What if Anxiety isn’t the Enemy?
Anytime we can listen to our true self and give it the care it requires, we do it not only for ourselves, but for the many others whose lives we touch.
-Parker Palmer
If you’re driving your car and the check engine light goes on, you might ignore it for a bit, maybe even for a few days, but eventually you’re going to wonder what might be wrong with the car. You might start by looking in the manual and trying to solve it yourself. You may end up taking it to a mechanic. What you don’t do is pretend the light isn’t on by covering it with tape. You don’t fill the gas tank and assume that will take care of the problem. You don’t change your route and hope that will fix the issue.
I’m a life-long anxiety sufferer. I come from a line of worried women. I’ve had panic attacks and serious bouts of agoraphobia. I have spent a lot of time masking my anxiety, ignoring it, belittling it and wishing it away. But in the past decade or so my relationship with it has slowly evolved. I’ve begun to see it as that check engine light. It’s an early warning sign that something is out of whack.
I’m noticing a big uptick in the number of friends and clients who are experiencing high to overwhelming levels of anxiety. Maybe this resonates with you? If so, I want to invite you to experiment with changing your relationship to anxiety and seeing it as an opportunity to listen. This is somewhat easier to do in either the early stages of anxiety, when you can still sort of reason with yourself, or the very late stages, when anxiety has stopped you in your tracks and you are desperate for a solution.
Here’s the thing: your anxiety is a messenger from your body. It’s trying to tell you something. What’s it trying to tell you?? That will differ from person to person and moment to moment. Sometimes my anxiety is gently asking me to drink WAY LESS caffeine. Oftentimes it’s asking me to take something off of my plate and to rest. If I find myself anxious over something I’ve seen on the news, my anxiety is almost certainly asking me to trade the news consumption and social media scrolling for some time in nature. When I am anxious about the future, my anxiety is suggesting I lean into uncertainty and surrender, reminding me that I have very little control over most everything.
Sometimes we take the car to the mechanic and they fix the problem but forget to turn off the check engine light. I think of this as chronic anxiety. The kind that starts by being a messenger but ends up staying on out of habit. This is when our brains rewire to accommodate the anxiety (this happens with chronic pain, too.) We can fix that wiring, but it sure is easier to listen to the anxiety before it gets to that stage, so I encourage you to start listening now and making changes that help bring more ease to your life.
And, I know, the world is a difficult place to be these days and we might convince ourselves that we can’t rest until everyone can rest. But I promise you, you won’t lose your conviction and passion because you listened to your own body and gave it what it was asking for. Learning to see your anxiety as a check engine light will give you the power to know when you need to pause and when you can go full throttle.