Jan 31, 2019
Stop: Could You Be Secretly Benefiting from Your Anxiety?
Talking about mental health has gone mainstream. Gens Y and Z are more open to discussing personal struggles with mental health and acceptance of others who have been suffering in silence. If you struggle with mental health symptoms, I hope that you have more support from loved ones now than you did before. It can be freeing to talk about it openly, and to know that there are people who still love you unconditionally even if you feel shitty.
But your symptoms won’t go away that easy.
This is a sad truth about mental health, and one that I hope people who aren’t diagnosed with mental illness can understand. Getting rid of depression and anxiety is not followed up with “kumbaya” moments. You cannot just go for a walk or sit in an open field of flowers and then expect negative feelings to go away permanently, though only for a moment. While I believe that meditation is a great way to reduce severity of symptoms in the moment, it’s not effective in the long-term. Reducing or ridding of mental health symptoms involves a lot of hard work that we’re actually avoiding.
We want to be nervous and feel bad.
It’s a little insensitive for a practicing therapist to make such a blanket statement. I hope therapists don’t actually say this verbatim to their clients. I don’t mean to say that we’re bad human beings for not wanting to change and that we should feel ashamed. I’m saying that we have good reasons not to change, and then we make memes to share with the world about how much we’re struggling with anxiety. So are we really willing to get rid of it?
I ask my clients to list several ways their anxiety benefits them. They think I’m being ridiculous and that maybe I’m not a very qualified clinician, but they actually end up finding the list very helpful. If you list some of the reasons anxiety benefits you, you’ll realize some of the following:
- It keeps your schedule in check. You stay on top of the things that you need to do and, along with your calendar and planner, helps you remember the most important priorities if you don’t have time to check.
- It keeps you motivated. You are more likely to get things that aren’t priorities done, such as going to the gym after work and other errands, if you hype yourself up before.
- It’s the small price you pay to make sure the rest of your life goes smoothly. If you fear that everything is about to go terribly wrong, and that you must ensure that things don’t, you might compromise with your emotions and convince yourself that there is a method to your madness.
4. “If I worry now, I’ll save myself from worrying even more later”. If you’re scared of not getting things done due to avoidance, this could help you avoid bigger problems later, because who wants to wait until a problem occurs to freak out? We think worrying now is a preventive and proactive measure for later.
5. It’s a protective measure. Like #4 above, your anxiety protects you from feeling worse or having a bigger let-down later. If you predict that something terrible or bad will happen soon, you can have time to cope and prepare before it happens, if it happens.
6. You have high standards. Your anxiety helps you put more effort into your work and to deliver quality. Your fear may be not meeting your own personal standards, even if people around you are already satisfied with your productivity.
7. You have low expectations in outcomes. It’s easier to expect the worst so that way you don’t suffer a big disappointment when something turns out less-than-perfect.
8. It helps you bond with others. There are memes and jokes all over Instagram and Twitter where people can bond over the shared experience of chronic anxiety that comes with being a hard-working millennial in entry-level industries. It helps you feel like you’re a part of something bigger and that you’re not alone. You may even joke about it with other friends or co-workers at happy hour or a night out. If we don’t struggle with chronic worrying, what can we talk about? Will we come off as pompous and privileged if we don’t validate each other’s struggles with shared experience? As they say, misery loves company.
There are many other reasons that aren’t on the list. My clients will start going over the reasons why they want to get rid of their anxiety, and at the end of our session, I ask how this activity was for them. They usually say several things about listing anxiety’s benefits:
- Writing down how the benefits helped them gain some insight.
- It helped them see that not all anxiety is necessarily “bad”.
- They could not imagine life without anxiety and realized they rely on it.
- It helped them see that they’ve been secretly holding on to their anxiety in the midst of also complaining about how much they are suffering on a regular basis.
At some point, clients realize that their anxiety is counterproductive. Since depression and anxiety go hand-in-hand, there’s a point where hyping up to go to the gym actually makes them feel more down that they no longer have the energy to go. They realize that less-than-perfect outcomes can happen, regardless of how much they worry, and then they end up worrying more later. They’re actually more motivated to take steps to change, even if it’s challenging and, ironically, more anxiety-inducing!
Chances are you have some valid reasons to keep feelings of low mood and sadness too if you struggle with depression more than anxiety. It’s possible that you’ll come to a realization of how and when you want it to be addressed. In an ideal world, these mental health concerns would not exist, but the reason why they do is that the world has many structural problems that produce and exacerbate them. Our symptoms exist for a reason. It’s just a matter of how much of it you want them to occupy your time and headspace.
Tracy Vadakumchery, MHC-LP is a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist (CBT) at Feeling Good Psychotherapy of New York. She graduated with an M.A. and Ed.M. in Psychological Counseling from Columbia University. She has a background in evidenced-based family therapy. Follow Tracy on Instagram at @tracymhc or at tracymhc.com.
