In Chapters 4, 6 and 9, the first three parts of the Anxiety Toolbox, we have looked at a number of tools and concrete strategies designed to help us begin to engage with our thoughts in a different way, so that we gradually gain greater control over anxiety. As we progress through the initial stages, it is very important to keep pushing on with our lives, cutting ourselves a break when we need to and learning to accept that we will not always be progressing. If we can continue to move on with our lives as a parallel process to the ongoing work on our anxiety, we will be more easily able to see that anxiety is just one aspect of our being and not the all-encompassing monster that we can often make it out to be.
In this chapter, we will be looking at broader approaches and strategies in which we can engage to enhance our lives in a more general way, which in turn will help loosen the hold worry and anxiety have over us.
Working towards our best selves: a method from Brief Therapy
A key strategy that really seems to help with anxiety management in a general way is to start doing again the things that worry or low mood have taken away from us over the years. It’s a process we should try to engage in alongside the work we are doing directly with anxiety: we don’t want to have to wait for that work to be completed before we begin claiming back the aspects of our lives that have fallen away because of our fears or try new things we want to do but which anxiety held us back from.
One way of giving some helpful structure to this process is to use a method from Brief Therapy (a short-term, solution-focused form of therapy), which involves drawing on what we already know about ourselves from a time in the past when we found life easier.
The idea is to take a simple scale of one to ten, and plot our way up that scale towards an ‘ideal’ version of ourselves. First, we need to get a strong, concrete idea of what a ten would look like. This can be a version of ourselves when we were at our best – perhaps from a certain time in our youth or in college or during a summer away or any time when we did not feel that worry or our anxiety was such a big deal – no matter how brief or fleeting that period was. We need to really try to remember that time and pin down some details for ourselves. What were we like? What were we doing? How were we interacting with other people? What was different about us to how we are now?
If you can’t think of any time like this, do you have a vision of how you would like to be in the future, if anxiety was less of a problem? If such a vision doesn’t immediately come to mind, you may need to indulge in a bit of fantasy and turn off the cynical side of your brain! Imagine you go to sleep one night and, as you are sleeping, a miracle happens. When you wake up in the morning, your anxiety and intrusive thoughts have completely gone. You no longer know how to worry and you cannot relearn it. Your mind has stopped firing negative thoughts at you; things you once found frightening no longer scare you. So, now try to pin down what differences you would notice in yourself and in how you would interact with others. What would your loved ones notice about you that was different? What would you be doing that you do not do now – in your relationships, at work and in your free time? Really try to flesh out the picture.
When we’ve done this preparation, we will go on to rate ourselves against our ideal. So, if ten is us at our absolute best, where are we now?
Using the scale in this way serves two purposes. Firstly, it gives us a sense of how far from our best selves we think we are. If we feel we are a four, OK, that’s below halfway, but it’s not as low as it could be. If it’s a two, then we know we have some work to do, but we have a good sense of where we are and where we would like to get to. The rating process also gives us a starting point and a more tangible feel of what we are working towards.
So, let’s say we think we are a three. Our overall goal is ten but, for now, let’s not worry too much about whether we get there or not. For now, we are going to shrink the timeframe right down and aim for four. We have looked at what a ten is, and we know how we feel now, so, using our imagination, can we think about what just one rung up the ladder would look like? Can we flesh out a four? We’re not looking for massive change here, we are just aiming up and looking to start moving forward in small increments.
So, if we were a four, what would we be doing that we are not doing now? Out walking more perhaps? Asking a friend out for coffee or lunch? Would we be spending less time on social media, eating a proper breakfast, looking after ourselves a little better generally? Keep it simple but identify two or three concrete things that you could start doing, regardless of the objections from your brain, in the spirit of getting yourself galvanised into action and moving forwards.
As we’re able to tick those initial few things off our list, we keep fleshing out a four and doing the things that that version of ourselves would be doing. Then we turn our attention to five and what that would look like. And so it continues.
