The Anxious Morning

Everyone is allowed to get help where they think they can get it. I’m not here to tell you who to talk to or not talk to, and I’m not here to call out specific people. But we should be well informed when we make our choices, so let’s get well informed, shall we?

This morning I will start a series where I compare therapists and coaches along several dimensions. We’ll start with education.

This is a question I get all the time.

“I KNOW I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO CARE ABOUT THIS, BUT HOW CAN I NOT CARE ABOUT IT WHEN IT FEELS SO POWERFUL AND STRONG????”

Today I want to talk about the things I DON’T do when anxious. These are things I used to do as a matter of course, but have left behind in recovery. They are no longer necessary for me because recovery taught me that they were never necessary.

I have experienced both disordered and non-disordered anxiety in my life. If you are reading this, there’s a really good chance that you have too. But if you’re reading this there’s also a good chance that you currently experiencing disordered anxiety and therefore may have lost touch with what “regular anxiety” feels and looks like. No problem. I got you covered.

As a non-disordered person I am most interested in anxiety as a symptom rather than the symptoms of anxiety.

I am growing weary of social media. I am growing weary of the mental health “community” on social media. I am growing weary of algorithms that have ZERO interest in this topic and could not care less about teaching, privacy, safety, or actual support and empowerment...

Carl Rogers, one of the most influential and important psychologists in history, was correct. Living really is an awfully risky proposition. It’s risky on many fronts.

How much time and energy do you spend trying to avoid risk, mitigate it, or protect yourself from it? How much of your approach to both anxiety and life are based on trying to deny or fend off the risky nature of living through thinking, thinking, retreating, and more thinking? How hard are you working to control things in an effort to know, predict, and therefore minimize or eliminate risk?

Believe it or not, many anxious people find themselves wanting to get better, but afraid to get better.

Why is this?

If anyone had told me how much time I’d be spending fielding questions about coffee and alcohol, I would have thought them to be completely insane. Yet here I am, talking about coffee and alcohol. Who knew this was going to be a thing? I’m joking a bit. I certainly don’t mind talking about it. We’ve never covered this topic on The Anxious Morning so let’s do that now.

Last winter I started a project that involves relating the Tao Te Ching to the topic of anxiety and recovery. It’ll be a book at some point. This is my analysis of verse 1, and how it relates to the issues we’re addressing together. Welcome to a sneak peak of The Tao of Anxiety …

Next time anxiety drags you around through what it insists is an immediate disaster and only wants to know “What have you done for me lately?”, whip out your success journal and whack your lizard brain over the head with it. Then give it the finger and be reminded of the fact that you CAN.