The Antidote To Worrying
Are you just managing your anxiety or actually overcoming it?
I’ve been trying to figure out how to stop worrying. I don’t need to stop worrying forever, which would perhaps be biologically unrealistic, but I am looking for how to actually stop worrying when it’s happening, without medication or substances. Like everyone—to varying degrees—I worry about things that don’t matter; things I cannot control; scary future events that may never happen. This kind of anxiety is usually pointless, a long and windy track to nowhere productive. So why do we spend so much time dealing with it? How do we stop?
We all experience anxiety because it’s a part of being alive. Its biological function is to protect us, crazily enough. It’s trying to alert us to danger, or to something we might be able to prevent or seek protection from. While some people certainly have pathological levels of anxiety that ought to be treated medically, we all have to deal with that innate propensity toward worrying about the unknown and what we cannot control. In the right doses, and in the right situations, anxiety can be really helpful—until it starts wreaking havoc in our minds.
I wouldn’t call myself a chronic worrier, but I certainly do my fair share. In the past, I’ve taken anxiety medication and filled my plate with self-help practices in order to manage worry and future tripping. You can find dozens—if not hundreds—of remedies for anxiety in bookstores and on the internet. Some of these practices help, some of them don’t, and like everything in the self-help world, what works is different for everyone.
But what if the specifics of what you’re doing to be less anxious isn’t what matters? As I’m discovering, it’s not necessarily about what you do in order to get yourself out of an anxiety pit, but about knowing where you’re trying to go. Are you trying to get rid of the worry, or know how to overcome and be free from it? Sure, you can take a walk or do some yoga, try meds or drink a beer, or whatever other activity takes your mind off of worrying for a time. That can be good. Worrying rarely yields positive results, so getting out of the spiral is the right call. And, if all you’re doing is trying to manage the anxiety without addressing what the anxiety is shielding you from feeling, you’ll find yourself right back in the spiral without have overcome much of anything.
So then, at the risk of sounding like a critic of Big Pharma (who said I wasn’t?!): why aren’t we addressing the root cause of anxiety rather than just the symptoms? The goal can still be to reduce anxiety or stop worrying, but unless we look at the root of what we’re really anxious about…well, it’s like throwing different medication at the same problem and hoping something sticks.
Let me be clear about what I mean by the root cause of worry or anxiety. It is not that you should know precisely why you’re worried about something, or precisely understand where your latent anxiety is coming from. That pursuit often generates even more anxiety, because the truth is, we can’t always know why we’re anxious. Sometimes there isn’t even a reason. What I do mean by “root cause” is this: What is the worry or anxiety shielding you from feeling? What is it really about?
Chances are, there’s something underneath what you’re worried about that cuts closer to the truth. The surface worry is distracting you from the bigger, more feared feeling: that you don’t know what will happen, that you cannot control the future. It might just be the discomfort of the uncertainty, fear, or lack of control that you’re unwilling to feel, rather than the logistics of the surface worry. That makes sense. It’s…uncomfortable to feel discomfort. It’s hard to accept uncertainty.
So here lies the antidote to anxiety: feel the underlying discomfort, and accept uncertainty.
That’s it, that’s the key to solving all your anxious problems. Stop avoiding what your worry is covering up: Face it, feel it, and accept that you don’t really know how things are going to go. Strengthen your ability to sit with the uncomfortable feelings that your anxiety is trying to protect you from. Widen your capacity to be ok with accepting uncertainty.
If the goal is to learn how to truly overcome and be free from worrying, this is how to do it. Feel uncomfortable feelings and accept uncertainty. Yes, of course you can and should also take walks or meditate or turn off the TV; whatever helps you get out of worry/anxiety mode. Take some Zoloft if it has become unmanageable. But at some point, strip away the extraneous details and inquire about what your worry is really about, what you’re really trying to avoid. Look at and feel the feelings your anxiety is trying to protect you from.
As fellow skeptics of Big Pharma know, symptoms come back if you don’t treat the cause. Similarly, if you’re treating anxiety by doing whatever you can to get rid of it, you might miss what the anxiety is actually about. You’ll miss the empowerment and self-growth that comes with learning to overcome it, to get to a place where you are genuinely not bothered by the source of your anxiety. (If you can believe it, it’s possible to actually not be bothered by the things you currently worry about.)
Perhaps this antidote is a most unsatisfying answer to the problem of excess worry and anxiety over things we cannot control. Accept uncertainty. Feel uncomfortable feelings that you’ve been trying to avoid. Repeat.
If it’s unsatisfying in theory, it might not be in practice. In fact, when I can legitimately get to a place of acceptance of uncertainty and of my own lack of control over what I’m worried about, it’s incredibly satisfying. It’s the only way I can honestly overcome my worries without just distracting myself from them.
As the meditation teacher
sagely says:“Paradoxically, transformation emerges from the complete acceptance of what is, and not from willful efforts to change it…In my experience, intelligent action emerges from the acceptance of right here, right now, just as it is. If we start anywhere else, from resisting what is and aiming for what isn’t, what follows tends to go in murky or harmful directions.” [emphasis mine]1
Try applying this to your next worry session. Whatever you’re worried about—what you look like, how others are perceiving you, what might happen next month, who you (don’t) want the president to be—start by accepting that this is how it is, now. See and feel the moment for what it is. Accept that you don’t have all the answers. If you do need to do something about whatever you’re anxious over, trust that you’ll be able to do it when the time is right.
Quitting worrying can only happen if you’re willing to feel what’s uncomfortable beneath your worries, and accept the uncertainty that accompanies the future.
This moment, as it is now, is where you can start practicing this.
Maggie
From Joan Tollifson’s Substack, Right Now, Just As It Is