Tolerating Anxiety
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
Anxiety is an emotion we all experience, whether on occasion or on the regular. It is often an issue that brings people to seek therapy. A common target patients will have is to decrease or even eliminate their anxiety. This is an understandable goal, as if you are suffering enough to seek treatment it likely means that anxiety is disrupting your life. While early in my career I would express to patients that this was a realistic target for our work, my perspective on treating anxiety has shifted over time.
Anxiety as an emotion serves a purpose. It can alert us to threats or dangers, and can also motivate us to take action. The issue is when it becomes a common feature, alerting us to dangers that may not require the amount of mental and physical resources we allocate to them. If anxiety is often causing you to feel paralyzed or leading to frequent avoidance of anything that might set it off, it might be a sign that anxiety is interfering with your life. The experience of anxiety is not necessarily problematic. Most people report feeling anxious before a first date or a presentation, and feeling distressed in these situations does not mean you have an anxiety disorder. It is actually quite normal. However, if your anxiety causes you to avoid presentations or dates, or affects your performance in these situations, then it might be a sign of a larger issue.
This is where the issue of tolerating anxiety comes into play. Let’s start with the work presentation example. If the primary goal is to reduce anxiety in those situations, you might try relaxation exercises, meditation, or even trying to tell yourself “it’s not a big deal.” There is nothing wrong with any of these practices, and in certain situations they can be very effective. The issue is what messages we are telling ourselves when we are using them to rid ourselves of something, in this case anxiety. What are some other things in your life you try to avoid or rid yourself of? Some examples might include serious illnesses, accidents, financial ruin, or abusive relationships. All of these have the potential for real harm. Anxiety is unpleasant, no doubt about it, but it is not dangerous in the same way. However, if we are fighting with anxiety or taking steps to reduce our exposure to it, we are implicitly signaling to ourselves that it is dangerous or something we cannot handle. There is also the nature of anxiety that the more we fight it, the more we can get stuck in it. Those efforts to avoid anxiety are probably making you more susceptible to it in the long-run, and you may even be making your experience more intense if you are frantically trying to get rid of it.
Therefore, my work with patients who experience anxiety is not about how we can make their anxiety go away but rather how we can learn to tolerate it. Tolerating anxiety is an active process in which we are intentionally experiencing anxiety without trying to reduce or change the experience. When we are willing to co-exist with our anxiety, we are better positioned to determine if the beliefs that contribute to anxiety are actually accurate. We also can learn if it is possible to engage in the actions we want even while feeling uncomfortable. You can think of this ability as a muscle, and thus it requires exercise to strengthen this muscle. This can seem daunting, as there are valid reasons why people avoid the different contexts that produce anxiety. The question to consider is, what would I be willing to tolerate anxiety for? If there is something important on the other side of that discomfort, am I more inclined to work on facing my anxiety?
If you determine that anxiety is interfering with your life, or that overcoming your anxiety will unlock your ability to pursue something that is very important to you, it might be helpful to consider therapy as a way to address this. If you are interested in working on your anxiety in therapy, feel free to contact me to set up an initial consultation to discuss your experience and how we can work on it together in treatment.