Have you made friends with your anxiety?

Absolutely! I have a long history with anxiety. In my experience, I had to make friends with it. Like pain and other discomfort, I can now feel anxiety and be ok with it. When I am feeling anxious, it is no longer a problem. And since it’s not a problem, it’s just a feeling. No need to build layers of anxiety and worry about the fact that it’s there. No need to identify with it. It turns out to be pretty harmless when it’s not given the fuel it needs.

I usually don’t have anxiety at all. A supervisor years ago teased me that I “don’t have appropriate anxiety.” She was referring to when they tell you there’s a deadline and I was not appearing that it made me worry.

On the rare occasions when something really concerns me, I will usually try to talk myself out of it. I’ll think about what the mitigating factors are, and how it’s very possible that I’m anticipating something that won’t happen. For example, the “ex in the group” example given by the OP, I would think that I am expecting we can all be adults and interact with each other in a pleasant, civil way. If he is not pleasant and civil, as I know I’ll be, then I’ll just keep a distance.

@jca Lucky you!

Interesting points, @janbb. I am currently afflicted with some intense anxieties as I explore the possibility of eliminating a source of ongoing deep-rooted anxiety. I am appreciating that irony. It is a good thing to explore new challenges, good for you. Complacency is sometimes necessary for healing, but letting it become stagnation is not a good thing.
A hard lesson I am learning, here, but your Q has given me a positive insight into a painful time.
Thank you.

@canidmajor Wow!

We’re not exactly friends.
But I’m kind of used to their company.

More of a pesky sidekick.

I’ve always been fine with my anxiety. It is the other people that I encounter that seem to suffer from it. I don’t need or want medication (lorazepam) that doctors have offered to me. The way I look at this is that if you don’t like my nervous personality then that’s your problem not mine.

When I get anxious I eat a burger and root beer. Or whatever is handy.

I am trying hard to live with it by my side. I realize I cannot live on Xanax so I am looking for outlets, depressurization points. No easy task but I can’t beat it so I guess I will join it.

Not quite friends. I’m not at that stage of enlightenment yet, haha.

I do realize I almost rely on it sometimes, though.

Here is the way I get work done. It’s pretty unhealthy:
1. I have a lot of work to do
2. I feel anxious about the amount of work I have to do
3. I dislike the feeling of anxiety
4. I do some of the work to help alleviate the anxiety

I find that if the amount of work isn’t enough to cause anxiety, or the due dates aren’t close enough to cause anxiety, I have much harder time motivating. So…anxiety helps move my life along, in a way.

I’m only very recently coming to peace with many of the difficulties that my life has contained because I’m realizing the value of being somebody who has experienced a variety of things, and how this experience lends me the opportunity to know and think deeply about more topics than if I had had a super simple and easy life. It’s hard to explain but I guess I’m realizing the value in being somebody who knows what it’s like to have really bad anxiety.

Poorly-constructed metaphor warning…

There are times when I’m really stressed out and trying to get send an email while at home. Suddenly, my son is asking me a ton of questions. He’s decided that now is a great time to come in. I ask for a minute, and he’s back in 30 seconds, but is carrying a bowl of food that has now spilled all over the place, and he’s asking more questions. My stress is going through the roof, and I can’t seem to really focus on my email. I ask for just two more minutes, and he “needs” to get something in the room I’m working in. He knocks over some books and I’m about to snap.

But….

What if I close my computer and invite him to sit down on my lap? The presence of my son is no longer a problem. I can be there fully for him, and when we have spent enough time together, I may find that he’s no longer there. Then, I can complete my email.

I find that doing the same for anxiety changes the whole game. Rather than try to push it away because it’s not the right time (and it’s terrifying), if I invite it “sit on my lap”, I can fully experience it now and it ceases to be a huge deal. I then often find that it leaves when it’s done, like my son. Pushing anxiety away makes it grow and stick around.

And yes, I’m a horrible person for comparing my son to anxiety. :) You know what I mean though, right?

Actually, that was an excellent metaphor, @hominid. :-). and anyone that doesn’t get it is just a silly goose

Yes, @hominid I think that’s what I did last night and what I meant by making friends with it. One of the other things I do now is when I pick up a piece of paper or face a task that seems incomprehensible and aggravating is….I put it down and come back to it later. Usually, then with a clearer mind I can see that the task ahead is not so insurmountable.

Until I read this great set of answers, I had not really thought about befriending anxiety. Upon further reflection, perhaps that is what I have done without consciously realizing it.

The base of my currently much healthier approach to anxiety is best described by the title of a book on overcoming fear that came out years ago: Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. This works just as well with anxiety (at least for me.)

Now, instead of being paralyzed by it, I listen to it, because it occasionally is trying to alert me to something important (like I’m heading out the door, and don’t have my keys with me.) When that is not the case (almost all of the time), I mutter “I’m feeling anxiety. So?” and go ahead with doing whatever is stirring it up.

One side benefit to this approach is that, through repetition, the things that used to cause paralyzing anxiety no longer are. In the place where anxiety once dwelt within, I am increasingly feeling inner peace and freedom.

So, yeah, perhaps I have befriended my anxiety without realizing it.

@sahID Yes, a line someone gave me was, “That’s just my free-floating anxiety.” And yes, I am feeling the fear and doing it anyway. GA to you.

Ah yes, I’m familiar with the free-floating anxiety. It floats in, it floats out….free floating sounds so carefree doesn’t it? While it may not be as bad as the anxiety that has an exact cause attached to it or a clear reason for being, it certainly isn’t very companionable. It doesn’t surprise me when it makes an appearance though. I think of it as something akin to existential angst. It doesn’t require action to circumvent, merely diversion.

Music often helps me to subsume it. I mean, how can you feel anxious when you’re listening to a feel good song?

I think that I used to have more fear and anxiety when I was younger than I do now. Or maybe the things that cause it are just different now? You learn to deal with and conquer certain fears and then new ones take their place, it’s like playing that old kids game where you hit the hippos with the hammer.

I had thought that I was handling my stress very well lately, all things considered. But then this week Monday and Tuesday were very high anxiety days. The kind of days when I was thinking along the lines of “I have 10 more years of this to go until retirement??!” and wondering how I was going to do it without making a change. I resolved to try to make a job change within the year. Of course then today went much better and I wondered what all that anxiety was for.

Personally I think anxiety can be additive, like stress. Even if the anxiety drivers are constant, when they get activated all at once your circuits overload the same as they do when the stress quotient is too high. A lot of anxiety can be due to worrying too much about things that you can’t control. When you learn to stop trying to control the things that are impossible to control and trust in your capability to deal with things, your resilience to stress and anxiety increases. You don’t become immune to it, but it makes it a little easier to roll with the punches and also not to catastrophize and imagine dire outcomes to things which haven’t happened yet.

^^ Yes, working on all that.

Hmm…I’ll have to try this and get back to you.

I don’t have many friends. My anxiety is definitely not one of them.

I guess I’ll have to give it time.