MSR #4 - Quell The Anxiety

MSR = Mental Struggle Reset. That's the terminology and the name of the series here. If this is your first article, know that there are (or will be depending on when you read this) other articles around this topic. Look for the tag if you're struggling or looking to see the things I do.

There's nothing more killer than being in a terrible mental place, unable to move, and even the thought of moving causes fear, doubt, and immediately makes you give up. They cause you to be highly emotional instead of productive. Those thoughts I just mentioned are rooted in anxiety.

Anxiety has a game it plays, and boy is it highly skilled at it. Like imagine picking up a 2 player video game for the first time, and your opponent is the 100 year reigning champion of it. That's how good anxiety is, but it doesn't come without it's weaknesses too, which when you exploit, changes the game of what it does to you until it's almost entirely gone.

A mental struggle is difficult. What makes it even harder is when everything feels like it's working against you, and your mind just... feels like it's cornered all the time. That's because it is. It's not "all in your head" - aka all the older folks will tell you, essentially making it seem like you made it all up - it's very real and it's basically built into the DNA of our brains.

It's designed to keep you safe. To keep you in line and focused, and not just wild and whimsical. Anxiety in a average situation where it hasn't entirely run over your brain, is very helpful. A quick example would be cooking dinner. You're boiling noodles and you're ready to drain them. Anxiety might kick in and be like "yo, this is dangerous. That steam can burn you. That pot will burn you." and so you set up the strainer first and put on some oven mitts and use that to drain it. Anxiety might also help you in social situation, trying not to hurt people, or fitting in and trying not to seem offensive or off-putting.

Anxiety is a healthy cocktail of fear + risk aversion + possibility. Three things that are often very negative in context, mixed a little at a time together to help you live a better life. Notice in that cocktail though that nothing is based in the now. Anxiety looks ahead, concerned about what you can do now to prevent negative outcomes. It focuses a lot on pain and emotion more than anything.

It's a survival mechanism. It is intended to help us avoid problematic and issue filled situations and replace them with a happier path. What could go wrong?

Anxiety has a few tricks it does to really fool you into thinking though that it's far more valuable than it is. It's game is simple; predict, attach, validate, and silence. This is where it tends to become far more a problem than it was ever meant to be, and it turns from this helpful survival tool into an outright monster.

Predict

As it was originally meant to do, it attempts to identify harmful situations that may result for whatever is happening. Paired with our imaginations though, those possibilities become more and more terrifying the older you get. Let's go back to those boiling noodles. As a kid, you might think the possibilities are just food, maybe pain if you touch the hot parts. As an adult you worry that the oven mitts you have on for safety are so slick that you might drop the pot, and your poor child or dog is right underneath it and gets drenched in steaming hot water, then you panic and ruin their whole life because you didn't react fast enough and didn't know how to handle the situation... all because you wanted to drain those noodles.

It sounds a bit ridiculous doesn't it? For some people, that's really what it is though. Hold that thought for a second... the terrifying ridiculous one.

Attach

Okay so now anxiety thinks this is an actual possibility. It knows not the difference in you feeling stupid from putting it on the wrong burner, or ruining a child's life. It does not distinguish that, in fact it simply feeds off of your reaction to that possibility. That ridiculous thought is a real possibility and anxiety wants to help you prevent that situation from happening.

It takes your imagination driven fear and treats it like reality.

Validate

And then... it waits. It attempts to steer you another direction, and what it's waiting for is that something about that possibility becomes reality. Anxiety will literally take anything. However, if you starve it, it will eventually just go away... until the day that you move that pot of noodles over, and a little water spills out and hits your shoe and it's HOT. You notice like 6 feet away is a dog. There's hot water on the floor.

That is what anxiety was waiting for. This life ruining noodle pot disaster has been proven to be a reality. You must fear it and avoid it at all costs.

Silence

No, not it creating it's own silence, but rather silencing any other thought in your head when it's around. It screams at you "LOOK I WAS RIGHT" and "WATCH OUT AND DON'T DO THAT!!!" and makes sure all your other thoughts are drowned out and silenced by the noise it makes.

Think of it like a fire alarm. When those dang things go off, you can't hear anything else because they demand so much attention.

The problem here, is every time you let anxiety drive at all after this, it will repeat this process... basically until everything feels like a fear-fueled nightmare, and not much happens in life that doesn't just shut you down or put you in a panic.

