Photo by George Pagan III on Unsplash
Just like everything in life, it’s a little more complicated than a “yes or no” answer.
I’ve had seasons of such intense anxiety that I thought I was dying. Literally. And it wasn’t all situational or tied to anything I could figure out. I would tell myself “stop worrying!” and “I’m anxious over nothing, this is ridiculous!” and “there is nothing for me to be anxious about, nothing!” and on and on. No matter what I told myself, how I distracted myself, or what I read/thought/did differently, nothing worked. The physical symptoms of my anxiety got so bad that they didn’t feel like anxiety at all, and I convinced myself I had a debilitating, incurable disease that doctors kept misdiagnosing:
- Muscle twitches all over my body that would last for weeks.
- Chest pain and tightness.
- Numbness or tingling in my limbs.
- Heart palpitations.
- Panic attacks.
- Stomach, gastrointestinal issues.
- BAD acid reflux and trouble swallowing.
- Insomnia, nightmares, trouble staying asleep, waking up tired.
- Headaches, neckaches, backaches, lots and lots of ACHES.
- Tension and clicking in my jaw.
- Tinnitus (ringing or thumping in my ears).
- Strong sense of impending doom/death.
**And right here is where I type a mandatory disclaimer: Listing my own symptoms, and talking about physical anxiety sensations, does not constitute medical advice, and it does not provide you with a mental health diagnosis.**
Here’s a wise suggestion that I wish I would have heeded whenever my anxiety spiraled out of control and I texted my friends “I think I have multiple sclerosis” (or any other chronic illness): Stay off WebMD, MedlinePlus, Mayo Clinic, Harvard Health, etc.
I mean, unless it’s super helpful to you because you’re looking for….
No, wait, it’s not super helpful to you. It’s just not. Google your symptoms and the search results are going to be filled with information about why you have cancer or something else that’s super scary. But just like my disclaimer above, information found on the internet is not equivalent to an actual diagnosis. Searching the internet doesn’t take the place of a trained medical doctor with years of education, experience, and the ability to use diagnostic equipment to rule out actual illness or disease, and I recommend you seek medical help if you’re experiencing physical symptoms so they can rule things out. Diagnosing yourself with a mental health issue or anxiety problem is also not helpful. If you’re truly struggling with anxiety issues, reading articles, books, or working with a life coach who claims to be able to stop your anxiety will not take the place of a good counselor who has years of psychological training via a graduate school degree, 3,000 hours of clinical experience, annual continuing education requirements, and a regulated licensing process that must be reviewed and renewed by a state board every 1-2 years. (Don’t get me wrong, there are some great folks out there who offer life coaching services that are helpful, but anyone promising you a quick fix for complex psychological and emotional issues or disorders is not one of them.)
It’s so easy to get sucked into an internet black-hole when you’re feeling anxious. You tell yourself “I’m just looking for more information. I need to know what’s wrong with me.” So, you Google symptoms and read through chat forums where people discuss worst-case scenarios that came true in real life. Or you read about miracle programs and cures that make promises they can’t keep.
That kind of coping is unhealthy because it worsens anxiety and increases fear. It also gets you in the habit of looking for and expecting the other shoe to drop, or the rug to get pulled out from under you, just when you thought things were okay. You may also convince yourself that you’re defective, and anxiety is the worst thing ever, and you’re never going to be able to stop it.
Those things are also not true. I am speaking from my own experience of learning to manage anxiety, and from my professional experience of helping women to manage theirs, too.
Anxiety exists on a spectrum that’s different for everyone. There’s the normal end of anxiety, a natural and helpful process your body engages to tell you “hey, something’s up.” There’s also the debilitating and acute end of the anxiety spectrum, where you’re on high alert all the time, can’t sleep, can’t stop worrying, panic attacks become common, or you experience a lot of the physical symptoms I talked about earlier. (And by the way, I don’t have those physical symptoms anymore.) And just like some people are more introverted, some people are also more prone to anxiety. That doesn’t mean that you can’t learn new ways of coping, or that you will always be this way and won’t change and grow. It’s also possible that you (like everyone else in the world) will experience seasons that are more stressful than others. A season doesn’t last forever.
