How to Win by Not Trying

Hello Everyone,

I must  start by apologizing for not having posted now for several months.  My main excuse is that I got remarkably busy for a while, got out of the rhythm of posting weekly and simply didn’t get back to it.  Now that I have completed this blog post, I plan to get back on track and it is my intention to once again post weekly. 

I hope you’re all managing to survive during this crazy time in our history and that the pandemic has not been too hard on you and your family. Hopefully we’ll have a vaccine in the near future and can get back to a more normal life.

One way to think about treating an anxiety disorder is to treat it as a game, but a game to which you don’t really know the rules when you first start playing. Anxiety knows the rules and so can play to win, whereas since you don’t know the rules you virtually always lose. By calling anxiety a game I don’t mean to minimize the struggle with anxiety, but I find it a useful technique sometimes to think of it this way. So let’s start to consider what are some of the “rules” you have to understand when you’re playing the game if you want to win. In this blog post I will consider what I think is one of the primary rules one must understand and take into account, if you want to win when you play the anxiety game, and one which most people who come to see me don’t understand.

Rule #1 Meeting anxiety/panic with acceptance and willingness is better than fighting with and trying to get rid of the anxiety/panic. 

Many people when they first come to see me, state that their goal is to completely get rid of their anxiety because it seems like it keeps getting in the way of living the life that they want. Having a goal of getting rid of your anxiety is simply not a helpful perspective to have and it’s also probably an impossible goal to achieve in the first place. First of all, and this may be a different way of thinking about anxiety, anxiety actually is there to protect you. It’s a warning system that’s meant to have you detect and anticipate possible dangers on the horizon. I would venture to guess that the anxiety that my clients are so eager to get rid of has actually benefited them in many ways that they don’t realize. Examples of how this might show up could be driving slower when the streets are wet because your anxiety has reminded you that the roads might be slippery or avoiding eating that anchovy pizza because your anxiety reminds you that the last time you ate anchovies you got ill, etc.   So if we abandon the goal of trying to get rid of anxiety then what is the alternative? Accepting that the anxiety is there and literally trying to make “friends” with the anxiety is a good place to start. 

Let’s use having a panic attack as an example for our discussion. Understandably, having a panic attack is a very unpleasant experience which virtually everybody would want to avoid, however, there isn’t any way to guarantee that panic attacks won’t occur. “What you resist will persist” is at the heart of the issue here. The more you resist panic, the more determined you are to never have another panic attack, the more you virtually guarantee that panic attacks will continue to occur. Clearly, this is a paradox. When you want to fix something in the external world, such as a flat tire on a car, you simply take the old tire off fix-it or replace it and then put the tire back in place and you’re all set. When you try to apply the same process to internal experiences, this is virtually guaranteed to backfire. Acceptance and willingness is your best posture towards even unpleasant interval experiences.

If we have Panic Disorder, trying to avoid experiencing anxiety and panic often leads to Agoraphobia because we’re so careful to avoid going places we fear a panic attack might occur and our life gets smaller and smaller. To avoid feeling uncomfortable/anxious we can get caught up in doing all sorts of compulsions within the context of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and to avoid feeling anxious in social settings, we can avoid talking to people or going to social events for fear of making a mistake or embarrassing ourselves. When we are trying to avoid experiencing anxiety our lives get smaller and whole lot less fulfilling. If the goal is to live a full, rich and meaningful life, it’s virtually impossible to avoid feeling anxiety at times. And it’s also true that the more we try to avoid anxiety, we actually are laying the foundation for more anxiety in the future. Avoidance often leads to more avoidance, compulsions lead to more compulsions  and, as mentioned above, life gets smaller. 

So going back to the title of this blog post, “How to Win by Not Trying” the “Not Trying” part is about turning toward acceptance and willingness when it comes to anxiety as opposed to working so hard to avoid having anxiety. I completely understand that turning towards anxiety /panic may not feel like the right thing to do, but if you truly want to understand how to play the game to win, turning towards anxiety is what you must do as opposed to trying to resist and stop anxiety in the first place. I can virtually guarantee that if you keep fighting/resisting your anxiety it will almost certainly get worse.

I hope you find this post helpful and, as always, if you have topics you’d like me to address in this blog, please let me know.

Stay safe,

Dr Bob