#37: You should spend more time thinking about your anxiety
Do you tell yourself that, in order to be a strong, successful, productive human, you need to have zero tolerance for anxiety? I thought so. You think that if you ignore it, it will go away. The problem is, that doesn't work. Ignoring it makes it worse. To stop anxiety holding you back, you need to hit the pause button - yes, including on that thing that you really should have finished last week - and take a long, hard look at your anxiety. Here's your guide on how to do that.
Here's some useful info and resources at cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).
Episode transcript:
Are you trying to pretend that anxiety isn't there? It's not going to work.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello, imperfectionists! It’s half term here in England, or at least in my part of England. The kids are off school for the week and I’m bringing you an episode that’s been prepared across several very early mornings and little snippets of time while the kids are occupied with wholesome, enriching, educational activities - or, more likely, I’m afraid, ipads and games consoles.
In this episode, I want to zoom in on something that came up in the previous episode. I mentioned there the idea of taking your anxiety seriously - listening carefully to your anxious thoughts, giving your full attention to whatever it is that you’re worrying about, instead of brushing your anxiety aside, where it gets to sit threateningly in the shadows without ever being held up to the light and examined properly to see whether it even makes sense. Some of our anxious thoughts, I said in the last episode, centre around concerns that we can actually do something about: they point us towards areas of life where we can be doing a better job at meeting our own needs or increasing the chances that things will work out for us, and so on. So, an anxious thought like, ‘I don’t have time to get everything done’ can, if we take it seriously by giving it our full attention and reflecting on what lies behind it, push us to review our priorities, look at whether we’ve taken on too much, find ways to make the burden easier to bear, and so on. And there are other anxious thoughts that are just going to be there whatever we do, and which we probably just need to accept and learn to live with, without allowing them to influence our choices or hold us back. Those are thoughts like, ‘What if I fail?’ and ‘Maybe I’m not good enough’. Those thoughts often continue regardless of how successful we are - they’re just part of our mental environment, like having noisy plumbing in your house. Those are the thoughts that, to repeat the expression I used in the previous episode, you need to strap into the passenger seat and carry on driving. I’m simplifying here, of course - there’s not just two types of anxious thoughts, and it’s not as if there are only two ways of responding to anxiety. The point is that not all anxious thoughts are the same, and some of them are more tractable than others. The problem is, though, that unless you look quite closely at your anxious thoughts, it’s going to be difficult to tell what they’re saying to you and what, if anything, you might be able to do to turn down the volume on them. Without a close look at your anxious thoughts, it’s often even impossible to identify them as thoughts at all. Sometimes anxiety is a feeling - a lurch of the stomach when you think about a particular person or project or area of your life, or a tightness in the chest, or a quickening of the heartbeat, or just a tendency to procrastinate. It sometimes doesn’t occur to us that, at the root of these feelings, there might be a thought that it’s possible to articulate, and that once articulated we might be able to do something about it and make life easier for ourselves. And if we do decide to try to articulate the thought that’s at the heart of our anxiety, that’s not always easy. We can procrastinate without knowing why we’re doing it or what exactly we’re trying to avoid. We can feel bad when we’re in the company of a particular person without knowing exactly why. And so on. And it’s hard to do anything to appease our anxiety unless we first engage with it, look directly at it, take time to articulate and understand it.
Often, though - and here’s the heart of the problem - we don’t try to understand our anxiety. We go straight from noticing that there’s a problem - that we’re procrastinating, or that we feel bad in a particular situation - to beating ourselves up. We go straight from ‘I’m not doing the thing I need to do’ to ‘I’m lazy’ or ‘I’m undisciplined’. Sometimes we don’t even pause to notice that we feel bad. Anxiety doesn’t always feel the way we expect it to feel. It can involve a churning stomach and racing heart, but it doesn’t have to. Sometimes it’s more like a motivation problem - a just-not-getting-round-to-it problem. A time-wasting problem. And when that happens, helpful as it might be to stop and try to lift the lid on the issue, we’re often reluctant to do that. We get frustrated with ourselves. We tell ourselves that we’ve wasted too much time already, we need to stop messing around and get on with doing what we should have done yesterday. How do I know all this? I’ve seen it in other people in coaching sessions, and I’ve experienced it myself. Honestly, it took me literally years to realise that the reason I was taking so long to finish writing my book was anxiety-related. It just didn’t feel anxiety-related. It felt like I was just bad at organising my time, so that days would pass without me actually sitting down to work on the book, and that when I did, I was liable to be distracted. And I’ve had coaching clients who just don’t hear their anxiety above their own self-criticism. They’re so busy telling themselves how they’re awful people for making such slow progress that it doesn’t occur to them to reflect on why they’re making such slow progress, or whether they could do something to make things easier instead of criticising themselves.
