Hey it’s me, your anxiety

Here’s how we make sense of ours.

Credit: Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Welcome to Solicited Advice, our weekly column that celebrates the helpfulness in health. Because in a world where strangers at the grocery store love to tell you that a specific brand of magnesium will indeed “cure” what ails you (it probably won’t, so sorry), we’re all about passing on our lived experience in a way that makes your life a little better. Are we experts? Nah, not really. But we’re great listeners who have perfected the art of pillow screaming. Let’s get into it!

I was recently diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). In my internet sleuthing, I’m finding some of the information — especially on social media — just isn’t relatable to my experiences. How does anxiety show up for you all? How do you make sense of it?

Kat: First off, I’m glad you have a name for what you’ve been experiencing. Second, the internet is equal parts helpful and off-putting, so you’ve come to the right place! One of my biggest anxiety triggers revolves around things I can’t control, specifically other people’s behaviors and words. For example, I have this irrational-to-me fear of my car getting hit in a parking lot. It has happened before (just once!), so I can’t say the fear is unfounded, but it’s not an everyday occurrence in the slightest. My solution? I park relatively far away from my destination, usually in a parking spot on the perimeter, telling myself I can get a little walk in before entering wherever I’m going. And while I don’t have society anxiety while I’m in social situations, I do harbor a lot of anxiety leading up to them: Will my health be good enough to go? Will everyone get along? Will my senior dog be OK at home alone for an extended period of time? I will admit that my anxiety has definitely stopped me from attending certain events in the past, and the guilt and shame spiral those decisions inspired were usually much worse than the actual follow through. Plus, then I have self-inflicted FOMO… the worst! So when this thought pattern doubles down in the lead up to an event, because it always will like clockwork, I flip through my mental rolodex of social situations that seemed scary — mixing sides of the family, going on a first date (many years back), holidays — and see if any of my worst-case scenarios actually came to fruition. When the answer is no, I try to remember how good it was to see people or enjoy a special celebration. Bonus points if you have a very similar occasion you can call upon and compare!

One of my biggest gripes when it comes to how people talk about anxiety is that there’s a whole lot of generalizing (which it sounds like you’ve experienced), a ridiculous expectation that we can cure ourselves of the thought patterns (I believe we can curb and cope with them, which is different), and the worst offender: the belief that there’s a right way to be anxious and a gold standard in how it should be dealt with. For instance, let’s use my parking lot example. Perhaps parking far away feels like a cop out and avoidant behavior to some, and they’d benefit more from a type of exposure therapy where parking in a packed lot — as close to the door as possible — helps that part of their brain ease up over time. Maybe doing it enough will become a habit. Is either method more correct? Nope. To the people who say there is? Give them my number.

Also, it’s important to remember that clinically diagnosed anxiety is different from “everyone gets anxious!” territory. A condition like GAD is constant, the latter experience is fleeting. A persistent feeling of anxiety can make your body feel like a livewire, even when there are no triggers in sight. So since everyone and their second cousin make mental health content on the internet these days, it’s very likely certain accounts or creators aren’t making their content for you, as someone who exhibits diagnostic criteria and needs a touch more than box breathing. That, in a nutshell, is what motivates us to write what we do!

Jess: One of the ways anxiety shows up for me is not being fully present in the moment, and then forgetting stuff until I learn or experience it again, and that’s exactly what I did with my initial anxiety diagnosis. I knew it existed but didn’t really know what to do with it, and because I didn’t have the language for what I was experiencing, or even understand that what I was experiencing was anxiety, I wasn’t able to explain to the mental health professionals I was working with. 

For a long time, it frustrated me that some of the commonly recommended tools for anxiety and general well-being — like meditations where you sit still and quiet and clear your mind — didn’t work for me. I tried for years and judged myself so harshly. It wasn’t until I went through meditation teacher training myself (thinking ~ obviously ~ I was just “doing it wrong” and needed to “learn to do it better”) that I discovered some types of meditation don’t work for everyone, and sitting silent and trying to quiet your mind and be present often feels unsafe for some people with anxiety and complex trauma. This understanding rocked me, and also helped me release the guilt and shame I was carrying about “doing meditation wrong.”

Still, it took about 20 years from my initial diagnosis (and a public panic attack that someone else recognized for what it was and helped me identify) for me to realize how much my anxiety was affecting my life and how often I was judging myself and spiraling — thinking I was “bad” or “lacking” or insert whatever rude thing my brain decided that day — for things that were rooted in my anxiety. 

I’ve learned a lot about what works for me in the years since (like heavy bass lines. Have you ever seen anyone recommend a heavy bass line for anxiety? I sure hadn’t!) and have found ways to accommodate myself. Many of the teachers in one of my spiritual lineages do long meditations with advanced students. I just can’t. If we’re in person, I doodle until they’re done. If we’re online, I show up about 20 minutes late. Years ago, I would have judged myself for that. Now I just know it’s what I need.

All of our individual experiences and any other diagnoses we’re also navigating can determine whether commonly accepted tools work for us or not, and here’s what I wish someone would have told me when I was young (or maybe they did, and I forgot it 😅): If something doesn’t resonate, that’s OK. It doesn’t diminish your experience, and what matters most is finding what does work for you, regardless of whether it makes sense to anyone else or not.

Ash: When I got the diagnosis of anxiety, it wasn’t a surprise. Anxiety was —and still is to an extent — a constant frenemy of mine. As I worked with my mental health team, no course of action seemed to lessen the thoughts, feelings, and general impact it was having on my life.

Eventually we learned anxiety is tricky, and it didn’t just exist in a vacuum I could single out and attack, it wrapped itself around my depression. Anxiety opens the door for depression to leap inside and fill the space with darkness. If treating anxiety was locking the door, I first had to figure out a way to shove the darkness out before I could even consider closing and locking it. I didn’t realize how self-focused that aspect of my anxiety was, and that it could even present itself that way, until I unpacked it for myself.

Another way it shows up is in my decision-making — though not in all decisions, something I’m still working to understand. It’s become even more prescient since my celiac diagnosis as now, if we’re going out to dinner, it often becomes my sole responsibility to find the restaurant, scrub through the menus, and decide for the group where to eat. I go from having a good time to mid-panic attack and flustered after five minutes while trying to search the maps and hope something is available. It feels very embarrassing because it’s not well understood how decisions that seem so “simple” have such a volatile impact on me.

Also, just because you’ve seen no one else talk about similar lived experiences, doesn’t mean yours isn’t real. Your perspective and brain chemistry culminate into your experience with anxiety. Take what you need and leave behind what doesn’t resonate with you.

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