Anxiety has a particularly convincing characteristic: when it appears, it manages to make what we fear feel much more probable than it perhaps is. The heart speeds up, we start anticipating scenarios, we pay attention to any sign that confirms our suspicions and, in a matter of minutes, a possibility can feel almost like a certainty. The problem is that our body can react to a threat before we have determined whether that threat really exists, so feeling fear and having reasons to feel it are two related things, but not equivalent ones.
A couple of years ago I did not make that distinction. For me anxiety was one of the worst things that had happened to me, a kind of error in my brain that appeared to ruin my day, make me doubt myself, and convince me that something terrible was about to happen or, when there was no concrete catastrophe available, simply keep me on alert just in case.
My response was fairly predictable: I wanted to make it disappear. The more I tried to control every sensation and make sure nothing bad was going to happen, the more space that bitch ended up occupying, because seeking absolute certainty in the face of an uncertain possibility is a task that can hardly end. There is always another check to make, another scenario to consider, and another "but what if...?" waiting after the previous one, so what I initially did to calm myself could end up feeding exactly the process I was trying to escape.
Over time I started to understand anxiety in a less hostile way, though also a less romantic one. I no longer consider it simply an enemy, but I also do not consider it a kind of deep intuition that always tries to reveal something important to me. I see it more as an alarm system: it can detect a real problem, it can react disproportionately to a small one, and it can also go off when the danger it announces practically does not exist. That it sounds deserves attention, but it does not automatically mean there is a fire.
Not everything is solved with willpower
There is an important difference between experiencing anxiety (something that is part of human life) and living with an anxiety disorder that produces significant suffering or interferes with everyday life. In those cases, turning the whole problem into a matter of attitude can be particularly unfair and insufficient, because there are psychological and pharmacological treatments that may be necessary depending on each person and on a professional evaluation. Will matters in many parts of our life, but it does not replace treatment when there is a clinical condition that requires it.
This also changes the question I try to ask myself when it appears. I used to think almost exclusively "how do I stop feeling this?", while now I try to add another question: "What is happening that I feel this way?" The difference seems small, but the first immediately turns anxiety into something I have to eliminate, while the second forces me to investigate before deciding what it means.
Sometimes the answer is fairly obvious. I have an important exam and I have not studied enough, I have been sleeping badly for days, I am avoiding an uncomfortable conversation, or I am trying to control a situation that objectively does not depend on me. Other times the explanation is less clear and I can spend half an hour looking for a sophisticated cause when my brain is probably tired, overstimulated, or simply being an asshole. Not all anxiety contains a hidden message waiting to be deciphered.
A signal is not an instruction
This distinction has been particularly useful to me before exams, important projects, decisions that could change my life and, why lie, some fairly chaotic relationships. For a while I interpreted feeling anxiety as evidence that I should stop: if something produced so much fear, it was probably because something was wrong. Then I made almost the opposite mistake and started thinking that anxiety meant I was leaving my comfort zone and, therefore, growing.
Neither of the two interpretations always works. Sometimes we feel anxiety because we are doing something important and difficult that is worth continuing; other times we feel it because we are entering again a situation we already know hurts us. The sensation can feel similar while the reasonable decisions are completely different, which is why I try to treat anxiety as information and not as an order.
A while ago I started doing a fairly simple exercise when I notice I am entering that state. I try to separate three things that normally appear mixed: what I am feeling, what I think is going to happen, and what evidence I have that it will actually happen. It seems like an almost too obvious distinction, but when I am anxious I can go from "there is a possibility this will go wrong" to "this is going to go wrong" without noticing everything that happened between both statements.
Then I try to identify whether there is something concrete I can act on. If I have not studied enough, studying makes more sense than continuing to imagine the exam; if I have been sleeping badly for several days, I probably need to rest; if I am avoiding a conversation, perhaps the problem will not disappear until I finally have it. And if what I fear does not depend on me, keeping thinking does not necessarily increase my control either, although for a few minutes it produces the feeling that I am doing something.
Anxiety, then, can contain valuable information without being right in its conclusions. It can point out that uncertainty exists and at the same time exaggerate the danger that uncertainty represents, it can remind me of a responsibility I am avoiding and then convince me that the consequences will be catastrophic, or it can simply appear without offering me a satisfactory explanation. Listening to it does not mean believing it.
Acting without waiting for it to disappear
Another mistake I made was assuming I needed to feel calm before doing certain things. It seems logical: first I solve the anxiety and then I study, present the project, have the conversation, or make the decision. The problem is that that complete calm may not arrive and, if I turn it into a requirement for acting, I end up granting anxiety a fairly large capacity to decide when I can live normally.
I have been learning something less elegant but more useful: in certain circumstances I can act while I am still anxious. Not because I have defeated anxiety or because I have finally learned to control it, but because an emotion can be present without necessarily becoming the criterion that determines my conduct. I can be afraid before an exam and still take it, I can feel uncertainty about a project and keep working, and I can also feel anxiety inside a relationship and decide to step away if, after examining the situation, I find enough reasons to do so.
That also does not mean we should always push ourselves forward. Sometimes acting correctly consists precisely in resting, asking for help, leaving something, or recognizing that we have already reached a reasonable limit. The point is not to prove that we are stronger than our anxiety, but to recover a certain capacity to decide what to do with the information we have, including the information our own body provides.
That is why I no longer need to think that anxiety "wants" to destroy me or that, in secret, it is trying to help me. Probably neither of those things is true. It is a system that tries to anticipate threats and that, like any prediction system, can be right, exaggerate, or be completely wrong. My job is not to obey every alarm or to tear it off the wall because it makes too much noise, but to learn progressively to distinguish when there is something to attend to and when it is only sounding.
I would still prefer that the bitch be wrong with less enthusiasm. But understanding that a signal is not a sentence has been considerably more useful to me than trying never to feel it again.