Here are two claims that I’d like you to try on. The first is this: especially if you have trouble getting things done, and if it’s a familiar experience to end the day feeling frustrated with yourself because you’ve wasted time and not got enough done, then you have anxiety even if you don’t feel like you do. Remember: anxiety doesn’t always feel the way we expect it to feel, and it’s not always obvious what thoughts are at the root of our anxiety. Feeling our way into our anxiety, and articulating and understanding the thoughts that lie behind it, are things that can come later. First, accept that it’s there. And here’s the second claim: all feelings are acceptable. Including, of course, anxiety. Sometimes, especially when we’re frustrated with ourselves and just wish we could get the bloody thing done, it’s tempting to tell ourselves that we shouldn’t feel anxious. We say to ourselves things like, ‘It’s stupid to feel anxious about having to attend this meeting, it’s not as if anything bad is going to happen, there’s nothing to be afraid of’. Just accept the anxiety, without criticism. Let it take up the space it needs to take up in your life, just as your other feelings do. They’re all welcome - all the feelings. That means that not only is your anxiety acceptable, but so is the frustration you feel at yourself . That’s where you are. To do something about any of that, you need first to accept it. It’s hard to give mental energy to dealing with feelings that you don’t recognise or that you’re telling yourself shouldn’t be there. If you’re listening to me talk about this and feeling sceptical about it - that’s fine too. Feel anything you like. It’s all fine. What I’m trying to get you to do is to try on a frame of mind in which anything you feel is acceptable, and entitled to take up space in your awareness. Often, we don’t do this - we’re there with a rubber stamp, marking feelings as they arrive with ‘accept’ or ‘reject’, like an emotional passport control officer. We don’t even realise we’re doing it, and that’s not how you deal with feelings. You don’t just get to decide whether you feel something or not. Imagine what life would be like if that were true. You’d be smarting from a job application rejection or from just being dumped, and you’d be able to just switch those unpleasant feelings off. Wow. How convenient, but also - how distant from the way things actually are.
This ‘notice and accept’ attitude to anxiety, and to feelings in general, is familiar from mindfulness. It’s not always easy to do, as you’ll have discovered if you’ve ever been trying to meditate and listening to the soothing voice telling you to accept your thoughts as they come up and then just let them float away - and even while you’re trying to do that you’re getting annoyed with yourself, thinking, why the hell am I thinking about what sort of pizza I want to order tonight, I’m supposed to be focusing on my bloody breath and I can’t even get that right. But noticing and accepting feelings - imperfectly, of course - is important if we want to deal constructively with them. I’m reminded here of a brilliant observation about mindfulness that I saw on Reddit: someone called rookieMale posted, ‘Just realised that meditation is like looking at the task manager of your windows system. You get to see all the processes that maybe running in the background that you are not even consciously aware of. And then you can decide which ones you want to switch off. It might be stubborn and take time to kill the process but at least now you are aware of it. The ones that are hogging the memory and space of your life.’ The first comment in response to this post reads, ‘This is an AWESOME way to look at it. Be all like aah, I see imposterSyndrome.exe is using up 23% of my CPU and generalizedAnxiety.exe is increasing in its memory usage’. Now, sticking with this analogy, there’s no point sitting there yelling at the task manager that certain processes have no business being there (although I think that’s probably something we’ve all done). If you want to stop those processes, you need to accept that they’re there, and then decide what to do about them. When it comes to anxiety, that means you need to stop pushing your anxious thoughts and feelings into the shadows, stop telling yourself just to get on with whatever it is that you can’t get on with because you’re too anxious about it, and give the problem your full attention. Stop the ‘should’ thoughts - the ‘I shouldn’t be doing or feeling this’ and ‘I should be getting on with that’. Accept that there’s a problem, and be prepared to invest some time and energy in working out what to do about it.
