Towards Hope

Anxiety can be absolutely horrific to experience, and is quickly becoming more and more common in the general population and especially so since COVID-19. There are so many reasons this may be the case and just examining that would be a huge post on it’s own, but throughout my own journey in therapy and in working with anxious clients I’ve come to think that for many, becoming friends with our anxiety may be a way we can learn more about ourselves and what our emotions may be wanting to tell us.

It’s important to note that everyone will have a unique experience with anxiety, and that the emotion of anxiety is different to a diagnosis of Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD). Everyone will encounter the emotion of anxiety within their life, and whatever experience you have with it is completely valid – you don’t need a diagnosis to have struggled with anxiety. 

What actually is anxiety?

The emotion of anxiety is usually experienced when we’re anticipating an event that could be perceived as a threat. It’s considered to be different from experiencing fear, which is more in-the-moment and can be used to escape potential danger. Anxiety is longer lasting and usually more future-oriented, still activating that fight-or-flight feeling but usually much slower to dissipate. 

It’s the difference between hearing a noise at night and feeling afraid until you figure out it was the cat attacking the furniture (fear) and lying awake at night because you have an interview in a few days and are terrified it’s all going to go wrong (anxiety).

The idea of connecting with your anxiety may seem like a very weird idea, and I felt the same when my own therapist suggested trying to be understanding towards it. Even if you feel connecting may be too big a step, being more neutral towards it may be a start. Our emotions are a part of us, and that includes anxiety; when we become hostile towards our experiences of anxiety we can often feel frustrated with ourselves, and I feel there’s a lot of potential for healing when we start to be a bit kinder towards our experiences.

What’s behind anxiety?

There are so many approaches to treating anxiety, and for some it may be using approaches to deal with the immediate symptoms like a racing heart, heavy breathing, or shakiness – all of which can be super helpful in-the-moment but may not necessarily address any root cause of anxiety.

Whether you remember being anxious from a young age or you’ve felt this way more recently, it can often be argued that there may be a cause or reason for feeling anxious so often. I’m aware that this is different for everyone so it may be that you feel there isn’t a reason you feel anxious, which is completely valid – usually there isn’t just one set ‘why’ anyway. From my understanding and experience though, feeling anxious so often isn’t typically something that just pops up out of nowhere. We learn to become cautious and afraid because we grew up in an environment that felt unsafe, or we had social experiences that made us feel on-edge, or for any other amount of reasons we somehow got the message that we have to be careful or else.

My Experience

When I was 17 and saw a counsellor for the anxiety I was experiencing at the time, I remember so clearly a comparison she made that I still use it in sessions today. I had explained some of the effects I had felt as a result of my anxiety, and she started to compare my anxiety to a dog. Okay, that felt incredibly weird at first and I was not super keen on the idea, but she went further by explaining that it felt as though my anxiety was a dog trained to guard a house, but had become way too protective and now instead of barking at intruders or genuine threats it now barks at everything that could be negative. A small shadow in the distance gained the same reaction as a dangerous threat.

And that felt incredibly accurate to me!

The message I took from that was essentially that my brain was doing its best, and for whatever reason it was now doing too much to try and protect me. And the very idea that my brain (and by extension my anxiety) was not trying to harm me by making me feel awful, but rather had my best interests in mind but wasn’t quite hitting the mark, was a huge weight off my shoulders.

This idea that anxiety can be the mind’s way of protecting us in an exaggerated way isn’t entirely unfounded. We developed anxiety as a response to our environment, and despite huge changes in our social, cultural, and technological environment, we haven’t been able to quite keep up mentally. Essentially, we’re anticipating that something awful will happen because our brain is shouting “danger!!” at us, but when that danger is the possibility of being rejected for a job or of a stranger disliking you, that response starts to become unfounded. Even if those things suck, they aren’t necessarily a threat to your life or safety, even if your brain is shouting at you that it is.

How we can connect with anxiety

To connect with something that has caused you so much stress is a difficult concept. It may help to start with neutrality; recognising when anxiety is present and that you’re struggling with it is a huge step and can help to build up that relationship. I’ve listed a couple of tips below that may help, but if you have any more suggestions please do feel free to list them in the comments.

Of course, these tips may not even scratch the surface, and for many that’s where counselling comes in. Exploring your anxiety and your feelings around it can help many to come to a better understanding, as well as give you space to process the impact it has on your life.

I’ll be writing more about finding the right counsellor for you in a later post, but I hope that if you’re feeling like you may want to try counselling that you find a therapeutic relationship that feels healing, encouraging, and truly safe.