Why We Wish Anxiety Away
When anxiety arrives, our instinct is often to want it gone. We want the racing thoughts to settle, the tension in our bodies to ease and the uncertainty to stop occupying so much space in our minds. If you've ever lain awake going over tomorrow's possibilities, avoided a difficult conversation because you can't face how it might go, or found yourself checking and rechecking something you are worried you've missed, that desire for relief probably feels very understandable.
But why do we want anxiety to disappear so quickly? And what happens when our attempts to get rid of it become our main response to it?
Perhaps looking at that process can tell us something about how we manage uncomfortable feelings and give us another way of responding.
Image of alarm clock from Catherine Hughes at Unsplash.
Anxiety can give us useful information
Anxiety can be a bit like an internal alarm. It gets our attention and tells us that something feels significant. We might feel anxious because something matters to us, because we are facing uncertainty or because something in our environment doesn't feel quite right. Our minds and bodies are responding to what they perceive as important.
But an alarm doesn't tell us the whole story. Anxiety isn't necessarily telling us exactly what is happening or what we need to do. We can feel anxious about something that isn't actually dangerous,or find that our response is much bigger than the situation warrants. The feeling itself can still provide useful information, even when our interpretation of it isn't completely accurate.
So rather than immediately asking ourselves how to make the anxiety stop, we might sometimes ask what it is drawing our attention towards. What has changed? What am I concerned might happen? Is there something here that matters to me?
What do we do when we don't want to feel anxious?
Of course, knowing that anxiety can be useful doesn't make it pleasant. When we don't like what we're feeling, we can become very good at trying to manage it or make it disappear.
We might avoid the situation that is making us anxious, keep ourselves busy, seek reassurance, or try to control every possible outcome. We might spend hours thinking about the problem, researching it, rehearsing conversations or imagining every possible scenario. Sometimes these responses are helpful. They can help us prepare, solve problems and make decisions.
At other times, though, our attempts to manage anxiety can become ways of moving away from the feeling itself. We can become so focused on working out why we feel anxious, or what we can do to prevent the feeling returning, that we don't stop to notice what is actually happening for us.
This is one reason that anxiety can be worth approaching with a little curiosity rather than simply trying to get rid of it.
Responding rather than automatically reacting
There is a difference between responding to anxiety and automatically reacting to it.
Responding might mean recognising that something is difficult and deciding what you need. Perhaps you need to have a conversation you've been avoiding, ask someone for support, take some time to yourself or make a change in your circumstances.
Sometimes, though, our response is more automatic. We do whatever we can to reduce the uncomfortable feeling in the moment. That isn't necessarily wrong. Many of the ways we cope with difficult emotions developed because they helped us at some point.
The useful question is whether the response is still helping us now.
So what might we do with anxiety?
There is nothing wrong with wanting relief from anxiety. When it becomes overwhelming or starts interfering with everyday life, reducing it may be exactly what we need.
But perhaps we don't have to see anxiety simply as something that needs to be eliminated. It is part of being human, and it can alert us, prepare us and draw our attention to things that matter. At the same time, it can become disproportionate, persistent or overwhelming, particularly when our attempts to manage it begin to restrict our lives.
Perhaps the more useful question isn't always “How do I make this feeling go away?” but “What is happening for me right now, and what might this feeling be telling me?”
Sometimes anxiety needs calming. Sometimes it needs understanding. And sometimes, before either of those things, it simply needs us to notice that it is there.
If anxiety has started to feel difficult to understand or manage on your own, counselling can offer a space to slow things down and explore what might be happening beneath the surface. You don't have to arrive with all the answers; sometimes having someone alongside you can make it easier to begin making sense of things.
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