Yesterday we looked at the conflict created when you are trying to hold on to things that you say work for your anxiety, while you’re still trying to find things that work for your anxiety. We touched on the idea that the soothing and calming rituals designed to save you from discomfort are likely not working enough, or are not working all the time. This is why you read yesterday’s edition of The Anxious Morning, and why you’re reading this one too.
At the risk of being overly aggressive, I’d ask you why you need this information if you already know what works for you?
When people get frustrated because I steer our conversations away from the usual coping and soothing techniques, I get that. Here’s why I do that and will continue to do that.
When you insist that you must take special action to avoid feeling anxious, to manage bodily functions that were never designed to be managed, or to engineer a life completely free of any possible “trigger”, you are rewarding your brain for sounding fight or flight alarms inappropriately. When your brain keeps throwing you into a panic for no obvious reason because the panic itself has become its own trigger, responding to that alarm with all kinds of saving and rescue strategies is an admission that the alarm is justified and that it should continue to sound. When you treat your own body and mind as a danger that you must be saved from, it will continue drag you around as it likely has for some time now.
I know it seems like common sense to try to make yourself feel better immediately, or to do everything possible to try to stop your heart from racing or your mind from saying scary things to you. But none of recovery is common sense at first and often the things that you think you’re supposed to do are the very things that make it worse for you. In this case, hanging on to those things doesn’t make any sense, even while letting them go doesn’t make any sense either.
Assume that every time you try to drive to your friend’s house you wind up stuck on the same dead end street on the wrong side of town. The streets you drive on are lovely and make you feel good, but then you wind up stuck anyway. You don’t like that. You want to go the right way! You ask for directions that will get you to your friend’s house. What would happen if you ignored the directions you are given and continued to insist that the route you’ve been taking is working for you because the scenery is nice? Is it possible to somehow combine your dead-end route with these new directions to get to your friend’s house? It is not. You can’t drive down the dead end and also get to your friend at the same time.
The only way to solve that problem would be to stop taking the old route, and start taking a new one, even if that new route isn’t as pretty and might have some bumpy roads and traffic along the way.
You cannot hold on to soothing, calming, escaping, and avoiding as a primary anxiety strategy and also use facing, acceptance, floating, surrender, or willful tolerance to get better. One strategy leads one way. The other leads a totally different way. Pick one.
I’m going to say a thing here that I say often. This is a raw deal. But it is the deal we have been given. So take a few minutes to think about this even if you find the idea ridiculous and distasteful.
87. You Can't Hold On To Old Habits