And also... part of the game it plays, is that it will attach itself to every aspect of your life if you let it. It'll weasel it's way into work, faith, friends, family, and everything in between until the world is out to destroy you.

This aids anxiety in ways you don't even realize, and often you don't even realize that anxiety puts you in this position. It's a play in his game, and it's not part of the game, but rather like a steroid that helps anxiety win every time; the need for now. That idea that you can get what you need right now, and if it's not right now, then it's not right at all.

Our society thrives off of immediacy and dopamine. How many times do you pick up your phone? How often will you choose a product because it delivers faster? How often will you choose fast food over sit in? It's addictive. It's easy.

This degrades patience. Anxiety loves that so much, because it can use that against you. It's not fast enough, it'll cause you to be late, it's not worth the time, etc. etc. It will plant itself deep inside everything that is slower and not immediately gratifying.

The reality of life is - most immediate things go as fast as they come. It's the longer term, habitual, or goal oriented things that end up being worth it and long lasting in the end.

If you haven't noticed yet, I left out a couple of key things anxiety does; attack and dwell. That's because these things are it's weaknesses disguised as strength. There's nothing more proving that anxiety is in control when it attacks you in the midst of a moment and sends you into panic. It also sucks when all you can ever think about are the WORST possibilities of EVERYTHING.

Well that's no fun now is it?

You can't however, just shove anxiety out the door. No, it's big, it's monstrous, and it's very demanding. You can't move it. You have to shrink it and put it back in it's place. Plus, you technically need it to a degree, so it's never going to completely leave.

Remember when I said you have to starve anxiety? That's the ultimate goal here. Anxiety feeds off of you - that's what makes it monstrous. The more attention you give it, the more it'll take. The more you acknowledge it's concerns, the more it'll create more concern. A lot of people think you have to face anxiety "head on," but that's... well a complete loss of a battle. If you challenge anxiety, it will cripple you and take you out while you're defenseless.

Anxiety can't attack if there's no battle to be fought. When you're fighting anxiety, it's so incredibly difficult, but that's where it loves to live. It knows everything about you; how to press your buttons, what your fears are, what your insecurities are, what colors you hate, what frustrates you, etc. I'd be willing to bet your anxiety knows you far better than you do. It presses them, engages you, and then attacks.

So here's the simple, yet hardest thing to do - you must not engage with it at all. Even if you know with all your heart and mind it's dumb and you can win, anxiety will find a way to turn that into something else. It never runs out of tricks. It never runs out of buttons. So when the anxiety is onset... you just literally need to do something else, think about something else, or say something like I do sometimes where I'll say "eh, I don't need that" or "I will handle that later."

Yet... even if you win there, it dwells within you. You stopped engaging with it, but it lurks in the shadows, feeding off your concerns and daily life. Until... you don't give it anything to feed on. If it doesn't have anything to fuel off of, then it can't grow. It won't have enough strength to fight, but to exist and suggest... like it's supposed to.

Now that the cool story telling is over, let's actually get into some methods that I've used personally to overcome anxiety. I spent many years of life swaying in and out of attacks, extreme pressure, and a lot of pain and suffering from anxiety. I must admit, I am not completely free, but it's small enough that I can cage it when I need to.

Engage the Outcome, Not the Anxiety

This is extremely practical advice. I'll setup a little bit here; I was going through a lot of struggle 5-6 years ago... in fact it was so much that most would consider absolutely valid anxiety, yet I was tired of it. Every day, just eating away at me. I was several months behind on bills, working at a startup where I wasn't sure when my next paycheck was coming, common arguments with the wife over the job, a toddler at home, and through all of that, I found myself in the middle of the day one day... looking for new cars to lower my car payment, yet I was dreading getting a vehicle I wouldn't enjoy driving. I was a little fed up with that attitude and fear over something that dumb.

So I did something very practical - I wanted to stop worrying about crap and so I start to consider "what happens if the very worst thing happened?" - and I put literal pen to paper and made a chart. Every time I had an anxious thought, I wrote it down. Then I made columns of the best and worst outcomes, then a column of the "most realistic" outcome, and one for what would happen if worst case came true.

When I say I filled that sucker up in like an hour... my gosh. Here's the beauty of that layout though; I got to reality check myself, completely bypassing anxiety altogether. What I found is that the most likely situations almost always happened, not the worst or the best. The second most important thing I found was that the worse case scenarios... weren't really all that bad, and could be easily worked through or reframed in a different light.

