A lot of advice on dealing with anxiety involves ignoring it. “If you’re not actually in danger, then dismiss your fears”. This never really helped me, but I’ve been doing some reading and realized that this advice is missing a step or two. The more useful form of this advice is something like this:
- Notice that you feel anxious, afraid, or unsettled. Apprehension, hesitation, unease, nagging thoughts, and other signals are your brain’s small alarms. They’re still based around something real. Trust them so your brain doesn’t have to go straight to terror to get your attention.
- Believe that you are picking up on something real; don’t dismiss these feelings or push them away. Tune in and pay attention. Your brain is wired to be really good at noticing threats, and its survival system picks up on things before the thinking part of your brain has put the pieces together.
- Figure out what in your environment is being perceived as threatening. It might be an immediate threat, but it might also be something associated with past fear; either way, take it seriously and be open to its presence. Your job is to work out what your survival system noticed and/or act on those observations.
- Now you can evaluate if those threats need any actions to be taken. Act if you need to. Otherwise, acknowledge the message your brain gave you and trust that if there is a serious threat, you’ll know about it.
- Afterwards, notice how it worked out. If you responded too much or too little, take note of that. This lets you train your survival system on what threats actually hurt you.
Worrying is a different beast. It can be hard to stop worrying when it feels like everything will go wrong if you haven’t thought about it, but it helps to know that worrying both prevents your brain from getting your attention for real threats and proves that you’re not in active danger from whatever you’re worried about.
If you’re worried about something, then it isn’t actively happening to you. It’s also not very likely to happen. If it were very likely, then you wouldn’t worry; you’d do something about it. Worry is the single best sign that you’re not in active danger of whatever you’re thinking about! That doesn’t mean that worry isn’t important. There’s usually some other fear or need behind it, and it’s worth exploring what that might be.
Some examples, borrowed from The Gift of Fear by Gavin DeBecker:
- Worry is a way to avoid change; when we worry, we don’t do anything about the matter.
- Worry is a way to avoid admitting powerlessness over something, since worry feels like we’re doing something.
- Worry is a cloying way to have connection with others. […] As many worried-about people will tell you, worry is a poor substitute for love or for taking loving action.
- Worry is a protection against future disappointment.
Worry also gets in the way of hearing your brain alarms in a real crisis. You have a survival system that’s wired to handle animal attacks, starvation, abandonment, and other serious threats. These systems can spot a cheetah in the grass by a tiny moving spot in the corner of your eye, and they’ll set off the alarm to get you moving. If your survival system can spot something that subtle without your being aware that there are cheetahs nearby, then they can spot threats in the present without your doing anything.
If you’re busy worrying, then you’re not processing all the inputs that your survival system needs to help you. Instead, you’re inside your head with inputs that don’t exist yet. There’s something real behind the worry, but it’s not a current threat. Refocus on your inputs instead. Pay attention to your senses.
See Also: Fear