“Anxiety is the vertigo of freedom.” ~Soren Kierkegaard
Let’s clarify:
This article is not about positive thinking.
This article is not about how the silver lining makes everything okay.
This article is not about your opinion of anxiety being wrong.
Kids call these things “toxic positivity.”
No toxic positivity here.
This there is an article about my life relationship with anxiety and what I learned from something that doesn’t go away. At times, anxiety spikes and feels almost crippling. It’s hard for me to appreciate the learning back then, but it’s still there.
This article is about that.
Please don’t confuse me learning from something that doesn’t go away with me endorsing it or saying it’s a good thing. Everything I learned from anxiety I would trade for less anxiety. I don’t even like to write about it because focusing on it so much makes me anxious. But I want to write things that help people.
How a bare bottom triggered anxiety
Stranger Things showed how cool the eighties were. In most cases this is true. I miss the arcades and the music. I miss the freedom I had as a child, which I don’t see in children these days. Some of the fashion is missing. There is no shortage of people who know nothing about mental health.
We played soccer every day after school at a baseball field/park in our small town. It was unsupervised tackle football with kids much older than me.
I remember once a guy broke his finger. He pointed back at her at a ninety degree angle. He started towards his house. One of the older children said, “Run home to Mommy!” and we all went back to play.
Oddly enough, it might break it’s mine finger did not worry. What he did The concern was that there was a day when a kid was running for a touchdown and another kid jumped in to stop him. He only grabbed the top of her pants and pulled them down to expose her bare bottom. He scored the touchdown anyway, but while everyone else thought it was funny, it scared me to death.
What if this happens to me?
I started tying up my pants with a string every day and pulling them so tight that my stomach hurt (remember, this was the eighties – I wore those neon pajama pants things). I started getting sick before we played soccer, before school and before all.
You’d think it’s obvious that I struggle with anxiety, but you have to remember that in the eighties and nineties we didn’t talk about mental health like we do now. We didn’t throw around terms like anxiety and depression. I was just that weird kid who threw up before going to school.
The anxiety has become a little more noticeable in the past few years. It seems to have gotten worse since the 2020 and 2021 COVID. I don’t know if this is wrong, but I feel like it is. It forced me to engage with it consciously and with more intention. It’s never pleasant, but I’ve learned a few things.
1. Anxiety taught me to be present.
The overwhelming presence of high anxiety forces me to be exactly where I am in that moment. I can’t read and write. I cannot play video games or watch movies with any enjoyment. I can’t do anything.
This very intensely, authentically roots me in the moment. This may sound bad as I worry, but there is another layer to it. When I can be fully present with the physiological feelings of anxiety, I recognize that they are energy in the body. When I’m super present, I see how my mind turns these feelings into the emotion we call anxiety, and that’s where my suffering comes from.
2. Anxiety taught me control.
I was told that my excessive independence and the need to be prepared for everything a trauma response. I’ve been a therapist for ten years and I still don’t know what to do with this information. I know that anxiety gives me a fast track to what I can control and what I can’t.
The bad news is that I can’t control the things that I think are causing me anxiety. The good news is that I can control how I react to these things. Anxiety forces you to do this very deliberately.
Anxiety also definitely sets my mind on something bigger than me. Maybe it’s the higher power we hear about at AA meetings and awards shows. It’s good to get out of my head and remember that I’m not responsible for anything. It helps if I only box within my weight class.
3. Anxiety teaches you good habits and boundaries.
I’m bad at letting my habits and boundaries slip when times are good. I start eating poorly, stop exercising, stay up too late, and watch a bunch of shows and movies that beam darkness and distraction directly into my head.
I’m also starting to allow unhealthy and even toxic people to play a more prominent role in my life. All this is done to help them, because people earn a lot. Over the years, I’ve learned to limit how close I let the most toxic people get, no matter how much help they need.
When I feel good, I start to believe that I can handle anything, and so can I its borders sliding. Anxiety always reminds me that there are consequences to the unhealthiness of my life, and I clean house when it pops up.
4. Anxiety is a reminder of how important growth is.
After I clean the house, I start looking for new projects and things to make me feel better. I’m starting to take the next step in who I want to be. It’s been hard the past three years because the waves of anxiety have been so intense, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel as the good habits I’ve put in place and the new projects and things I’ve started are starting to come to fruition.
I decided to make my counseling license inactive and focus on life counseling because it’s less stressful and I’m better at it. It wouldn’t have happened without anxiety. I have changed my diet and exercise due to blood pressure and anxiety and these are good habits whether I am anxious or not.
5. Anxiety taught me to be gentle.
I have written and spoken a lot about my desire to be gentler with people. I don’t unfriendlyand I have a lot of empathy for people, but it’s often expressed in a blunt or too direct way. That’s how I was raised, and I often feel like I’m patronizing people when I go around in word of mouth when I’m trying to help them with something.
When I experience intense anxiety, I feel fragile, which helps me understand how others might feel about my rawness. I started working on getting leaner around 2018 and was disappointed with my progress.
It was also that year that anxiety re-entered my life. As I look back now, I realize that I am much gentler with those around me when I am anxious. Being a little fragile helps me treat others with a little more care.
6. Anxiety taught me to slow down and ask for help.
When I started experiencing increased anxiety, it caused me to make quick decisions and change things to try to manage it. That makes sense. From an evolutionary perspective, the purpose of anxiety is to make us take action.
The problem was that these decisions rarely turned out to be my best decisions and often led to other consequences that I had to deal with. Because of this, I’ve learned that peak anxiety is not the time to make big decisions.
When I have to make a decision, I slow down and try to be very deliberate. I also learned that I needed to talk to someone else, which I was never willing to do. Asking for help is a good thing.
7. Anxiety helps you speed up.
Yes, yes, yes, that’s the opposite of what I just said.
Let me clarify.
One of the most important quotes I’ve ever read is from folk singer Joan Baez: “Action is the antidote to anxiety.” (I found out years later that he said despair instead of anxiety, but that was the first time I heard it).
Some tasks cause anxiety that I don’t want to deal with. These usually involve phone calls or e-mails to bureaucratic organizations, or errands that I find unpleasant and anxiety-inducing (these also make sense to avoid—our evolutionary heritage doesn’t understand why we would do something that feels dangerous).
I’ve learned over the years that anxiety is reduced when I take the necessary steps to tackle these tasks. The cool thing is that this has carried over into many of my daily tasks.
By dealing with anxiety, I’m pretty good at getting things done when they need to be done. I mow the lawn when I need to, take out the trash when it needs to be taken out, put the laundry up when it needs to be put up, and change the oil in my truck when it needs to be changed.
If we start dealing with tasks right away, it becomes a habit. The anxiety helped with that.
Anxiety is still a sucker
So there you go. Seven things anxiety has taught me. I’m grateful for these lessons, but they don’t make my anxiety any harder at the moment.
The purpose of anxiety is to suck. Its purpose is to make things difficult and uncomfortable until we do something about the problem. Unfortunately, the problem is often untreatable these days.
We worry about things like losing our job, not having money, getting divorced, and the general state of the world. Anxiety wasn’t designed to deal with any of these things, so sometimes feeling uncomfortable is the best we can offer ourselves.
Maybe that’s the last thing anxiety teaches you.
About James Scott Henson
James is a writer who wants to help people overcome challenges and make important changes in their lives. She has been working as a social worker, meditation teacher and qualified counselor for over twenty years. After finding your home life counselinghelping others achieve their goals and create the life they want. As a writer, James shares useful posts on the site Substackhe writes thousands of words every month to inspire, challenge and motivate his subscribers.