Let the work we are doing on our anxiety be one thing and this push towards our better selves be another. The two processes will feed into one another, and at times overlap, but it is always better not to wait until we are feeling better to start moving in a positive direction. It is in action that we get motivation, and it is as our brain observes us voluntarily facing our fears and expanding our lives that it will gradually stop sending the warning signals of anxiety and worry, and this, in turn, enables our confidence to grow.
Drop the comparison habit
Constantly comparing ourselves to others is a fantastic way to ramp up anxiety and feelings of not being good enough. We do it all the time. We look at others on social media, with their seemingly perfect lives, and we feel bad about our own mundane existence. We walk by people on the street and think that we are not as fit, good-looking, well-dressed, and so on. We look at our friends, colleagues, celebrities – whoever is at hand – and decide we don’t measure up. None of this is helped by the fact that all we can see is our own weaknesses and everyone else’s strengths.
Take the example of comparing ourselves with regard to work and our career. There are two main ways in which this tends to play out in relation to the working world. Firstly, we look to our friends and peers who we qualified or finished college with – acquaintances, cousins, neighbours, anyone of roughly our own age, people we knew before we all started our careers. We look at their job titles, who they work for or where they are on the career ladder, and we begin to feel that we are not doing as well or are falling behind. Of course, we ignore those who don’t seem to be doing as well as we are. They don’t seem to count, for some reason!
As so often happens with worry and anxiety, we allow ourselves to get wound up emotionally about a situation without taking the full set of facts into account. We look at others, make presumptions and jump to conclusions, yet frequently we really only have basic information about them.
We do not know what part luck or connections have had in their apparent ascent. We have no idea how they see their own progress or how they compare themselves to us. We don’t know what levels of stress they may be under or what they have had to sacrifice to get to where they are. We don’t have a clue as to whether they are actually happy or have any degree of contentment in their lives. All we can see is that they are there and we are here – and that here is not good enough, and we are going to make it mean all sorts of bad things about ourselves, both now and in the future (thanks, Brain!).
One thing that we can probably accurately assume is that, if they did not have the handicap of worry and anxiety to contend with, there were certain roadblocks and obstacles that they did not have to overcome. If they did have difficulties with their thoughts, perhaps they had better coping skills to manage their anxiety. We looked earlier at the damage anxiety can do to a career – the wish to stay in our comfort zone, seeking out only things that are safe. The struggle to deal with uncertainty in a complex environment. Climbing the career ladder when you are constantly worried can be like running a 100-metre race while dragging a bag of sand behind you. You can make progress, but every metre is hard-won.
Building a satisfying and meaningful life is, however, a longer-term venture that can take many different turns and generally consists of many different aspects beyond just a successful career – such as developing quality relationships with family and friends, identifying a value system that sits well with who we are, developing our spirituality and fulfilling our creative potential, and so on. In all of these areas, as in our professional lives, as we learn to become more aware of what is holding us back, figure out how best to move forward and face some of the fears we have otherwise turned away from, we can begin to make bigger strides and experience a greater degree of personal growth.
In our working lives, the other group of people we constantly compare ourselves with are those with whom we work directly. On the face of it, there is nothing wrong with this one. Evaluating our peers and seeing how we stack up alongside them can act as a good barometer. It can show us our strengths, but also where we might need to improve. In the right circumstances, it can spur us on to greater things. The ability to compare ourselves accurately with others can therefore be a good tool. However, the problem with anxiety, negative thinking, social anxiety and worry is that they make comparing ourselves accurately with others impossible. This is because very often our starting point is the belief that others are better than us in every way – more intelligent, more competent, funnier, more interesting and more socially adjusted. They find life easier, have fewer problems and, generally, they are opposite of us – they are ‘normal’.
