If you’re reading this, I’m guessing that you have been through times when you would happily pay big money to feel relaxed just for a few minutes.
Then one day you discover that you ARE feeling relaxed. Then you get anxious because it doesn’t feel “right”. True story. This happened to me many times during my recovery, and it happens to many people in our community every day.
Why? Why does this happen? Why does not feeling anxious make us anxious in some cases?
There are two explanations I can offer for this. The first is that anxiety is triggered by waiting for the other shoe to drop. When you have spent such a long time battling anxiety and trying to get away from it, feeling like it attacks you constantly, when it does subside it’s normal to remain on guard and ready for it to return. That state of readiness and guardedness is in fact anxiety, so you stop feeling anxious, then get anxious because you are anticipating being anxious again. This is quite common.
The second reason that we might feel anxious about being relaxed is that after so long in a continuously tense state, relaxation can feel “empty”. I used to call it feeling “floaty” or detached. Not in a DP/DR way. But it would feel like my body was both heavy and light at the same time, or sometimes the best word I could use to describe the sensation was “hollow”. Being in a physically relaxed state, augmented by a mentally calm state, meant that I just felt different from head to toe. When you are afraid your own body, it becomes natural to not only scan for changes, but to closely evaluate and judge every physical state you encounter.
Just when you start to come to grips with the idea that feeling tense, wound up, and anxious is OK, that feeling goes away, leaving you to analyze and evaluate this brand new feeling … NOT being anxious or worked up. It quickly leads to questions like:
“Is this right? Am I supposed to feel this way?”
“Why do my legs feel so light right now?”
“Can I even feel my hands?”
“Is something happening to me?”
Some of this inner dialogue and analysis might be familiar to you. Isn’t it interesting that feeling NO anxiety will trigger some of the same questions and catastrophic “what if” thinking patterns that we experience when at the height of anxiety?
An anxious brain is never satisfied, is it? It simply must scan for threats, and when it scans, it finds them even where none exist. NOT feeling anxious is different and different is wrong and wrong is dangerous so … anxiety.
The key here - in my opinion - is to accept the FACT that all states are acceptable. I mean within reason of course. Nobody is telling you that bleeding from your upper thigh because you’ve had a chain saw accident is acceptable. But in general, in the absence of actual physical impairment or medical danger, ALL states are acceptable and even permissible. Humans experience a very wide range of physical, mental, and emotional states, so all are allowed. We are designed for all of them, even the ones we do not like.
It’s OK to get anxious because you’re not anxious. But when you do, remind yourself that your job in that moment is to allow that state and to move through it so that you can learn that there is no threat and that you are OK when you feel that way.
If someone told me on my 16th birthday that one day I would be writing an article for thousands of people to explain that its safe to relax, I would have never believed it. Yet … here we are. Brains are so strange.
Have you listened to this week’s episode of The Anxious Truth podcast? Check it out out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or my website and YouTube channel.
124. Feeling Anxious About Being Relaxed