Anxiety: A user's guide
“Anxiety is the price of the life you were meant to live,” said psychologist James Hollis. “And resigned cynicism the cost of failing to live it.”
If you’re serious about building something new, about stretching yourself into areas you’ve never gone before, more than fundraising, product strategy or operations, your success will be a function of how you interact with the anxiety that is sure to arise.
But as much as we train entrepreneurs how to raise money, groom product backlogs, or set up OKRs, there’s very little training on how to interact with anxiety skillfully.
For starters, I learned in my 30s that persistent anxiety is often exacerbated by a lack of vitamins B6, B12, or Magnesium (a little nugget that would have been great to know in my 20s). And obviously sleep, exercise, and diet play a role as well.
But I’ve found it goes deeper than that.
Working skillfully with your anxiety has everything to do with your relationship to the complicated emotion.
Anxiety: A user’s guide
“In high school they taught me chemistry and biology / but nobody ever taught me how to cope with anxiety.” – Big Sean
Anxiety is our biological alarm system. It’s the canary in the coal mine warning us when something is wrong, needs attention, or is even downright dangerous. Perhaps more than any other emotion, anxiety has kept us alive throughout the millennia.
And perhaps more than any other emotion, anxiety is misunderstood.
So many people want to “get rid of” or “overcome” their anxiety. But this is counterproductive. Resisting anxiety keeps it stuck in place and creates tension in the nervous system that builds up over time. Resisting anxiety not only does more harm than good, it actually causes more anxiety in the long run.
But what else are we supposed to do?
Today, we’ll answer that question. We’ll discuss the proper role of anxiety, its two different types and how to work with each, and the systematic approach that will allow you to progressively decrease the amount of anxiety you feel in daily life. Without drugs or disassociation.
If you’ve ever wanted your anxiety to just go away, know that you’re not alone.
This is for you.
Interpreting Anxiety
The first step toward helping anxiety resolve is understanding why it’s shown up in the first place. To do that, you have to get curious about the emotion. You “lean into the sharp points,” as Buddhist monk Pema Chodron has said, and explore what the emotion has to tell you.
It’s tempting to imagine that if you think hard enough, you’ll be able to understand what your anxiety is about. As if all our anxiety were purely conscious and logical. But the subconscious mind processes 27,500x more information than the conscious mind. And most of that data is processed within our entire nervous systems, not just our brains (see image of our entire thinking apparatus below). In fact, the largest nerve in the human body, the vagus nerve, carries 10x more information up from body to head, than it does down from head to body.
No wonder it’s common to have a strong feeling about something you can’t quite put your finger on. Call it intuition, a hunch, spidey sense, or even in some cases anxiety. But whatever you do, don’t ignore it.
The way to access this treasure trove of data in your subconscious mind? Follow this process and drop into your body (adapted from Internal Family Systems):
Sit still, preferably alone, and consciously stop movement and distractions.
Allow yourself to fully feel your anxiety, both emotionally and phenomenologically (body sensations).
Let go of any story you might have and simply feel what there is to feel. If you have a resistance to this process, understand that this emotion is here to help you. It’s some part of you trying to help another part of you stay safe. Thank it for doing its job. Do this for at least a few minutes.
Direct your attention to the sensory feelings of your anxiety, and ask it what it wants you to know about itself.
Don’t jump in to answer that question or try to think of the right answer. This is for your emotion to answer, not your mind. Simply clear your mind, open up, and allow the feeling itself to communicate (it may use words, images, videos, memories, and simple knowing).
The function of anxiety is to get us to pay closer attention to something. We may not know what specifically, at least not immediately, but our curiosity will provide us with a sense of direction toward the nexus of our anxiety, perhaps in a person or place. And sometimes, simply asking the feeling what it wants us to know can even provide a direct answer. If we’re ready to hear it.
Although it can take a couple sessions to get comfortable with this method, I find that most people quickly become adept at listening to their anxiety, and are surprised by how communicative the emotion is when properly heard and seen.
And what you’ll find, when you become intimate with your anxiety in this way, is that it usually falls into one of two distinct types: functional and patterned.
Functional anxiety serves an immediate purpose. It’s trying to tell you something important about an issue that you need to address right now. Patterned anxiety is not attached to a thing you need to address in the moment but is instead generated based on a set of subconscious patterns running in the background of your mind. Usually patterns that were installed way back when you were young.
Interpreting your anxiety is critical, because once you know which kind of anxiety you’re dealing with, you can take appropriate steps.
If it’s Functional Anxiety
Functional anxiety is what you feel when you wonder if you left the stove on or if you forgot to lock your car. It’s what you feel when you find out you’re going to run out of runway in six months, and you know you have to rejigger your financial proforma.
Functional anxiety represents 90% of the anxiety that most people experience day-to-day.