Too often we want to beat anxiety, or get rid of it, or control it. And in my personal and professional opinion, it’s an unrealistic goal (despite whatever Facebook scammy advertisements pop up that claim you can do it in “12 sessions or less by enrolling in my Master Class.”) It’s just not that easy, and it shouldn’t be. A better goal is learning to manage anxiety while accepting it as a normal human process we go through when we’re uncomfortable. There is also tons of evidence to show that anxiety can worsen for women when hormones are fluctuating during menstruation. I am going to be writing a whole series on menstruation, perimenopause, and menopause in the future because NO YOU’RE NOT CRAZY when menstruation happens (or stops happening), but your hormone fluctuations might make you feel that way.
Lisa Damour, PhD, is one of my psychology crushes. I love her. (I’m a counselor, so that automatically means I’m a geek who has crushes on psychologists and PhDs, and because I love empowering women, all my psychological crushes happen to be female.) She writes a monthly adolescence column for The New York Times, and she’s authored some pretty fantastic books about girls that I wish everyone on the planet would read. Here’s a fairly long excerpt from her book Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls (2019) because I cannot write it any better than she already did:
Anxiety is a gift, handed down by evolution, to keep humans safe. Every one of us comes equipped with a sophisticated alarm system programmed deep in our brains. When we sense a threat, that alarm system triggers anxiety. And the discomfort of anxiety compels us to take steps to reduce or avoid the threat. To put it another way, our prehistoric ancestors who sprinted for the cave when they spotted a saber-toothed tiger survived to pass down their anxiety alarm genes to us. The caveperson who casually remarked, ‘Hey, check it out, that’s a really neat tiger’ did not.
Our anxiety alarm now rings in response to a wide range of modern-day threats. It goes off when we nearly have an accident while driving, when we hear a strange noise while alone in the house, or when our boss calls an unexpected meeting in the midst of layoffs at work. In addition to warning us about the threats in our surroundings, anxiety also alerts us to dangers from within. You know that uncomfortable feeling that bubbles up right before we say something we later regret? That’s anxiety trying to warn us to zip it. And you know that nagging sense that arises when we’re binge-watching Netflix instead of doing our taxes? That’s anxiety trying to keep us from having to pay the fines for filing late.
In short, anxiety works to protect us from the world and from ourselves.
Unfortunately, anxiety, like stress, has gotten a bad rap. Somewhere along the line we got the idea that emotional discomfort is always a bad thing. This turns out to be a very unhelpful idea. Psychological distress, like physical pain, serves as a finely tuned feedback system that helps us to course correct. Just as physical pain prompts us to stop touching a hot burner, emotional distress alerts us to pay attention to our choices. For example, if you always feel nervous before having lunch with a particular friend because you never know how she’s going to treat you, it’s probably time to reconsider that relationship.
So here’s the first thing we can do to help our daughters take control of anxiety: we can teach them that anxiety is often their friend (pp. 12-13).
Okay, so she said “take control of anxiety” which I already mentioned is unrealistic, so I’m just going to say I disagree with her wording – but the explanation of why anxiety is a helpful process is important to note. Getting rid of your anxiety means you’re shutting down a part of yourself that is trying to be helpful. Why would you want to do that?
Probably because you’ve been told that stress and anxiety are harmful and unhealthy (and there is a difference between stress and anxiety, which I’ll discuss in an upcoming post in this series). And that’s partly true. They can be unhealthy when there’s no reprieve, no rest, no peace, when you’re always stressed or anxious and it keeps you from sleeping, eating well, exercising, making decisions that help you, or accomplishing things you need to do, especially when you’re stressed and anxious over things that are realistically out of your control anyway.
And ironically, it tends to backfire whenever you try to control your anxiety and stress. Avoiding situations that are stressful or anxiety-provoking feels good in the short-term, but long-term you’re just reinforcing your fear and making it that much harder to confront what you’re afraid of the next time that situation comes up. Telling yourself “don’t be scared” or “don’t be anxious” can make you feel like a failure when it doesn’t work, which then makes you anxious about not being able to control your anxiety, and that feeds into more anxiety. It becomes a battle against yourself, which is never winnable.
I’m going to be writing several more posts on this topic Can I Control My Anxiety? The next blog post comes out June 20th when I’ll be talking to you about the difference between stress and anxiety, and the varied types of anxiety. You can also look forward to the rest of the series where I’ll discuss how anxiety tends to effect women and girls, and ways to manage anxiety. This is Part 1, so we’re just getting started!
Damour, L. (2019). Under pressure: Confronting the epidemic of stress and anxiety in girls. New York: Ballantine Books.
Recent Comments