The Theory of Anxiety:

What exactly is anxiety? Where does it come from? Why do we feel it? How does it work? It is my belief that most human experiences are a system, and are part of a system. There are theoretical answers to all these questions, and finding the answers that resonate can help us feel knowledgeable and empowered, and better prepared for making changes to those systems. And so, anxiety is a system, too. It’s an emotion, yes. But it’s also a thought process, it’s a cyclical pattern, it has something of a life of its own.

I specialize in anxiety because I have a history of social and generalized anxiety disorders. Both of these things have roots in my neuro-diversity (ie. trying to force myself to be something I’m not, AKA trying to control things about myself I can’t). And after almost two decades of managing and reducing my own anxiety I’ve learned a lot about how it works and what it needs. My first lesson was realizing that managing anxiety isn’t about managing anxiety at all. It’s about letting go of the things that make us anxious. Not ‘real’ things like people or jobs. But psychological things, like control. 

From my perspective, we feel anxious when we, or someone else, has assigned us the task of controlling something we can’t. Classic examples are: our emotions, other people’s emotions, the environments we work in, or other people’s actions. We have a tendency to tell ourselves things like: ‘if I just speak kindly enough, or work fast enough, or be considerate enough I can make this go perfectly.’ But we can’t. Even if those strategies work sometimes, they won’t work all the time. And they are rarely sustainable because they require so much effort and offer very little reward. Something in us recognizes these problems, and that something tries to warn us that we are setting ourselves up for failure or exhaustion or vulnerability to other people’s bad intentions. That warning system? That’s anxiety.

My theory on emotion is that everything we feel has a function. Emotion is meant to communicate - it is the highway of messengers between our subconscious (or our instincts or our body or our connection to the universe or whatever else you want to call it) and our consciousness. We spend so much time trying to control or avoid emotion we miss out on valuable opportunities of allowing it to inform our expression and decision making. 

Control is a Gateway Drug

I don’t mean control is literally a drug, that’s just my clever metaphor. There’s no research (that I know of) to back up the idea that control releases addictive endorphins or has any biological impact on us at all. However, it is arguable that there is something addictive about control. When we feel in control we feel safe and secure. We feel prepared and empowered and incharge. These feelings are hard to sacrifice, especially when there is a history of trauma or feeling insecure (in our relationships, in our responsibilities, in our finances, or whatever else). And so control becomes a life boat and everything else becomes the water.

In an effort to hold on to our control we adopt all kinds of thinking patterns that, in the end, reaffirm our need for control and increase our experience of anxiety. In control we are primed to: Black and white thinking (if I can sort things into categories I can predict what will happen and why); Magical thinking (I can control the outside world by controlling my inner world); Personalization (I am capable of and responsible for controlling these external problems); Jumping to conclusions (I can predict the future and what other people will do on little information); Mind reading (I can know what people are thinking and feeling, particularly about me, and therefore respond in a way that allows we to change their mind); Should statements (if I just follow these rules, I can decide what will happen and how). You’ll notice predicting the future comes up a lot. When we feel we can predict something we can feel prepared for it and therefore in control of it. And a lot of these add up to the ever-dreaded people pleasing which assumes, of course, that we are capable of reliably pleasing others. (We’re not, other people’s emotions usually have very little to do with us).

This is how the anxiety system works: the need for control leads to black and white thinking which primes us for personalization which makes mind reading necessary. Each additional gear affirms, supports, or invites another. And before we know what’s happened we have a whole control machine just pumping out anxiety. And the kicker? The bigger the machine gets, the louder it is. The system works directly to convince us that the more control we think we have, the more we need. It just grinds out ‘More control! More control! More control!’ all the while going in circles trying to make some, and inevitably failing. That’s what we need to understand about anxiety: there’s no easy solution. Nothing in the world will get you the kind of control you’re craving. Nothing will stop dirt from entering your home. Nothing will convince other people to perceive you a certain way. Nothing can make time speed up or slow down. And nothing will give you certainty. Control is, in some ways, an illusion. And so is cleanliness, and time, and other people’s opinion of you, and the regularity or consistency of emotions (yours or someone else’s). What’s more: the more in control we feel, the less practice we’re getting for learning acceptance and tolerance of difficult realities (ie. not being in control). And acceptance is often the thing that can do what control just can’t: help us feel secure in an insecure reality.

Replacing Control with Acceptance

The antithesis of control is acceptance. Where control fails to give us certainty or security, acceptance offers us toleration and reassurance. Control is rigid and structured and planned in advance, acceptance is flexible. Control says: ‘It has to go this way, or else terrible things will happen.’ Acceptance says: ‘We don’t know how it’s going to go, but if it goes terribly, we can manage that, too.’ Control thrives on low self-efficacy: the belief that we can’t do hard things, or tolerate difficult situations, or manage uncertainty. But acceptance requires high self-efficacy: that we can tolerate discomfort, that we don’t need predictability to succeed, that just because things go wrong doesn’t mean we won’t be alright. Mostly, acceptance says: ‘it’s going to be alright’.

Acceptance is a hard skill to learn, especially in our culture where control is one of the things we worship most. For some of us it might seem fanciful or uncomfortably unfamiliar. Letting go of control is no longer something that comes naturally to us. To put it into perspective, acceptance usually means: Slowing down; Doing less; Taking a break; wWiting to see what happens; Refusing to make a decision; Being inconsistent; Worrying less about the future or the past or other people. These things usually require some serious tweaking in our thought processes, which are often taken up mostly with efforts to the opposite effect. That means: Replacing black and white thinking with flexible thinking; Magical thinking with grounded thinking; Personalization with equal accountability; Jumping to conclusions or predicting the future with waiting it out; Mind reading with open curiosity; Should statements with spontaneity; And people pleasing with self-care. 

Everything’s a Balance

None of this is to say that we can never have control. That we can never consider what other people might be thinking or what might happen sometime in the future. All of these are actually crucial strategies necessary for healthy adjustment. In fact, they all probably started out as totally harmless, and only became problematic when they became automatic; When we started using these strategies when we didn’t need to. (For example, I can consider what a friend thinks of me, with the caveat that I can’t actually know unless I ask). Managing anxiety isn’t about embracing a life of zen-like, above-it-all energy. It’s about control in moderation. And matching control with acceptance. 

To unlearn coping mechanisms that have grown too large and too wild we need to be intentional. Intentional about when we allow ourselves control, and how much. Basic idea: control at home alone, control at work with boundaries, control over your response to things, all good. Control that relies on or impacts other people, or control that tries to avoid the unavoidable, not so great. Everything is a balance.