Anxiety and Its Alternatives

Something terrible is about to happen; I don’t know exactly what it is but I do know that it’s going to be terrible, and not knowing what it is makes my fear of it all the more intense. If I were a smarter and more capable person I’d be able to understand this impending doom and do something about it, but unfortunately it’s just going to happen and I’m going to know myself as someone who is too weak and stupid to stop it. 

That feeling had a very deep hold of me for a very long time, and drinking heavily was the only way I knew how to intervene. I got drunk a lot because it worked! Being drunk and getting drunker was how I escaped those inescapable feelings of imminent calamity and relentless self-contempt, bringing immediate and reliable relief in a way that nothing else seemed capable of doing for me.

Drinking a lot left me (predictably) unstable, which had the unfortunate side-effect of directly causing some bad things to happen, which then served as further fuel for my anxiety (Bad things will happen soon! Something is wrong with me!), which in turn generated further urgency to drink. It became a self-sustaining cycle. 

Eventually, thanks to the hopeless-seeming collapse of my life and my unwelcome neurological tolerance for the substance, alcohol stopped working in the way that I needed it to and things really started getting messy. I found out the hard way that I had an even deeper unproductive solution to anxiety - I dealt with anxiety by *not* changing my life. Yes, I felt awful all the time and had no hope of ever getting better, but on some deep level I felt like taking any action at all would almost certainly make my life and my feelings even worse than they already were. Better to stay still and live in fear of change than to take action and make my worst fears possibly manifest themselves. I was attached to the suffering I knew, afraid of the all possible suffering that I couldn’t understand. 

I didn’t take any action to change until the pain of staying where I was at became greater than the imagined pain of changing. People in 12-step meetings call getting to that point the “Gift Of Desperation”, and sometimes refer to it by the first three letters of each of those words. But then what? I’d love to tell you that I bootstrapped my way right out of that situation, but in retrospect I’m not sure if doing so would really have been possible for me. I’ve grown to appreciate the importance and impact of individual responsibility over the years, but there were critical aspects of my growth that I simply could not have conjured in total isolation.

It all started from being *accepted and understood*, a key experience that 12-step groups offer to those in need of it. My anxiety was cut in half through other people showing me that they knew what I was feeling, that I wasn’t a deranged freak for experiencing those feelings and finding myself in my current situation. I still had to face my problems myself, but I didn’t have to face them alone - no matter what happened and no matter how badly I felt, I could move through life knowing that I would always have people there who were eager to connect with me and help me. 

It occurs to me that this runs counter to the American market imperative to distinguish yourself - customers and employers need to have a reason to give you money rather than giving money to the other guy, so you always have be working to make yourself different and better than those who are similar to you. If people “get” you then they will copy you, and the value you offer will be diffused away and the amount of money people are willing to pay you will dwindle, maybe even all the way down to nothing. If you aren’t working as hard as you can for as long as you can, know that somewhere someone very much like you is, and when they meet you they will beat you. 

I don’t want to cast myself as a helpless victim of Capitalism here, but I do want to assert that (for me) a deeper, longer-lasting kind of well-being couldn’t be found in value system that drives the relentless churn of market dynamism. I personally think that market logic has value in some domains of human life, but (in my experience) a single-minded focus on being a Good Businessperson can’t be the only thing it means to be a Good American. Besides, even if your single mission in life is to think of Bold New Ideas, they won’t be any good unless you can effectively communicate them and convince others of their value. How many geniuses have been written off as deranged just because they didn’t know how to communicate?

Anyway: a community and a collective conversation of growth has proven essential for me in my day-to-day quest to manage my anxiety, but I don’t spend all of my time interfacing with members of those growth communities. My encounters with those communities are a lot like being in a locker-room huddle, connecting and sharing strategies and results before going back out there to play the game again. When I’m playing the game of anxiety management on my own, the most effective strategy I have is “counter-framing action” - my anxiety frames my encounter with life in a way that constantly anticipates bad things happen, and so the deepest way to take that on is to take action to make good things happen instead. If I don’t know how to do that, I find people who seem to have it figured out and see what they do and maybe even ask them for help directly. Rather than wait for the anxiety to go away before taking action, I take action to make the anxiety go away. I reclaim my agency and power.  It hasn’t always gone the way I wanted it to, but over the years and on aggregate nothing else has come close to improving my moment-to-moment well-being.

So my anxiety is much less intense than what it once was, but it still pops up all over the place - basically anywhere my life falls short of my values and visions, which (since I’m a finite human being) is pretty much everywhere. This can make things confusing since anxiety can serve as a motivator for me, moving me to take positive action to seek relief from anxiety and making said anxiety look like a net-positive in my life. Anxiety can look like proof that I care about something!

Acting from anxiety might give me something in terms of motivation, but it costs me a lot in terms of quality of experience. It adds a psychological tax to everything I do, which lowers my quality of life and quality of work, which can act as further fuel for the anxiety - anxious spirals might be smaller in scale and power than they were when I was drinking, but they can still pop up. 

The opposite of anxious action for me isn’t inaction, but non-anxious action - action that is motivated by self-expression and abundance, rather than anxiety and psychological scarcity. That’s my vision for a life of wholeness and completeness, where my actions are guided by the reward of completing them rather than the perceived punishment I’ll experience if I fail. 

I often fall short of that vision, but I’m glad to have it all the same - it gives me something to return to when I’m feeling lost and confused, a way to help me decide if something that I’m up to is ultimately right for me. So while I’m not exactly where I want to be it’s still important to honor the fact that I’ve come very far, that I now have an idea of what I want and tools to help me get there. 

Critically, I don’t think I could have gone anywhere in isolation; I’ve relied heavily (and continue to so rely) on the presence and contributions of generous people. Even an imagined presence is helpful, knowing that someone cared and was interested enough to read what all the way to the end. So, if you’ve made it this far, I want to say thank you :)