What is Your Anxiety Doing for You?

“I don’t want it anymore”

“I wish it would just go away!”

“Why does it make me feel like this?” 

Often, anxiety becomes something that we are attempting to avoid at all costs in our lives. With good reason! When that worried, nauseous, restless, yucky feeling comes along we would do almost anything for it to go away. This post is aimed at changing the way we think about and interact with our anxiety. 

Would you believe it if I told you that your anxiety is TRYING to do something good for you? 

We experience anxiety for a reason. The problem is that our anxiety is often times trying to do a helpful thing in unhelpful ways. A big step toward improved anxiety management is changing the relationship you have with anxiety and the way you think about anxiety. The best way to start this is by reflecting on situations when you felt anxiety and asking yourself “What was my anxiety trying to do in that moment?” or “What was my anxiety trying to tell me?” - if you’re able to do this you will likely notice times when your anxiety was trying to protect you, or prepare you for a big test, or get you to think about something that is really important to you. Once you start to gain insight into the things your anxiety is trying to do for you, you might start to take some steps toward these things purposely rather than allowing the anxiety to push you into them. 

When we think about anxiety, it can be far more beneficial to think about changing the relationship you have with your anxiety rather than “getting rid of” anxiety. Starting to allow yourself to think about what your anxiety is trying to do, how it might be trying to do something good, is the beginning of changing the relationship you have with anxiety. Changing that relationship can be the missing piece when it comes to managing anxiety and decreasing its impacts.

- Caleb Simon, LCMFT