Resolving functional anxiety is straightforward: you need to take action. Immediately. Go check on the stove. Run out to the car and confirm it’s locked. Get that revised proforma done. Because if you’re dealing with functional anxiety, you’ll feel that anxiety until you take the action it’s demanding of you.
This is a feature, not a bug. Functional anxiety is how your nervous system makes sure you don’t burn the house down or blissfully steer your company into a brick wall. In fact, once you turn off the stove, you should make sure to take a moment to thank your amazingly helpful emotion and all the damage it prevented.
Sometimes, a situation arises in which functional anxiety alerts you to something that can’t be addressed immediately. In those cases it’s useful to break the overall solution into its component parts and figure out which of those parts you CAN do now. Then, do those parts. The act of beginning to resolve the issue can have the same dampening effect on your anxiety as resolving it entirely.
There’s a world of difference between being in the shit and being in the shit with a plan in motion.
So if, upon examination, your anxiety points to an action you can take right now, take it.
But what if it doesn’t?
If it’s patterned anxiety
Ten percent of the time, the anxiety you feel won’t have an immediate solution. This type of anxiety is called patterned anxiety, and is anchored to your past experiences.
Patterned anxiety feels familiar, and for good reason: it’s a well-worn thought or feeling that’s created when someone is young, and then it gets reinforced many times over the years. The typical situation goes like this: Kid (3-8yo) experiences a strong hurt and because of that hurt learns something about themselves or the world: “The world is dangerous” or “I’m not good enough” or another doozy like that. To avoid ever feeling that hurt again, kid then subconsciously sets up an adaptive behavioral pattern (like feeling anxiety/fear to keep from putting themselves in situations in which they might get similarly hurt) to steer him/herself away from that possibility.
These types of patterns are incredibly adaptive to a young kid. They protect a defenseless child from the things that have hurt them the most, keeping them safe and ensuring their survival. Whether you can identify one of these adaptive behavior patterns right away or not, we all have them. And even though you may wish they would go away, the feelings associated with patterned anxiety are deeply precious to a part of you that has historically been responsible for your safety.
Patterned anxiety is trying to shield us from the danger of feeling something (usually some form of hurt, anger, or sadness). But unlike functional anxiety, the thing that it’s protecting us from is not actual danger, but remembered danger. And since danger from the past can no longer actually hurt us, we have to approach it in a different way.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. – Franklin D. Roosevelt
To allow our anxiety to complete itself and transition into something else – as is the intended path of all emotions – we must do the courageous work of feeling both our anxiety, and the thing from which it is protecting us, head on.
There are a number of really useful modalities for approaching this work, from those described in Living Untethered, Existential Kink, and The Upper Limit Problem, to The Turnaround of Desire, Conscious Leadership Group’s Commitment #3, and yes, IFS. Each of these modalities describes a method through which you can reorient toward your anxiety, and rather than trying to avoid or manage it, feel it deeply and completely.
And each one generally comes down to the following process:
Get quiet
Notice the anxiety
Notice your desire to get rid of it
Relax your desire to get rid of it
Feel the anxiety fully. Let it get larger, closer, knowing that doing so is helping you to feel it to completion.
Other unpleasant emotions may unfold from the anxiety. Feel those intentionally in the same way.
Notice your fundamental okayness, while deeply immersed in a cocktail of unpleasant emotions. Notice how you are not yourself those emotions, but are instead the one experiencing them.
Notice how the emotions shift and evolve and, eventually, lessen.
As a person who’s worked with patterned anxiety (the really sucky kind) for my entire adult life, I’ve tried all the resources linked above. I mostly use IFS with clients because I find people appreciate the sense of agency it gives them (as opposed to simply being overwhelmed by challenging emotions), but they all work, to various degrees. You may vibe better with one than the others, so I encourage you to experiment, either on your own or with a professional coach trained in these methodologies.
No matter which method you use, the key to shifting patterned anxiety is to feel the emotions you’ve avoided feeling for most of your life, however long it takes. Because once your emotions have been fully experienced, and feel fully seen and understood, the part of you that has been feeling them can finally relax.
The unique challenge, and reward, of emotional work
The work of processing patterned anxiety is not pleasant. The last thing someone who’s battling anxiety wants to hear is “lean into the anxiety. Feel it mawr!” There’s a reason that Xanax and the like have become so popular in our culture. It’s much easier to simply slap a really powerful bandaid on top of the problem than it is to deal with the root cause. There’s a reason so many people simply shove down their feelings in the name of logical progress.
That’s because those approaches can work. Only, they come with a high cost.
The human psyche has only one emotional volume knob, so when you mute the intensity of your anxiety – whether through medicine or disassociation – you also mute your joy, excitement, and everything else.
I’ve been there. I’ve been medicated. I’ve worked my way off it. I’ve struggled with chronic anxiety, and I’ve worked my way through it. And I’ve helped numerous CEOs do the same.
The cost of feeling your anxiety fully in the way I describe above may feel high. But the cost of not feeling it is much higher.
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