Why you should stop asking if everything is okay, and/or constantly apologizing
Cruelly enough, nearly all the natural urges we feel when very distressed are behaviors that unintentionally reinforce our anxiety.
It makes sense that when our threat response is triggered the first thing we want to do is attend to the problem. The whole purpose of the threat-response is our safety and wellbeing, so anything potentially ‘dangerous’ can be handled and our survival can happily continue. For those without anxiety disorders, this tends to be based largely on event-inspired threats (a fire, an argument, watching the news).
People with anxiety disorders often live in a tormented state of what-ifs and hypothetical terrors that may or may not happen but paralyze them nonetheless. I’ll hear a lot of patients describe it along the lines of, “I know it’s just a dumb project that’s due soon but I start to think about all the ways it will be difficult or that it won’t be received well and then I start imagining all the horrible ways it will end.”
Common responses are focused on ‘fixing’ the problem and feeling good again. Over-preparing, googling/researching, reassurance-seeking, checking, testing, finding the one thing that will ‘fix’ bad feelings, etc are all examples of the urges that lead to more anxiety in the long run.
The catch here is that a good number of those, reassurance-seeking especially, offer short term relief in exchange for long term higher anxiety. If you’re feeling overwhelmed and terrified of potential dangers, it makes perfect sense that you want desperately to be told “it’s all going to be okay” or “nothing bad will happen” and so on. If you routinely do this, the brain learns the only way you stop feeling scared or upset is dependant on whether or not you can get that same reassurance in the future. Since anxiety often builds and becomes stronger, when not controlled by treatment, the person ends up being more anxious than ever and reassurance stops working so they are left with the fear and no skills for handling it.
Improving your anxiety disorder depends a lot on being able to reframe anxiety itself as something that isn’t dangerous. Most anxiety disorders become “anxiety about anxiety” given time, so start making changes that let you show your brain that you can tolerate fear and discomfort without ending up stuck in rigid OCD or anxiety rules.
- DON’T ask someone to tell you there is no threat/danger
- DON’T repeatedly seek reassurance if you caved and asked the first time
- DON’T consider the anxiety itself a threat. Your body is meant to function this way, your response can modulate the discomfort felt but you can’t magically undo a threat response starting.
- DON’T convince yourself that ruminating or testing or researching is “problem solving” when all you’re actually doing is giving your anxiety new spooky outcomes to worry about.
- DON’T fall for the vague “something bad will happen” threat, and question the validity of the specific fears that do come.
- DO ride out the anxiety wave. If you’re here you’ve probably had them before. You’re an old pro at anxiety and this one is no different, you can handle it the same way you handled the others.
- DO recognize that distress is literally the only weapon anxiety has. It can’t hurt you, it can’t control the situation’s outcome, and it can’t force you to do anything. It can only put on a scary puppet show of worries, which you don’t have to take seriously.
- DO try to meet it with neutrality. “Maybe the bad thing will happen, maybe it won’t. I can’t control it, and ruminating on it isn’t going to help either.”
- DO acknowledge the feeling. Feelings don’t magically disappear when we desperately try to distract or avoid them, they just end up getting stronger and biting us in the ass later once the distraction is over. Let the feeling happen, feelings are meant to be felt, it is just the body’s communication.
- DO seek help from a therapist if you feel you need more support in tackling your anxiety
Comments are closed