Anxiety & The Impossible Task of Doing Nothing
Anxiety demands a response, anytime, anywhere.
It can be when you’re enjoying a party to then receive a text that reads “we need to talk.” It can be when you’re at work, and you receive an ambiguous email from your supervisor. No matter where you are, even the smallest notification can ignite an anxious response in your brain. Your environment fades to the background and your worry becomes all consuming. Once that happens, it’s difficult to do anything other than directly address the text or the email.
Your brain is calling for action so you may find relief from the discomfort. This action might be dropping everything to answer your friend’s text or ignoring your supervisor’s email until you absolutely must address them in their office.
However, there are consequences to doing exactly what anxiety wants.
The Consequences of Acting on Anxiety
If you react out of anxiety, then you are likely stuck in a cycle of dependence on action to manage your emotions.
If we stop everything to respond to that ambiguous email or text, and only after can we feel relief, we are teaching our brain that we can only feel better if everything in our life is okay. However, life often doesn’t go our way, and presents plenty of opportunities to meet our brain's anxious demands.
It’s important that we find methods of managing anxiety without acting on it. Not only when life goes smoothly, but in the midst of issues.
As a disclaimer, there are situations where it is appropriate to respond to fear. This could be running from a rabid dog or dodging a veering car. However, those scenarios are important to discern from reactions to the experience of anxiety, a response that is out of proportion to the threat posed.
Acting on anxiety leaves you with two primary consequences:
#1. You develop a reliance on external factors to manage your emotions.
#2. You reinforce your trust in your anxious perception of threats.
If you wish to elude reinforcing anxious expectations and becoming externally dependent to feel better, it's time to learn to manage your emotions independently.
Oftentimes, that means choosing not to react to anxiety.
The Benefits of Doing Nothing
If you have experienced long-term anxiety, doing nothing may feel worse than being anxious.
This is because you have evaded the expected consequences of your fears by acting on it. Thus, your facade of safety has been created by your response to stressors, not by managing your emotions.
Instead, I charge you with the impossible task of doing nothing.
This doesn’t mean forever, this means for stopping yourself 10-15 minutes whenever you feel that anxious drive to immediately address an issue.
If you receive a text from your friend that reads, “we need to talk” this means setting a timer for 15 minutes on your phone, putting it down, and working through the emotion. This doesn’t mean doom-scrolling or ignoring the emotion, but looking at it, breathing deeply, and working through it. I know it sounds like torture, but it’s for the purpose of rewiring your brain. By taking this time to delay yourself from addressing a stressor, you give yourself two opportunities:
#1. To accept, approach, and manage feelings of anxiety.
#2. To separate your actions from your feelings of alarm.
Practice & Patience
Naturally, this practice is going to be difficult.
An anxious brain is used to believing that terrible things will occur if you don't immediate action. Taking a 15 minute break will challenge this expectation, but for the better. In that 15 minutes, your alertness rises but then also falls before your timer ends.
You may have attempts that only go five minutes, but that’s okay. Take this exercise at your pace. Be patient with yourself, and start looking at your emotions in the eyes to manage them, not avoid them.
