Using Your Anxiety For Good

Using Your Anxiety For Good

This is the second post in a three part series about anxiety. In the first post, I discussed learning to recognize your anxious signals when they occur instead of reacting to them automatically

Instead of automatically responding to anxiety, it’s my hope that you can notice your anxiety without acting on it. Doing so allows you to create a space where you can choose your response. This post is about learning how to more clearly create that space.

Let’s Review the Why of Anxiety

Our anxiety is the product of our mental security guard, the limbic system. The limbic system is a collaboration of brain regions responsible for emotions and arousal. Information is constantly being sent to our limbic system through our senses for review. Our system checks the incoming messages against the stored information looking for warning signs or abnormalities. When something unusual or potentially dangerous shows up, our system sounds the warning alarm. This is the feeling we experience when we say we are anxious.

And that is the end of the limbic system’s role in our anxiety. From there, it becomes the responsibility of our more rational brain to look at the warning signal and decide whether it is something that needs to be followed up on or labeled as a false alarm.

Anxiety in Action

Imagine you are walking along a hiking trail and out of the corner of your eye you notice something slither away. Your blueprint says this is a snake and you immediately respond with a safety response. You jump back, your heart beats faster, your muscles tense, and your brain races to prepare for danger.

Quickly, you realize you only saw a stick move across the leaves and your brain sends a signal back to your limbic system that things are all clear and we can stop producing the anxious feeling and we keep hiking

If we decided it was a real threat we might decide to go back home because it’s too risky outside, we might start looking carefully at every stick, or only walking in areas where we can see everything on the ground very clearly. This would reward our limbic system for the stick warning and now we can expect it to point out all snake-like objects as a threat.

Our brains can create feedback loops. When we identify threats as real, we are telling our limbic system to be on the lookout for the type of threats. The limbic system eagerly chimes back with a well-meaning but sometimes over ambitious, “Alright, I got you”. Your limbic system is your Barney Fife, you have to find your Sheriff Taylor.

Your Mind As a Mailbox

Imagine your mind as a sort of mail system. Your rational brain represents the mailbox and your anxiety is the mailperson delivering messages. There are two types of mail being delivered; real mail and junk mail.  In real life, we are recognize junk mail fairly consistently and respond in helpful ways (tearing up and throwing away). In our mental worlds, we are not as good at recognizing the spam anxiety delivers to our brain.

Signing Up For Mailing Lists

It’s hard to tell real from junk because the spam senders are clever and attempt to disguise junk mail. Marketers (and anxiety is a marketer) know how to play on emotions and experiences to make us treat junk mail as if it is real. If you’ve ever Googled something and then have later seen an advertisement for that on Facebook, you recognize how marketers use our past experiences to manipulate future behaviors. Our brains work in similar ways.

Maybe you’ve been in a bad car accident and now you are on the “Cars and Traveling Is Dangerous” mail list. Maybe you’ve felt embarrassed or isolated in social situations and you’ve been signed up for the “I’m Socially Awkward and Unlikable” email list. Just like marketing campaigns, these mental emails are designed to look like important and demanding of your attention..

How to Remove Yourself From Mail Lists

Your job is to learn how to distinguish between spam and real mail. While unsubscribing from annoying mail lists in your own brain is not a one-click solution, it is possible to not open and investigate every email anxiety throws your way. Once you learn to recognize the difference between junk and real, you can start choosing behaviors that are more helpful and conducive to peace. But first, we need to talk about ways you can distinguish between spam and real.

What is Real Mail?

Real mail includes the worries that come to our mind and require attention. They demand action and problem-solving. This is your anxiety working in a way that is productive and efficient.

  • When you are driving along an icy road and you are more aware of your surroundings and focused in your thoughts, anxiety is delivering useful messages.
  • When you have an important meeting but you haven’t reviewed your material and then feel anxious, you are receiving a useful message.
  • When you think you’ll oversleep in the morning and you double check and alarm is set on your phone, anxiety is being helpful.

When anxiety pops up and pushes us towards solving a problem, it is likely useful mail.

What is Junk Mail?

Junk mail is often unsolvable or about uncontrollable. They are the What-Ifs of our mind. They because they create anxiety that feels like it should be real. Whether mail is useful or not, you get the same, “You’ve got mail” message.

The ability of our mind to create unending amounts of what-ifs means that problem-solving often falls flat with junk mail. Even when we create solutions, a new what-if rabbit hole opens up for us to dive into.

Junk mail might look like:

  • You spend time thinking about ways you might get into an accident if you leave the house.
  • You see a stick you think is a snake, realize it’s a stick but then doubt yourself by asking what if I was wrong or what if there are snakes that look like sticks.
  • You’ve spent the past few days diligently reviewing your meeting material and you understand the concepts you need to present but your mind offers endless scenarios in which it could go wrong (you’ll forget everything, look awkward, start sweating, stumble over words)
  • I know I checked the door locks three times, but maybe I should check it once more to be sure.
  • I know I proof-read that email for my boss multiple times, but what if I made a typo somewhere?
  • What if I have a panic attack when I go out to dinner with friends this weekend?
  • What if I am called on in class and don’t know the answer?

So What’s Next?

In the first post of this series, I encouraged you to learn to recognize what it feels like for you to be anxious. Learning to notice when anxiety is speaking to you is the first step in changing your relationship with anxiety.

Now I am encouraging you to learn how to create space between feeling anxiety and responding to anxiety by treating your anxiety like you do your Facebook feed. You flip through the posts quickly scanning it for things that look important and skipping past the targeted advertisement or irrelevant postings. Of course you might miss label some posts at times, but it is still more efficient than stopping at every post to dig into and judge whether it’s something you are interested in.

Our anxiety needs to work the same way. We should notice the incoming feed of potential worries and make a decision about whether we should click to open them, comment, like, share, or simply scroll past.

The final blog post in this series will discuss how to get comfortable letting some post go and strategies for convincing your mind that it’s okay to not respond to every anxious signal.

Contact Me

I love working with clients directly to change their relationship with anxiety. If you would like to schedule an appointment, please contact me by phone or through my website: Contact Me.

Additional Reading

This post is part of an ongoing series about anxiety. You can read the first post in the series HERE.

To go back to my blog: Blog Home

To learn more about me and my practice: My Counseling Approach

My approach to understanding and treating anxiety draws from the influences of Dr. Edna Foa and Dr. Reid Wilson. My analogies of viewing anxiety has a mail system is adapted directly from Dr. Wilson and his language of naming anxiety either a noise or a signal. He has put together some clever and useful Youtube videos which expand on this approach to anxiety. You can see them HERE.

 

Meet the author

Ben Taylor is a counselor in Johnson City and Kingsport, TN. He provides counseling for adolescents, adults, and couples. He specializes in treating Anxiety related concerns including OCD, Panic, Social Anxiety, and PTSD. He also works closely with couples seeking to increase effective communication, navigate infidelity, and rekindle past romances. 

Ben sets himself apart of other counselors by making therapy a more personal experience. He works well with clients new to therapy and challenges the notion of what it means to be in therapy. Ben strives to make therapy a more normal experience by developing a sincere interest in his clients, balancing humor and honesty, and offering a non-judgmental space for creating your ideal self. He takes pride in creating a counseling experience that is genuine enough for laughter and tears but honest enough to talk about what needs to be changed.