What does that mean? It means that you don’t get to decide what feelings you have, but you do have some say in how you go about understanding them and respond to them. To understand them, you can start simply by noticing when you feel bad and when you have trouble motivating yourself to do the things you need to do. Don’t criticise, just notice that this is how it is. Journaling can help, if you’re open to that. Just write down what it’s like when you’re in a place where you really don’t want to be, or with a person you don’t want to be with, or having to do something you are reluctant to do. This noticing, whether you write it down or not, involves focusing directly on the problem, which you might not have done before. Be curious about why it’s there - again, without judgment. What triggers it? What does it make you want to do - run away, scroll through nonsense on your phone, take a nap, eat something comforting? These are self-soothing activities. What happens if you hold out for a few seconds or minutes before you engage in those activities - how does it feel then? These are all ways of exploring the anxiety that you’re feeling.
Then there’s the question of how you respond to anxiety. The first thing to say here is that noticing that it exists, and accepting it and holding off judging yourself for it, is already a positive response. I’ve seen, so many times, the way people send themselves into a vicious circle when it comes to anxiety. They feel anxious about something - writing, for example - so they avoid doing it, and then they beat themselves up for not doing it, which makes them feel even more anxious, and so on. Not only does that sort of thought process make the problem worse, it also involves zero self-compassion. When you’re feeling bad, what you need is nurturing, not abuse. So, noticing that you’re anxious and taking an accepting attitude, rather than a self-critical one, is already a step in the right direction. How else can you respond to your anxiety?
One idea - and this is going to sound strange - is to revisit those self-critical thoughts that you might have had in the past. Those thoughts that take the form, ‘It’s stupid of me to feel anxious about doing this, because nothing bad is going to follow from doing it’. When we stop using thoughts like this as weapons against ourselves, it can turn out that they tell us something sensible. It’s great if doing that thing that makes you feel anxious isn’t going to lead to anything bad, right? Stick with that thought, but instead of using it to beat yourself, give yourself a hug and feel your way into it. Be kind and patient with yourself as you put yourself in the situation that makes you anxious. Hold onto that ‘nothing bad is going to follow from doing it’ thought, and turn it into a reassuring reminder. Is there anything else you can do to help yourself feel better about this situation? Would talking it through with a friend help? Or starting off small - perhaps exposing yourself to whatever it is that makes you anxious for a few seconds or minutes at first, instead of plunging in and expecting yourself just to get on with it right away. What good things might follow from doing this thing - have you thought about those? These are all ways of approaching the problem from different directions and accepting that it’s difficult for you. Treat yourself in the same compassionate way that you’d treat a loved one who was worried about something.
Some of what I’m suggesting here is reminiscent of certain techniques in cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT. CBT is a technique that helps people identify and change patterns of thought and behaviour that cause problems for them. I’m going to link in the episode notes to a website that provides information about this, along with some exercises to help.
As I’ve said, though, it’s not always possible to get rid of our anxieties, no matter how constructively we respond to them and how compassionate we are with ourselves. Sometimes anxiety is just the flip side of caring about something, or dealing with uncertainty, or wanting to protect ourselves, or feeling triggered by something. This is where it can help to accept that a certain amount of anxiety is coming along with us for the ride. These are the ones we have to strap into the passenger seat and carry on driving. Perhaps sending a certain sort of email or having a certain type of conversation or doing a certain sort of project makes us anxious no matter what we say to ourselves - but perhaps it doesn’t need to hold us back. Sometimes it’s possible to hold our nose and do the thing, and then it’s over. You’re not faulty because you find it difficult. All feelings are acceptable, remember. Stop attacking yourself, and start focusing on how you can help yourself do what you need to do even with anxiety in the seat beside you.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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