Anxiety: Beyond the Obvious

What is anxiety trying to say? The question seems strange, because most of us learned to treat anxiety as an enemy to be silenced. Breathe deeply. Meditate. Exercise. Avoid caffeine. Sleep better. All of these things help, and I'm not saying to abandon them. But none of them answers the question. They only lower the volume. And sometimes lowering the volume is exactly what anxiety doesn't need.

I don't want to romanticize anxiety. It makes people sick, it disables, it wears down the body. It isn't a gentle teacher. But it isn't just a manufacturing defect either. It's a signal. And signals, when we only smother them, tend to come back louder. What I'm trying to learn is to hear the signal before turning it off.

The obvious everyone already knows

The obvious thing about anxiety is that it's uncomfortable. Everyone knows. Everyone has felt it. The heart races, breathing shortens, the mind jumps from scenario to scenario, the body prepares for something that may never happen. It's an old response, useful in situations of real danger, misfit in situations of imagined danger. The obvious thing is that we want it to pass.

And, because we want it to pass, we do everything to make it pass. We avoid the situation that causes anxiety. We distract ourselves. We distract ourselves with the phone, with the series, with work, with food, with anything. The obvious thing is that distraction works for a while. The problem is that it doesn't solve. It only postpones. And what is postponed, like almost everything in life, comes back.

What anxiety is trying to say

Here begins the beyond the obvious. Anxiety, when it isn't clinical, is usually a sign of something. It isn't always the same thing. Each person has their own. But there are some questions anxiety tends to be asking, and that we rarely stop to hear.

The first is: what are you avoiding? Anxiety usually shows up before something we don't want to face. A difficult conversation. A postponed decision. A project that hasn't started. A feeling that doesn't want to be felt. Anxiety is the body warning that there's something ahead that needs to be looked at — and that we're trying to dodge.

The second is: what are you carrying that isn't yours? Much anxiety is born from expectations we took on without noticing. Expectations from family, from work, from image, from comparison. We carry what others expect, what we imagine others expect, what we think we should be. And the weight isn't ours. But the anxiety is.

The third is: what are you trying to control that you can't? Anxiety loves the future. Loves what hasn't happened yet, what might happen, what could happen. And the future, by definition, isn't under our control. Anxiety is the body trying to control the uncontrollable — and failing, and trying again, and failing again.

What happens when we only silence it

When we only silence anxiety, without hearing what it's saying, three things tend to happen. The first is that it comes back. Maybe lower, for a while. Maybe in another shape. But it comes back, because the cause wasn't treated. We only turned off the alarm. The fire continues.

The second is that we lose information. Anxiety, when heard, says things we wouldn't know otherwise. It says a relationship isn't well. It says a job doesn't make sense. It says a decision needs to be made. It says a limit needs to be set. If we only silence it, we lose the message.

The third is that we learn not to feel. And not feeling isn't the same as being well. It's only being anesthetized. The person who learned to silence anxiety without listening tends, over time, to silence other things too. Joy. Intuition. Righteous anger. Necessary sadness. The silence of anxiety becomes the silence of everything.

A question I carry

I carry a question since I started paying attention to my own anxiety: what is it trying to tell me that I don't want to hear? It isn't a question that solves. It's a question that listens.

Sometimes the answer is simple: I'm anxious because I have a conversation to have and I'm avoiding it. Sometimes it's deeper: I'm anxious because I'm trying to control something that doesn't depend on me. Sometimes it's older: I'm anxious because I carry expectations that aren't mine from a long time ago. Each answer asks for a different action. None of them asks for silence alone.

I'm not saying that hearing anxiety solves anxiety. It doesn't. Clinical anxiety needs treatment, and treatment isn't weakness. What I'm saying is that, when anxiety isn't only clinical, it's usually a messenger. And we can choose between hearing the message and continuing to try to kill the messenger.

The question I carry isn't how to stop feeling anxiety. It's what am I failing to hear when I only try to silence it? The answer doesn't always come. But the question changes the way of being with anxiety. It stops being only an enemy. It becomes, sometimes, a difficult conversation worth having.