When you feel anxious, what sort of messages do you send yourself? Are you more likely to pay attention to your anxiety or suppress it? How does anxiety make you feel?
Anxiety is an emotion everyone experiences on a regular basis, but it can be responded to in very different ways. Because it’s an uncomfortable emotion, some people believe that anxiety is dangerous so they try to ignore and suppress anxious feelings.
But anxiety has the potential to be useful by motivating you to consider potential worries and concerns, identify possible solutions, and do what is necessary to address the source of anxiety so you can stop feeling anxious. If you’re unwilling to listen to your anxiety, however, you can’t experience these benefits and the causes of your anxiety can be left unresolved.
When you understand what anxiety is, why it exists, and how it can be resolved, it can be a much less difficult emotion to experience because you understand it’s purpose and know how to use it to address concerns and make improvements to your life. You can even use anxiety to your advantage.
What is anxiety?
What types of feelings do you describe as being anxious? Do you have these feelings often? How do you respond to anxiety?
In recent years, the term anxiety has rapidly grown in popularity. A number of people will describe plenty of unpleasant emotions as anxiety.
Anxiety is a useful term because it’s definition – apprehensive uneasiness or nervousness usually over an impending or anticipated; concern about an uncertain future – can apply to many different scenarios and describes a wide-range of uncomfortable emotions.
People feel anxious when they believe there’s a chance something bad could happen that would impact something important to them – their lives, their reputation, or a loved one for example. They can imagine a wide variety of unpleasant outcomes, although the majority of these are typically exaggerated and highly unlikely.
It’s often an ongoing and distracting emotion that can be felt in widely varying degrees from mild concern to crippling dread. It can be vague and undefined, such as apprehension about the future, or highly specific and in response to an upcoming event, like getting the results of a test.
Anxiety can feel very similar to fear and they’re both instinctual responses to the perception of a threat, but these emotions are fundamentally different.
When people are afraid, they typically respond with one of the four survival responses – fight, flight, freeze or fawn – which are ancient responses barely changed by evolution. These are instantaneous reactions to a present threat and designed to save your life in the moment. They originate in the primitive part of your brain – the brain stem. This part of the brain takes over when you’re afraid and believe you have to take immediate action to save your life. It’s incapable of complex brain-functions, including thinking long-term, using logic or reasoning, meaning these are impossible when you’re afraid and in survival mode.
Anxiety is different. Rather than responding to a present and tangible threat, anxiety produces concern about possible future threats. Rather than originating from the brain-stem and shutting down complex brain functions, anxiety comes from the highly modern and human neo-cortex so people are often more focused, efficient, creative, resourceful, and productive when they’re anxious. These functions are often the ones that can help you resolve your problem on your own or compel you to seek out help from others.
Further differentiating anxiety from fear are the hormones each produces. When you’re afraid, your brain produces cortisol. This stress hormone is harmless in small amounts and assists with alertness, but when it’s present in the brain long-term, it can lead to permanently elevated stress levels and harm your physical and mental health. Anxiety, however, produces oxytocin and dopamine, which are both associated with positive emotions. Dopamine encourages people to seek out pleasure and rewards, while oxytocin drives the need for social connection. Both are very useful when trying to solve a problem as finding a solution is rewarding, and if you’re not able to resolve the problem on your own you can ask someone for help.
Anxiety can be mild and easily ignored, but it can also be overwhelming and dramatically interfere with daily life. People can be so affected by anxiety that they’re unable to do many of the tasks that are necessary to taking care of themselves and feeling happy. When anxiety is this severe, it’s considered a mental health disorder.
Anxiety disorders can be caused by chemical imbalances in the brain and require medication, but the majority are caused by poor coping mechanisms and mismanaged anxiety. So most anxiety disorders can be avoided or managed by learning healthy ways of thinking about and responding to anxiety.
Although anxiety can be highly distressing and detrimental, it doesn’t have to be. You can develop healthy ways of responding to anxiety that prevent it from being harmful.