This comparison cannot go well for us. There can only be one winner. We don’t do a critical analysis of our colleagues, looking at their strengths and weaknesses to determine where and how they could improve or where they could be stronger. Throw into the mix the fact that those prone to anxiety tend to downplay their accomplishments, strengths and abilities. Until we can properly acknowledge these, let’s just stop the comparisons! In Chapters 7 and 8 (Anxiety in the Workplace – Parts One and Two), we looked at how we can work to combat the negative thinking patterns that can undermine us at work. And dropping the need to compare is one very important step in the right direction.
Now, have a think about this. There will be people out there who will look at us and think, ‘God, I wish I was as together as they are!’ Everyone else just sees the things we say and do. They do not have access to our journey or all the things that are going on in our heads. They do not know what scares us or how difficult we find things. They just see the end product, and they, like us, compare themselves without all the information. That’s how little idea any of us has about what is going on for other people. And that’s how crazy this need to compare is!
One step forward: how to deal with the inevitable sense of going backwards
We all have an idea of how life should be going, and how things should be working out for us: If I do this, then that should happen. If I follow this path, then I will get these results. We may not have it all explicitly thought out, but we know what feels like progress, and we certainly notice when we sense that we’re going in the other direction. When we first decide it is time to tackle the problem of anxiety, we may not know exactly how to go about it at the beginning, but we definitely know that we want to feel better. What is certainly not in the plan is feeling better for a short time and then going back to feeling exactly the way we did before.
The feeling of being back at square one is such a common theme in all types of personal development work that is dealt with as a specific issue in therapy. We go to a therapist looking for help and start working towards making things better. We gain some early ground, facing fears and feeling good about our progress. Our confidence is a little higher and we feel as if things are beginning to change – and then we are hit with something that knocks us sideways. It may be something we’ve addressed already, something we thought we were ‘over’, or an event that suddenly brings back the old feelings of fear, failure, inadequacy, low mood, helplessness or whatever other horribly familiar feeling it is that screams, ‘You haven’t changed!’
When my clients come back to me in these circumstances, there is often a feeling of the air being sucked out of the room. They will express a great sense of despondency, that the old ways of feeling and responding to anxiety seem to have returned. There can also be some embarrassment from them, that we might now have to go back over old ground, areas that they ‘should’ be on top of already.
One of the most important parts of tackling and managing anxiety, especially in the early stages, is learning to manage the periods when we feel we are stuck or there is a sense of regression. Perspective, above all else, is crucial in these moments. We need to step back from the feelings and look at the bigger picture.
Often, when we feel like we are back at square one, we have shrunk our timeframe to incorporate only the immediate period we are in. We lose sight of the gains we have made and the previous times when we tackled similar issues successfully. If we look only at the day on which things have been difficult, we will draw a certain conclusion. If we broaden the timeline to take in, say, the previous week, we may see a more balanced picture. If we go out to a month and take in some of the big wins we have had, this recent setback may now only seem like a blip. The most important thing is what we do from here. Do we pack it all in or do we continue as we were when things were going well?
As we have discussed throughout this book, when it comes to anxiety, most of us have spent years learning to think the way we think, react the way we react and feel the way we feel. A lot of our coping mechanisms were developed at an early age, when they made perfect sense for the environment we were in. When we grow up, however, and our environment changes, we do not realise we still have some maladaptive coping mechanisms that no longer fit our new reality. As we learn new tools and begin to change the way we interact with anxiety, it is only natural that we will be met with some pushback from our older, established ways of being. You always ran from anxiety – what are you doing now, facing it head-on? You always got caught up in your negative thoughts – but now you think paying less attention to them is the way to go?
In therapy, we often go back over the same ground again and again, each time gaining new insights and a greater sense of control. In times of regression, we need to bring in compassion and curiosity. We need to acknowledge that this work is tough, allow ourselves to make mistakes and to fall back into old patterns of behaviour sometimes and be genuinely curious about the way things are shaping up for us.
How do we best judge our progress?
