Letting Go of Anxiety: A Practical Approach
Hi all,
I hope that everyone in Toronto is taking care as we shift into the colder months ahead. I wanted to share a quick and effective strategy that I’ve been reflecting on lately, drawn from The Generalized Anxiety Disorder Workbook by Melissa Robichaud and Michel Dugas. This is a wonderful resource that a colleague working out of the Centre for Addictions and Mental Health’s (CAMH) Structured Psychotherapy Program shared with me.
This book outlines the symptoms that folks with Generalized Anxiety Disorder experience, and reviews several concepts to reduce anxiety, including learning how to embrace uncertainty.
One concept from the book that I’ve been sharing in my sessions is this: in order to reduce worry, we must first give ourselves permission to do so.
I want to invite you in this moment to take a comforting breath, unclench your jaw, and relax your shoulders. What do you notice happens? Enhancing awareness and giving permission to let go is followed by physical relief in the body.
In a similar vein, it is only when we let go of the idea that anxiety is useful that our bodies can experience a sense of relief.
Letting go of anxiety requires permission that it is safe to do so.
As humans have unfortunately tricked ourselves into believing that anxiety is useful, and we hold onto it as a way of trying to maintain control or show we care.
As outlined by Robichaud and Dugas, here are some of the ways our society has conflated anxiety with positive attributes in a way that ultimately causes suffering, and questions you can ask yourself to challenge these distorted beliefs:
Worry is portrayed as a positive personality trait – it shows that you are caring, loving, contentious, attentive to detail, and concerned about others.
This is especially true if you grew up in a household where worry was a way that caregivers expressed love/affection (“I worry because I love you!”).
Questions you can ask yourself to challenge this belief: Can you display this positive trait (kindness, lovingness, contentiousness) without worrying? Do you know someone with these positive traits that doesn’t worry? Have others told you that worry is a negative personality trait?
Worry helps with problem solving - and helps address with whatever you’re dealing with effectively.
Questions you can ask yourself to challenge this belief: Are the worries actually solved or do you simply go over them in your head? Are you confusing worry with action? Has worrying about problems ever interfered with your ability to actually solve them?
Research shows that when we worry we are in the fight/flight/freeze part of our brains, and we actually can’t access the frontal-cortex, where effective problem solving occurs.
Worrying provides motivation - If you worry about something that’s coming up, you may be motivated to prepare.
Questions you can ask yourself to challenge this belief: Do you know people who are motivated and who don’t worry excessively? Has worry ever interfered with your ability to accomplish things?
Worrying about something prepares you for something bad to happen - For example, If you worry about getting fired, it will render you better able to cope with the feelings of loss, embarrassment and fear you’d experience if that ever happened.
Questions you can ask yourself to challenge this belief: Does worrying about something in advance make it less painful if it actually happens, or do you just live the hypothetical experience many times over? Have you ever coped well with a situation that happened unexpectedly? (e.g. one that you did not have time to worry about beforehand?).
Worry can prevent negative outcomes - For example, whenever you worry about going on a plane, the flight is smooth with no incidents or turbulence. Your brain tricks you into thinking that you somehow caused the flight to go smoothly because you focused on it.
This way of thinking relates to needing to have control over a situation, and an intolerance to the fact that we cannot, in fact, affect all the outcomes in our lives.
Negative outcomes are inevitable, and the idea is to build the belief that whatever it is that comes your way, you can handle it.
Questions you can ask yourself to challenge this belief: Have you ever worried about something only to have a negative outcome occur? Can you consider that the outcome of many situations does not rely on whether you worried about it or not?
While we trick ourselves into thinking that worrying helps us, what worrying does in actually is take away opportunities.
Sometimes we are so worried about something that we avoid it altogether, or we are so worried that we can’t attend to the thing we care about with a calm and grounded energy.
Sometimes when we are worried we avoid taking chances, and we lose the opportunity to learn that when something goes wrong, you can handle it (this is the principle of resiliency!).
It’s very common for people who worry to have their worries jump from one topic to the next, and there is rarely a reprieve. In a paradoxical way, we worry in order to keep ourselves feeling safe. But when we worry, we don’t have control. All we have is anxiety.
I hope that the next time you experience worry you can consider if you’ve tangled worry with love, care, or motivation, and that you can give yourself permission to let go, just a little bit. Your body will thank you!
Wishing everyone a restful November,
Jenn