up to solve the reason for the alarm bell. It shows up to give you a reason to solve it. It’s like you and Anxiety are teammates running a race (a Hunger Games kind of race, not a fun Saturday morning 5k race) to get you away from something unsafe and Anxiety hands you the baton and even gives you a jolt of adrenaline that can help you run across the finish line faster. But maybe you look at the baton in your hand, feel the adrenaline, and say, “Ummm, no thanks, I’m scared to run so I’ll just stay where I am right now.” That adrenaline will NOT feel good if you choose to stand in your lane, not moving. You’ll feel stressed and shaky and nervous. But is it fair to turn around and tell the runner who handed you the baton that it’s their fault you feel crappy for not running away from the thing you SHOULD be running from?
If you choose to ignore anxiety
it doesn’t mean the reason the anxiety showed up has resolved, right?
Imagine you're at a crowded event and the person you trust most in the world- your best friend ever- rushes up to you in a panicked sort of way, looks you straight in the eye with *the look* and shouts, “Quick! Sh**’s about to go down, we’ve gotta get outta here. GO, GO, GO!!”
You’d start running, right?
If this were a friend you’d built trust with, you’d just know by the way they spoke, by the way it felt while they spoke, that this was valid information that you needed to hear. That trust, and you acting upon their message, just might save your life, right?
The thing is, we lose sight of the fact that anxiety is our FRIEND. Its very existence is to protect us, guide us, prompt us toward safety. Anxiety is there to stimulate our neurochemistry to get us to run out of the burning building. Anxiety knows something we don’t. It knows we’re in the burning building, while we’re grazing the buffet table, denying there's smoke in the air.
Anxiety is an emotion.
Literally, it’s energy in motion. When your energy has received energetic communication from your surroundings that something is unsafe, it’s received and transmuted in your physical, mental, and emotional bodies as anxiety. Or, more accurately: fear.
This energy in motion builds in your body because it’s trying to get you to MOVE. Possibly for a reason that you might be denying or be truly oblivious to, but that doesn’t make it any less valid. Anxiety gets uncomfortable when it builds in the body, because that’s not what it’s supposed to do- you’re supposed to respond to it so it can dissipate and literally move through you. The warning system is supposed to sound, you’re supposed to respond and get to safety, and then the warning system can turn off and be re-set for the next time it might be needed.
The answer really isn’t to hush your anxiety up. It’s to listen to it. It’s got a message for you. But that’s not what we always want to do. Because that means we’d have to see the truth of our lives and that’s not always our preference. It’s uncomfortable to make tough decisions and do hard things, like quit the job or stand up for ourselves with our parents or draw a difficult boundary. So we decide it’s better to pretend we don’t hear our friend Anxiety pounding on the door. We tell it to go away and stop bringing all this annoying Truth to us. We override the system and choose to stay in unsafe situations because we’re even more afraid of what it might mean to leave them.
So the problem is you overriding the warning system- not the system itself. For anxiety to be useful as it’s meant to be, our willingness to hear it and trust it is required.
the way out of all that anxiety
you’re experiencing isn’t to get the alarm system to be quiet. It’s to pay attention to what anxiety has to say. To work with it and rebuild a trusting relationship with it. To value what it brings to you and act upon it. Because as soon as you do that, the alarm has done its job and anxiety can chill out and go on break.
Anxiety is FOR you.
If you feel like Anxiety is always around or is just way too high, the system isn’t necessarily broken. The trust is. And when Anxiety feels like you aren’t listening, it gets louder. Because that’s what a good friend does, right? It doesn’t just give up. It sticks around and finds a way to get through to you.
I hope you’ll let it.
