I read a lot lately about anxiety and one thing that seems to come up is to not resist or fight back the anxious feelings. Instead we should embrace them. I am trying to wrap my mind around this concept but I am not sure how to proceed.
Any ideas of how to just let the anxiety be and embrace it? I cannot just sit there and let myself freak out this can’t be right.
I know, it's a strange concept to get your head around when you've been fighting anxiety back for years.
It's like a lot of things in life, if someone was pressuring you into something you didn't want to do, you'd fight back because it's not you and you shouldn't feel bad about pushing back against anxiety as it's as natural as breathing.
The difference with anxiety is that you're in a sense fighting with yourself. Your brain is a wonderfully complex thing but it does like to try and trick you with anxiety as I'm sure you know. The main point of anxiety is that logic and reason tend to go straight out of the window. Do you ever find that you'll be having anxious horrible thoughts and feelings and no matter how much you try and inform yourself that you're alright that it doesn't work a lot of the time? If that was the case then no one would suffer with anxiety as we could just talk back to it and it'd switch off.
Another way of looking at it is that you're having an internal struggle where two equal parts of you are arguing against one another. Because as strong as you try to make your logical reasoning against the illogical reasoning of anxiety, the illogical part comes back at you as equally reasonable, both of those thought processes are coming from you whether consciously or subconsciously, they can be somewhat equal in their power to overwhelm you.
Now there's two things I'm definitely not saying here. I'm not saying that you shouldn't be logical in your responses. I believe in mindfulness, positive thinking and logical reasoning. Cognitive behavioral therapy is about retraining your thought processes to arrive at a reasonable and logical conclusion. I'm also not saying that you should just think, oh I feel this incredible anxiety and I'll endure it for hours, weeks and days and it'll magically disappear.
The reason why you should welcome your anxiety with open arms is for two important reasons.
1) Negative feedback loops. If you feel anxious for no reason (and medical reasons have been ruled out) and you start to validate it you're empowering your anxiety. This isn't your fault as anxiety by design is there for us to question it and to try to understand what the red flag is. There is a cycle there that every time we validate it as "oh I'm anxious, something is wrong, what is it, I can't find a reason, somethings wrong!", we are reinforcing the anxiety. The key with acceptance and enduring those horrible anxious feelings is that you are you signalling to your brain that "there is no threat here, I'm just walking down the street, stand down". This is a process, if you think about how long your anxiety has been consciously and subconsciously reinforced, it is going to take some time and exposure to undo this and to build positive feedback loops.
2) I would imagine your mind and body have become hypersensitive to feelings of anxiety whereby any slight disturbance or intrusive thought starts to move the slow train of anxiety that speeds up and before you know it every single nerve ending in your body is trying to tell you something is wrong, you're convinced that there is a red flag, you don't know what but you're on standby mode waiting for it. The reason why you accept all of this along with the anxiety is because you need to become comfortable with being uncomfortable. Those nerve endings will start to quite down because of it's acceptance of them, rather than tension through fighting back mentally between somethings wrong, nothings wrong, somethings wrong, nothings wrong.
As you move forward, keep in mind a few things. By no means should you now place an expectation on yourself that as you keep doing this, it will become magically resolved. If you have a great day dealing with your anxiety by allowing it, then that's fantastic. If you have a terrible day and you feel like its completely floored you, that's fine. It by noway means that it's beating you or becoming stronger. Having great days and bad days with anxiety is always still a step forward, it is never a step backwards.
You facing it everyday is the step forward, and even if it doesn't feel like it when you're in that anxious state, you're wearing it down and you're reclaiming territory.
I thoroughly enjoyed your explanation, it made a lot of sense to me. I am grateful that you took your time to write this answer. Like you have mentioned, the slightest thought or feeling of discomfort does trigger my anxiety and I become overwhelmed quickly. I feel hypersensitive to everything around me and in my body/mind. The hardest part will be to expose myself to my triggers and reason with myself while accepting the discomfort.
I can't wait to become better with this skill. I need to desensitize myself gradually.
Thank you so much bbanxiety! Have a good night!
One way I’m going to embrace my anxiety is to be more open about it. Everyone fights the battles alone, or at least that’s what it feels like for most. But the whole embracing it helps to make a team, so we know we’re not alone! I’m getting a tattoo that means “breathe deeply” just to remind myself that I suffer with anxiety, and I’m a warrior along with a victim but I won’t let myself dwell in this, I’ll embrace the fact that everyday I fight my demons and I put them to rest just for them to wake up again, and that’s okay. Because I’ll fight them for as long as it takes me!
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