If we feel that our progress is not as it should be, one question we might ask ourselves is, ‘Am I consistently putting in the work I need to, to be able to keep on top of my anxiety?’ As I’ve mentioned, if someone comes to me for therapy, and that is the only hour in the week in which they are working on their mental health, then it will be very hard for them to make progress. No matter how much our anxiety is playing up, we have, as we have seen throughout this book, choices in how we respond. We may need to review the work we are putting in and decide if it is sufficient to tackle what we are dealing with.
If we really believe we are putting in the work but we’re still experiencing setbacks (which are, as we have said, inevitable), then we may need to manage our expectations. If we are looking for immediate results or continual, visible progress, we may be disappointed and feel as if we are going nowhere fast. This goes back again to the concept of mastery from Anxiety Toolbox I (see page 54), where we spoke about how very easy it can be to mistake a plateau for a setback. We need to become more comfortable on the plateau, just doing the work needed that will enable us both to tolerate and manage our anxiety.
We may only be getting short bursts of progress followed by long periods of plateauing, but the current plateau is most likely higher on the curve towards mastery than the previous one, so there is real progress there, it’s just that it’s hard to quantify. Take the scenario, where there’s a baby in your extended family that you only see every three months or so – each time you see them, you are amazed at how fast they have grown and what progress they have made. For the parents, who are with the child every day, the child’s growth is not so obvious.
This is similar to what happens for us as we learn to managing anxiety over time. Because we are within our own heads all the time and we have to deal with our anxiety on a constant basis, it is hard to believe we are making real progress. We do not notice how much we have grown, and we lose sight of where we were. Things that used to cause us high anxiety, we are now able to manage to a tolerable level, so we no longer think about how hard it was for us. It is great that things are no longer as difficult, but we can easily lose perspective.
This is particularly true if we are using our feelings as a barometer for how we are doing. Feelings are not facts. We still feel anxious, so we presume things are not going well. What we need is a better way to measure our progress, whilst learning to tolerate difficult emotions. We have to learn to expand the timeframe, and look at the week or month or year and not just the uncomfortable feeling of setback we are dealing with today.
Changing our mindset
Sometimes, it is a change in mindset or a different way of looking at things that helps. To begin with, we cannot have regressed if we have not first progressed. So, we can see that a backwards step is actually evidence of progress, rather than proof that we will never get anywhere or that we have somehow failed. It’s just part of the process. If we have progressed before, we can and will again.
A step backwards absolutely does not mean we are back to square one. A regression does not mean we lose all the awareness we have built up or the new knowledge and coping skills we have acquired. We are still armed with the tools that will enable us to move forward and put the blip behind us.
Another example of how we frame things to ourselves is to change the language we use when talking about the days or weeks when it feels that things are not going as well as we would like – and indeed the times when they are going better than we expected.
Language is important. If you say, ‘I had a bad week because I was anxious’, it will give you a sense of helplessness when your anxiety strikes. If, instead, you say, ‘I didn’t have a good week, because I didn’t manage my anxiety as well as I might have’, and you can acknowledge areas for learning, it gives you a greater sense of control over, and indeed responsibility for, your own mental health.
Likewise, if you have a good week, it’s most helpful if you can look at it from the perspective of what you did to manage your mood and define more clearly why the week was good. So, rather than saying, ‘I didn’t feel too much anxiety this week’, you might be more precise and frame it differently by saying, ‘I listened to my body this week and addressed my anxious thoughts early. I exercised three times and I talked with my partner about something that was bothering me.’ This makes things clearer and, again, gives you back more control over what happened, rather than seeing yourself as a leaf in the air, at the mercy of the ever-changing winds!
Ultimately, as we do this work, we must never lose focus of the reasons we decided to tackle anxiety in the first place. What has it taken from our lives? How has it affected our career, our relationships, our peace of mind and our motivation? Where would we be if we just left it unchecked and carried on as before? When we keep bringing ourselves back to our ‘why’, we will find it easier to stick with the work we are doing and see it as a life-long process rather merely than a quick, limited fix.