Healthy and unhealthy ways of responding to uncomfortable emotions
What types of things do you say to yourself when you’re feeling anxious? Do you have any beliefs about the dangers or benefits of anxiety? How good are you at listening to your emotions?
Much of the impact anxiety has – positive or negative – depends on how you mentally frame the experience. Mentally framing is how you perceive an experience and the emotions it causes. Most experiences have different ways they can be interpreted and how you frame them has a significant impact on how they affect you. You can think of waiting in a long line as a huge waste of time and get frustrated, or you can look at it as a break in a busy day to spend a few mindless minutes on your phone. You can believe anxiety is harmful and best kept at a distance, or a potentially useful emotion that can help you prepare for the future.
Anxiety isn’t pleasant or comfortable; it can cause distress, restlessness, and unease that’s difficult to endure. For these reasons, it can be thought of as an unhealthy emotion that should be suppressed or ignored when it does occur. This belief is often driven by the mentality that all uncomfortable emotions are harmful and should be avoided.
But suppressing and ignoring painful emotions can be more damaging than the emotions themselves. Suppressing emotions – telling yourself you aren’t feeling angry, sad, disappointed, etc. when you are – takes a great deal of mental energy so it’s exhausting and rarely sustainable.
Emotions that are suppressed stay with you, even if you’re not consciously feeling or showing them. They can easily appear with very little provocation, such as yelling at a waitress because you’re angry at your boss for how they spoke to you a week ago or sobbing after breaking a glass because a friend is ignoring your texts.
If you listen to these emotions, you’re much more likely to find a solution because you can ask yourself what you’re feeling, what is causing it, and consider potential solutions that will ideally allow you to stop feeling the emotion. But if you ignore your emotions, you won’t discover what is causing them or how you can resolve them.
Suppressing anxiety can have the same negative results and cause you to experience ongoing tension, uneasiness, and an inability to relax because you have unaddressed worries. Viewing anxiety as a dangerous emotion can even create more anxiety because you feel anxious about feeling anxious, creating a distressing and self-perpetuating cycle.
But uncomfortable emotions aren’t dangerous – they have to be uncomfortable to get your attention and motivate you to do something to resolve them. A primary driver of human behaviour is seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Few people will take meaningful action unless they feel uncomfortable, so if anxiety was pleasant or even neutral, it would likely be ignored the majority of the time. Anxiety has to be uncomfortable to motivate you to take action so you can be rewarded by ending your anxiety.
Although anxiety is uncomfortable, it doesn’t have to be thought of as a negative experience. The same way that hunger motivates you to get up and find something to eat, anxiety is a cue that there’s something you’re concerned about and you would feel better after identifying what it is and finding a solution.
Listing to anxiety isn’t always easy, especially if you don’t have much experience in paying attention to and learning form painful emotions. But this ability helps you to avoid many of the negative consequences of prolonged anxiety while using it as motivation to address what is causing it. It will still be uncomfortable even if you understand it’s potential to help you identify and resolve possible problems, but that doesn’t mean that it’s harmful.
How your life can improve when you embrace anxiety
Do you believe that there are any potential benefits of anxiety? When is anxiety harmful? What do you need to do to make it useful?
Benefiting from anxiety requires listening to your anxious thoughts and feelings so you can determine what is causing them.
When you’re anxious, let your thoughts happen instead of trying to push them away, minimise them, or distract yourself, so you can understand what you’re feeling anxious about. As you discover more about the cause for your anxiety, be curious and ask yourself questions about what you’re feeling and explore the answers. If you struggle to do this internally, it could be easier for you to write your thoughts down or discuss them with someone you trust.
However, it’s important not to unconditionally believe everything anxiety tells you. There will likely be some truth to the messages your anxiety contains, but these typically include exaggerations, catastrophising, thinking in black and white, adopting negativity bias, underestimating what you’re capable of, and other ways of making your situation seem worse than it actually is.
