4 Ways to Change Your Relationship with Anxiety
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Some people are so good at avoiding their anxiety that it doesn’t appear they are anxious at all. Others show signs of being panicky. Some people are anxious about a very specific thing (such as a health issue) and others are anxious about their place in the world, how they are doing in life, the security of their relationships, or when the next disaster is going to happen and how they will cope. Some people are able to function well despite their anxiety and others feel frequently distracted, distressed, and can’t sleep well. Some repeatedly seek reassurance from friends and family while others become more introverted and avoidant.
Anxiety is definitely not one size fits all.
There are many techniques and approaches to address anxiety and different things work for different people. Some people really benefit from using counseling or psychotherapy to explore and process why they are anxious and to gain insight into the underlying factors that keep them feeling this way. Others benefit from tools and exercises that teach them to manage their anxious thoughts and feelings in a new way. I’ve found that many people need both of these approaches.
Some tools my clients have found helpful in managing anxiety are:
1) An Appointment for Anxiety
Schedule a regular time for worrying. With this tool, you find 15 or 30 minutes (or even an hour depending on how significant the issues are) and you schedule that time daily for worrying, just like any other appointment you might schedule. For example, everyday at 5:30pm for 30 minutes. Once you’ve set this schedule, every time you catch yourself worrying, you tell yourself you must wait until 5:30 to think about this concern any further. You can keep a list of your worries throughout the day if you feel you will need to reference it at 5:30. When 5:30 comes, you focus on your worries for 30 minutes (or whatever time frame you set), no matter what. A journal can be helpful if you’d like to write them out. You commit to this schedule every day until you begin to feel you don’t need it anymore (a sign that you don’t need it anymore may be forgetting more frequently about the worry or becoming bored with the worry and more relaxed about the concern). This creates a container for your worries so that they bleed less into the rest of your day. For many people it provides some comfort to know they have a time and place to worry and don’t have to resist their worries entirely. You may find this is a helpful way to manage concerns as a permanent, fixed part of your regular schedule or if it is an isolated worry, you may find that it begins to pass after some time and you no longer need to think about it.
2) “What Else Would I Be Worried About?”
If you are focused on one particular worry that is difficult to get over and it is a worry that you can’t do much about, it can be helpful to begin asking yourself “What would I be worried about if I was not worried about this?” You might find that your anxiety is a defense mechanism to avoid something else that is actually a problem that needs addressing. For example, if you are obsessed over a body part and feel it is not good enough, you might ask yourself: “If I wasn’t worried about my thighs/stomach/nose/fill in the blank, what would I be worried about?” It may be that you’re worried about failure in some other capacity, if you’re going to lose an important relationship, or if you’ll always be lonely. These are deeper questions that could be pursued and worked on in a more meaningful way, because fixing the body part is probably not going to solve these problems. Anytime you notice your thoughts ruminating on the issue, ask yourself this question.
3) The Self-Compassionate Approach
Sometimes it can be helpful to get more at ease with the anxiety itself. For instance, if you tend to be an anxious person, when you recognize that you are engaging in anxious thinking or behavior, say to yourself in an easy going, kind manner, “Of course, you’re anxious about this. That’s what you do.” The hope is that by accepting your anxiety, changing your relationship to it (rather than resisting it or punishing yourself for it), it allows you to be more comfortable with it, and your anxiety may diminish as a result. You can say, “Ok, so you’re anxious about this. It’s ok. You’re just trying to keep yourself safe.” This is an inner-compassionate approach to your anxiety.
4) Anxiety is Valuable Information
Anxiety is not a wrong feeling. It is information. Many people learned over time to deny or resist certain feelings or they never learned to understand what their feelings or instincts were trying to tell them or how to care for and respond to these feelings. For instance, if you feel angry at someone, but learned as a child that you weren’t allowed to be angry or were never taught how to respond effectively to your anger, your psyche may have compensated by becoming anxious instead. One example is: if I’m angry at you but I’m scared of confrontation or don’t know how to get my needs met by you, I might become more passive and my attempt to control these feelings might lead me to become anxious (about our relationship, about myself and my worth, or about something unrelated because that will distract me). This can become so automatic that you never identify the underlying feeling (in this example, anger) because you have learned to immediately feel anxiety instead, which, despite the distress it causes, may feel better than grappling with a more foreign, unfamiliar, scary feeling. So, remind yourself that the anxiety your feeling is information and see if you can figure out what legitimate information the feeling is trying to give you. You can then ask yourself whether the anxiety is out of proportion to the actual problem (maybe your anxiety has become louder over the years because you haven’t been able to respond to this information effectively). Journaling can be very helpful in trying to understand the feeling/information and to respond accordingly.
A Resource: Feeling Good
If you are interested in cognitive behavior therapy, which offers a lot of tools for managing anxious thoughts and feelings, many of my patients have found the book Feeling Good very helpful.
It’s an oldie but a goodie! You’ll see from the many positive reviews!
Counseling for Anxiety in New York CIty
Therapy can be really helpful with anxiety. It can provide a space to talk it through as well as some direction on what tools might be helpful for you. A pattern of anxious experience is usually not solved overnight, but learning more about yourself, gaining insight into the underlying factors that contribute to your anxiety, nurturing unmet needs, and gaining new tools to address the problems and manage the anxiety can help you make meaningful progress.
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About Melissa King
I am a licensed mental health counselor in New York City with a psychotherapy office in the neighborhood of Murray Hill in Manhattan. Find out more about me here. I'd love to hear from you. Email me if there's a topic you'd like to read about here.
**Information on this site is not intended to replace medical advice and does not constitute a psychotherapeutic relationship with the reader.
