Get comfortable with being uncomfortable
Learning to get up, close and personal with your anxiety has its benefits.
This week, I made a list of some of my most irrational fears. Nine things made the list. Not one of them surprised me.
Fears around death and sickness - losing my parents and loved ones, dying alone or bankrupt or both, fears around unfinished bucket lists and more.
Full disclaimer: There wasn’t a single ‘fear’ on the list. Not one. Only anxieties. The biggest one being that I can’t ever overcome my anxiety. You see the irony? Endless loops and chickens and eggs come to mind.
Ironically, fearing my inability to overcome anxiety is what protects me. Keeps me sane even (some of the time). I have now learned that it’s a useful fear to have. Because it helps me tell my fears apart from my anxieties.
But a long time ago, my fear and anxiety were like enmeshed lovers. It used to be difficult to tell them apart. They had each forgotten their purpose with me. They would come and go together. They were insufferably inseparable.
I mistook them both for fear. They wreaked havoc inside me, still do sometimes.
It was years before I learned that fear and anxiety are two separate things. With two separate agendas. And being able to tell one from the other does me good.
Fears are not to be feared. Fears keep me safe and sound from real, present dangers. They are an early alarm system that keep me from harm.
Like one recent Sunday, when I faced a fresh fear. I had woken up early on what was a cold, frosty morning, so I headed straight into the kitchen to make myself some chai.
And there, from the stovetop, to the kitchen counter, and right through to the edge of the sink, snaked a telltale trail of mouse droppings. And in the fruit bowl in the middle of the counter, the intruder had left its calling card - a perfectly ripe banana with the bottom half of its peel bitten off and the fruit neatly hollowed out.
The realisation that I had spent a whole night blissfully asleep even as this intruder frolicked in what I imagined was a victory dance around me sent literal shivers down my spine. My heart was racing even as I trembled slightly at the prospect of coming face to face with, or worse, being bitten by this mystery mouse. The adrenalin was pumping fast through my body already as I spent the morning cleaning the kitchen and vacuuming the whole house as noisily as I could to chase it away.
As if that was going to scare the little bugger away.
But all of these were reasonable behaviours (arguably) to keep me safe from the intruder in my home. A useful fear keeping me safe from a real danger.
Anxiety, on the other hand, is that dreadful feeling that comes from a vague, unspecified threat. It feels like a frantic attempt to get anticipatory bail for a crime that you may or may not commit in the distant or not-too-distant future. But you stop living anyway in anticipation of the crime ruining your life.
I experienced the worst of it at a silent meditation retreat that I attended in 2020. With only silence and my own thoughts for company for seven days straight, the worst of my worries surfaced up to my conscious mind.
At the time, in the months following the breakdown of my marriage, I was struggling with the idea of ‘home’. For the longest time, home had meant my then husband, and now with him no longer in my life, I didn’t know where to find home again. I was sick with worry for almost two days, and it started to feel like it was eating me alive.
There were no easy answers to be found.
Knowing that many of us at the retreat were fighting our own versions of anxious thoughts, one of the monks leading a meditation session offered us this advice - ‘Don’t fight your anxious thoughts. Acknowledge them and even welcome them as guests into the metaphorical home of your mind. Just don’t offer them tea or snacks.’
So that is what I have been trying to do ever since.
It’s a simple lesson that not only keeps my anxiety from spiralling out of control, but also makes it easier for me to separate my fear from my anxiety.
Learning to treat my anxiety as a guest, as another entity quite separate from myself is freeing to say the least. It means when anxious thoughts drop in unannounced, I can be a dispassionate observer who acknowledges them instead of fighting them.
In accepting my anxiety for what it is, it loses the power it would otherwise have to keep me in its tight grasp.
This lesson came alive in a beautiful way once during a speech I once had to deliver in front of a few dozen people. I hate public speaking, it triggers a particularly horrid memory of how I froze on stage as a four-year-old during a fancy dress competition. This time as well, I was almost gripped by panic, heart pounding in my rib cage, mouth dry and cold hands.
Even as I started to speak, I acknowledged my anxious thoughts but I refused to engage with them. I continued speaking as I imagined walking some distance away from my raging anxiety, as it sat away from me, pounding heart and all. Once I had made a little space for it, I was surprised by how easily it seemed to calm down, diminish and melt way.
Maybe my fear of my anxiety just needed to feel seen before it could go backstage and leave me to get on with my job. I am not sure if there will come a time when I am not afraid of my anxiety but learning to acknowledge it and even befriend it is the first step to stop it taking over my mind.