You could even tell yourself that you’re not capable of something and shouldn’t attempt it because it makes you anxious. This could be believing you shouldn’t go to a party because you’ll embarrass yourself or talking yourself out of asking for a raise. But if you believe these anxious thoughts, you can severely limit what you allow yourself to try and experience. If you cancel plans, avoid opportunities, or stay away from certain types of situations because they make you feel anxious, you’re limiting what you allow yourself to do because you believe that anxiety is a sign that you can’t manage what you considered attempting so you shouldn’t try.
Anxiety has the most potential to be harmful and limiting when you believe and obey these messages. This is why it’s important to gain a clear understanding of your anxious thoughts. Otherwise, they can exist as vague feelings that are difficult to challenge because you’re not fully aware of what they are. But by developing and listening to your thoughts, you give yourself the opportunity to challenge them and determine if they’re accurate or unrealistic and telling you to be overly-cautions.
Once you’re aware of just what your anxious thoughts are saying, you can then determine what you could do that would make you feel less anxious, without stopping yourself from doing something important or meaningful. Sometimes this will be by taking action, such as spending more time planning a holiday to reduce anxiety about feeling unprepared, deciding to have a difficult conversation with a friend after potentially offending them, or working on your to-do list because you don’t like how long it’s getting. If your anxiety is telling you that you’re not capable of something, you can consider how realistic these thoughts are and whether you’ve done something similar in the past to feel more confident.
However, an important and unavoidable part of being less impacted by anxiety involves accepting uncertainty. Because anxiety is caused by concerns about possible outcomes and events in the future, there will always be the chance of potential challenges and complications that you can’t anticipate or completely prepare for, which results in uncertainty. This can be distressing and cause you to ruminate on the possible negative outcomes, so your anxiety might not completely go away.
Accepting uncertainty in anxiety-provoking situations is valuable because instead of feeling as if there’s a strong chance that something bad will happen and you’re not doing anything to prevent it, you recognise that you’ve done what you can to prepare, but the outcome is still largely out of your control. You’ll likely keep feeling some concern, but by accepting that you’ve done what you can to prepare and the discomfort you’re feeling is unavoidable, anxiety can be much less impactful.
You can even add a positive aspect to anxiety by thinking of it as an opportunity for growth. Growth requires leaving your comfort zone, which almost always causes anxiety-provoking uncertainty. But this can be less intimidating if you recognise it’s a sign you’re taking on a new challenge and you have the ability to gain from the experience.
However, too much anxiety can be bad for your mental health. Even if you’re highly skilled at managing anxiety, it can still be exhausting and wear you down over time. Feeling persistently anxious means that you might benefit from making changes to your life to reduce how often you experience anxiety.
Although you can learn to listen to anxiety and adopt solutions on your own, some people prefer to work with a mental health professional. This can be especially useful if you’re struggling with listening to your anxiety and/or interpret what it’s telling you, as well as feeling that you have more anxiety than you can manage. Mental health professionals can recommend strategies that make it easier to connect with your emotions, encourage you to ask yourself revealing questions, and be supportive while you’re developing a potentially new and challenging set of skills.
Anxiety has the most potential to be harmful when you believe what it tells you unconditionally, or if you refuse to acknowledge it entirely. But by learning how to listen to anxiety and use the discomfort it causes as motivation to address it, anxiety can be a useful tool to finding solutions to challenges.
Anxiety isn’t a comfortable or pleasant emotion, but that doesn’t mean that it’s dangerous. Like all emotions, anxiety is information about how your environment, including events that are still in the future, that are affecting you.
Although anxiety can be harmful, especially if believe the limiting messages it sends you, or you ignore and suppress it, you can learn a great deal from anxiety.
Anxiety is a sign there’s something you would benefit from changing – whether it’s internally or in your environment – and you can use anxiety as direction and motivation to address what is distressing you. By adopting this perspective of anxiety, you can think of anxiety as a tool for motivation and problem-solving, rather than being a dangerous or limiting emotion.
By understanding that anxiety is meant to be a proactive emotion that encourages you to take action or think about upcoming challenges by anticipating and addressing future problems, anxiety doesn’t have to be painful or debilitating. It can even be viewed as having benefits.
