Anxiety as an Ally

Photo by JD Urban

The holiday season often triggers anxiety around issues like spending time with family members who say or do hurtful things and maintaining healthy boundaries around eating or drinking. This year, many people have additional worries about contracting and/or spreading COVID-19 during their holiday celebrations, which may feel especially heightened after nearly two years of living in a pandemic. (Not to mention the other systemic concerns that we might also feel anxious about.) 

For many of us, anxiety is scary and destabilizing. In fact, the fear of experiencing anxiety can be more real and threatening than the anxiety itself.  As a result, we can spend much of our lives avoiding anything that might activate us -  even if it’s something positive. When doing something stressful, we often grit our teeth and quickly run through the anxiety to get to the other side. The end result can be exhaustion, frustration and/or a sense of relief…until we have to go through it all over again.

What if we stopped seeing anxiety as our enemy, and started seeing it as an overactive ally? Anxiety, at its most basic level, is a response to threat. When we feel that something scary  is about to happen, our sympathetic nervous system triggers a fight, flight or freeze reaction. That paralyzing sense of dread we experience at the thought of getting on a plane or the urge to flee an interaction at the first sign of conflict are extreme reactions to the feeling of fear. Being afraid of losing control, experiencing rejection, embarrassment, or a myriad of other emotions can feel awful even when we might rationally know that we are not in physical danger, to our mind and body it really feels like we are. 

Ironically, our anxiety is trying to protect us at that moment. These feelings are difficult to manage however, - it can help us see red flags in relationships or avoid risky situations. But because it’s doing such a good job of protecting us it inadvertently protects us from good things too - like building a trusting relationship or traveling to visit family. If we try too hard to fight that anxiety so we can get to the good things, as a reflex it often fights right back.

So what do we do? We can begin to acknowledge the anxiety and thank it for all it’s doing to protect us and keep us safe. We can then recognize the parts of ourselves that feel brave and capable, even if they feel much smaller in comparison to the anxiety. By remembering the times in our lives when we have overcome obstacles and have been successful, we can ask the anxiety to take a step back. This can allow the braver parts to step forward and move through the moments that feel scary but aren’t actually dangerous. 

Our braver parts create space for rational decision making based on logic and facts, instead of fear. When anxiety is able to let down its guard enough and our other internal resources can rise up, then we’re less likely to feel exhausted or overwhelmed.

It takes time to shift the relationship with anxiety; which includes being kind to ourselves in those moments when the anxiety wins out. But if we can see it as an ally, our frustration with ourselves can be replaced with compassion and confidence  - even when the holidays are over and the uncertainty of these times continues on. We will still need to see all parts of ourselves as resources so that we may be whole. 

Written by Sara Eldridge, LCSW (s/her) who is a trauma-informed psychotherapist trained in EMDR.