Try it out.

Don't Negotiate, Be Grateful

I am a Christian - I follow Jesus and anxiety isn't something in the Bible that says is "healthy." In fact, what it teaches is gratitude. It teaches faith. Let me tell you, regardless what you believe, faith and gratitude outweigh anxiety every time. If you have faith the outcomes will always work out even when they suck, anxiety has no place there.

Gratitude was an interesting one. When you're grateful for things, you tend to disconnect them from you, and recognize what it is; temporary. Gratitude completely obliterates anxiety the more you practice it. It teaches you to calm down and appreciate what's in front of you, instead of what may potentially come next.

Often what we think is that we need to negotiate with anxiety, like we have to work with it to accomplish something, and that's not really something that works. It makes you comfortable living with anxiety rather than bringing it down to size.

Run, Don't Fight

Have you every been to a Walmart where the kids or folks outside the doors are selling something you don't really want to buy? Do you approach them and yell at them? Do you try to ask them to sell something different? Of course not. You awkwardly pass by them or say "no thanks" and move on with your life. Otherwise you get sucked into the sad or relatable stories, or cute kids, and you end up with a 25 dollar bag of mediocre popcorn and feel kind of good, but "eh" afterwards.

Anxiety is like this, but it's selling you lies. Don't fight it. Don't look at. In fact, if you can, don't even acknowledge it's existence, and if you need to look at it, give it a friendly nod and move on. This will at first confuse your anxiety. It'll thrash around, make you feel empty, and mess with you... and that's okay. It is normal.

Eventually though, anxiety will keep seeing you as the potential buyer that never bites and start to back down.

"Okay, but when it's all between my ears, how do I escape that?" - Hear me out; stay busy. Not saying to burn yourself out, but start now building a trigger in your head that when the "what if" scenarios start rolling a movie in your head... go find something else to do. A TV show, play with your kids, play a game, go back to work, etc. - it sounds counterproductive, but the point isn't to drown yourself with busy-work, but rather to tell anxiety "hey, I ain't got time for this." Do it with intention.

After a while, try sometimes just to quell your mind. When anxiety says "that boiling pot of water will ruin lives" - you say "nah, I am just thankful I have something to eat today." It takes time, but it works.

Practice Longer Goals, Lower Immediacy

As a society consumed by immediate gratitude, that in itself needs to be defeated. Something you can do is work on things that don't give immediate satisfaction. One of the best ways I've found is books. 99.99% of the time, you can't sit and read a book and be done in 15 mins and get everything out of it. No, reading a book you have to do over the course of a week, sometimes more, and you have to carve out time for it, sit with it, think about it, and then you finish it.

While you're doing that, replace something with the book. Maybe it's social media scrolling, photo editing, video games, etc. - just make sure that the little part of your brain that expects something NOW, is quieted. This is very difficult, I know, in a world with Amazon deliveries same day and social media making you smile 10 times for 1 second in 30 minutes. It's a different, more fulfilling victory when you get that one big win of finishing a book over the course of a week, than a 1 second high from TikTok.

Eventually, your brain starts registering "hey, that feeling was great, and we can do that again, in different areas too." Your brain will start seeing the instant satisfaction as crap, and you'll be on your phone and TV less.

Know It Has No Power

Think of anxiety being behind bars in your mind. It can't touch you, it can't harm you, and it definitely can't force you to do anything. What it can do, is whisper sweet nothings in your ear until you believe it. The more you let it talk, and the more you talk back, the more it influences you... and that's really the extent of it's power. It uses you via suggestion, fear, and influence.

Why this is important, is that it tries to convince you that there's a loop, and once you're in it, there's no escaping; you have to play it out or you don't feel right.

Don't listen to it. Know it has no power, and you can walk out of the room at ANY time. You don't have to finish the thought pattern, you don't have to engage it, you don't have to listen to it at all. It has no real power.

Walk away. Change your thoughts. Busy yourself with something else. Just don't listen to it.

I've mentioned before this battle is multi-faceted. Mental struggles are no joke. Some things may apply, some things won't apply. Even advice, tactics, and all that just aren't enough sometimes... but something will work. The difficult part to get through your head is that it won't last forever and that there is a way out.