Anxiety is the modern age’s favorite emotional sport. It’s like carrying around a tiny, paranoid screenwriter in your head, constantly pitching you horror movie scenarios about your own life.
Your brain is always preparing to fight a bear or run a marathon, except you’re just trying to order a coffee. “Should I take this job? What if it leads to my ultimate undoing? Should I go on this date? What if they’re a serial killer or, worse, someone who claps when the plane lands?” And social anxiety is like living in a never-ending episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”. You’re constantly Larry David, but without the wealth, wit, or ability to say whatever you want.
And it’s an all-too-common problem. A large epidemiological study conducted at Harvard showed that almost 20 percent of US adults—more than 60 million people—suffer from an anxiety disorder every year. Over the course of a lifetime, 31% of people will deal with one or more related problems.
But, before we totally demonize anxiety, there’s this old quote from Søren Kierkegaard we might want to keep in mind: “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way, has learned the ultimate.”
What if anxiety isn’t something to be snuffed out – what if it’s just misunderstood? Anxiety isn’t cackling as it raises our heartbeat; it’s legitimately trying to help. What if the key issue here is our relationship to anxiety?
Yeah, I know, this sounds like something a Buddhist monk said right before he screamed into a pillow. But the research is showing that we can create a new mindset around anxious thoughts that makes them far more tolerable – and even helpful.
Tracy Dennis-Tiwary is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Hunter College and her book is “Future Tense: Why Anxiety Is Good for You (Even Though It Feels Bad).”
Let’s get to it…
What Is Anxiety?
Fear is what you feel when there’s a growling bear in front of you right now. Anxiety is when you’re apprehensive about an imagined future, something that hasn’t happened yet. It’s like owning a parrot with a vocabulary solely consisting of your deepest, darkest fears.
Anxiety has two parts: bodily sensations (like tension or a racing heart) and thoughts (dread, worry, etc.) It’s like living in a perpetual horror movie — but suddenly realizing you’re the one wearing the monster costume. Your mind is hosting its own conspiracy theory podcast, and every episode is about how things could catastrophically implode.
But what’s critical here is how we interpret the anxiety. Instead of immediately labeling the thoughts and feelings as irrational and harmful, what if we saw them as useful signals?
Anxiety isn’t the problem; it’s the warning light on the dashboard about a possible problem. Those jitters are pointing out a discrepancy between where we are and where we want to be in the future and it’s urgently motivating us to deal with it.
You have a project due, and suddenly, anxiety starts whispering sweet nothings like, “If you mess this up, you’ll be living in a cardboard box, selling pencil portraits of people’s pets for a living.” So what do you do? You work like a person possessed.
Anxiety’s like a well-meaning but overbearing parent. It’s the reason we triple-check our emails before hitting send, the nagging voice in the back of our heads that reminds us to lock the door and turn off the stove. Sure, it might be annoying, but at least you can rest easy knowing that you won’t burn the house down or accidentally email your boss a picture of your cat in a tiny sombrero.
The goal shouldn’t be to overcome anxiety as much as to listen to it and use it – without the suffering. When the oil light on your car’s dashboard illuminates, you don’t try to put black tape over it. You get oil. In general, the best thing is to find the source of your anxiety and address it. (This can be like trying to solve a mystery where the detective is also the culprit.)
But what should you do if the anxiety is getting out of hand? If it’s paralyzing or you find yourself worrying about everything? (The advice to “just calm down” is about as useful as telling someone to “just be taller.”) There are a few things we can do to get our helper to dial it back…
Reframe Anxiety As Excitement
You just want the thoughts and feelings to go away. But that doesn’t work. You can’t simply will the oil light to turn off. It’s doing its job. The problem is how you’re perceiving the anxiety. Change that and you’ll find relief.
What’s the secret? Here we can take a lesson from marketing: what you need is some rebranding. Or, as they say in psychology, “reframing.” Interpret the trembling hands and racing thoughts differently.
In one study, research subjects were told that anxious feelings were simply signs that their bodies were revving up to effectively face a challenge. Racing heartbeat, queasy stomach, all of this was normal and would help them perform better. Then they were given a test specifically designed to stress them out. What happened?
They reported feeling less anxious and more confident. Their hearts were still pounding but the cardiac patterns resembled those of athletes before a competition, not people in a haunted house.
Repeated studies have shown reframing is powerful. The stimuli and the physiological reactions are the same but changing how you interpret them makes all the difference. Telling yourself “I’m not anxious, I’m excited!” might seem like telling yourself “I’m not broke; I’m just pre-rich!” except it actually helps.
