Can you overcome anxiety?“Overcome” might be too strong a word, at least in some cases. Some people are naturally more anxious than others. