I really love the idea depicted here of giving anxiety a “performance review.” (To check out the illustrator’s Instagram page, click here). I think this would be a worthwhile exercise to consider anxiety’s performance in my everyday life!

We often conflate the emotions of anxiety and fear, as if they are synonymous. They are similar, which is where it can get tricky to decipher which one is which. If I’m being chased in the woods by a bear, I’m going to be VERY afraid and very anxious that the bear might catch me. My fear and anxiety are going to motivate me into action to seek safety away from the bear. This is a GOOD function of my fear and anxiety, and it means that my nervous system is responding to a physical threat in a healthy manner.

Where anxiety becomes “extremely devoted” to its work and starts working overtime, is when it starts presenting me with “what if” thoughts or potential scenarios that technically could occur, but are not occurring in the present moment. For example, I’m enjoying a hike on a popular hiking trail where bear sightings do not typically occur, and my anxiety says, “what if you see a bear?” and then spends the remainder of the hike plotting and planning how I would escape from the hypothetical bear. Or it works extra overtime and says, “you could see a bear, you should probably not go on a hike.” Or it works double extra overtime and says, “you could be one of those people on the news, who encounters a bear in their neighborhood, you should just stay inside at all times!” Making matters worse, anxious thoughts trigger a nervous system response (as it’s designed to do to keep us safe, as in the first bear example), making us feel as if we are definitely going to see the hypothetical bear and we should be on alert at all times.

So, we can see that healthy fear can protect us and keep us safe, so we don’t want to fire it from its job. But what if we reviewed anxiety’s performance? How do we notice anxiety showing up to work? Is it sneaky in disguise, telling us it’s “just keeping you safe” or presenting you with solutions “just in case”? Is it a litany of “what ifs” with all sorts of scary hypothetical scenarios? Is it a sense of urgency, that you must figure this out right now? And how effective is anxiety at its job? Maybe it’s telling you it’s giving you a sense of control, but is it actually handing you control of the universe? Is it providing you with true, unquestionable certainty?

I hate to say it, but it’s kind of impossible to fire anxiety. Like in this cartoon, it is good at its job. It will just show up, even if you’ve told it to eat dirt and take a hike. It’s like a solicitor who rings your doorbell trying to sell you something, even when you’ve posted the “no soliciting” sign on your door.

But we can demote the role it plays in our lives. It starts by noticing how it’s showing up in our lives, what it’s telling us, how we respond to it, and choosing how we want to relate to it so that it does not become the CEO of our lives. If you’d like to know more about how I work with anxiety, check out my contact info and set up your free consultation call today.