Okay, we’ve got a simple way to reduce the jitters. But what if you’re totally uncertain about the future and it’s driving you crazy? We have another method that can help you drop that 50-pound bag of ‘what-ifs’ you’ve been carrying…
Get A Feeling Of Control By Planning
Uncertainty. The fissile core of anxiety. When you’re uncertain, anxiety doesn’t even have the decency to knock before it enters. It just waltzes right in, tracking mud all over your freshly vacuumed sanity. It’s got you doing mental gymnastics with a side of emotional parkour.
What will make it go away?
Research has found that it’s not pessimism or optimism that makes anxiety unpleasant – it’s that uncertainty. So stop wrestling with your feelings and take action to reduce that uncertainty: make a plan.
Ever made a list of what you need to do today and felt better about it? Yup. There you go. The universe may be out to get us, but it’s got terrible aim. Making plans reduces uncertainty and the anxiety evaporates with it.
Now some people are going to say they need their anxiety to be at their best. Without it nothing would get done right and everything in their life would fail.
Uh, no. There’s a better way…
Choose Excellence Over Perfectionism
Perfectionism is an eternal cycle of self-flagellation and diminishing returns. It’s not the secret to success; it’s prolonged torture with better marketing.
The pursuit of perfection is the ultimate paradox – the more you chase it, the more it seems to run away, laughing at you in a haughty, French accent. And that’s because perfection doesn’t exist. It’s like Bigfoot or a comfortable airline seat.
Anxiety drives us toward perfectionism and the research shows this doesn’t always make things better; in fact, it often makes them worse.
In many areas perfectionism actually produces inferior results or makes them more inefficient. Tracy writes: “perfectionists take longer than nonperfectionists to do repetitive or boring tasks, create more inaccuracies, and work less efficiently… highly perfectionistic scientists create lower-quality, less creative, and fewer published papers.” So what’s the alternative?
Forget perfection. Aim for excellence.
Tracy notes that people aiming for excellence do show “higher levels of anxiety compared to nonperfectionistic people—along with greater conscientiousness, higher intrinsic motivation, enhanced ability to make progress on goals, and more feelings of positive well-being. What they don’t show is more debilitating anxiety. They also don’t tend to carry other burdens of perfectionism: higher rates of burnout, intense procrastination, long-term depression, and suicidality.”
Sounds like a much better deal. Perfection is like that overachiever who brings a homemade quiche to a potluck. Meanwhile, excellence is bringing chips and guac. Sure, it’s not homemade, but everyone loves it, and it’s gone in five minutes. And the chef doesn’t drive themselves insane.
Okay, time to round it all up – and we’ll get the quick, easy, feel-good way to reduce acute anxiety…
Sum Up
Here’s how to reduce anxiety:
- What Is Anxiety?: My anxiety is like a friend who always insists on doing karaoke, and the only song he knows is “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It”. But anxiety is still a friend. It’s trying to help. Don’t push it away. Listen to it.
- Reframe Anxiety As Excitement: Anxiety can feel like the mental version of a cramp you can’t stretch out, like a brain charley horse that refuses to quit. Instead, see that tension as a coiled spring. You’re not worried – you’re energized.
- Get A Feeling Of Control By Planning: The jitters aren’t the enemy; uncertainty is. Make a list and watch the worries disappear.
- Choose Excellence Over Perfectionism: Trying to be perfect can lead to inefficiency and paralysis. As the great writer Terry Rossio once said, “My lousy way of getting it done is better than your great way of not doing it.”
If worrying were an Olympic sport, I’d have more gold medals than Michael Phelps, and my face would be on a Wheaties box looking concerned about cholesterol levels.
So what’s that quick easy tip for relieving anxiety?
People you love. Psychologists call it “social buffering.” Everything’s harder when you feel alone. Just having people around who care about you reduces the perception of threat. A good laugh with a friend is like emotional exfoliation.
When anxiety finally decides to take a hike and leaves your brain’s studio apartment, it’s like discovering you’ve been wearing 3D glasses your whole life and you just took them off. Everything is less… coming at you. The world’s not a booby-trapped obstacle course anymore; it’s just a slightly flawed, but mostly okay place where you can wear mismatched socks and no one cares. And that, my friends, is a slice of fried gold.
Deciding what to watch on Netflix no longer feels like “Sophie’s Choice”. Your newfound control over anxiety turns social events from a game of emotional Minesweeper into something resembling actual fun. And sleep – oh, sweet, beautiful sleep. It’s like sinking into a cloud made of every comforting TV show theme tune you’ve ever heard.
I’ll leave you with the one scenario I can think of where overwhelming anxiety was entirely appropriate. Alan Shepard was the first American to go to space. When he was preparing for launch on that day, someone asked him what he was thinking about and he replied:
“The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.”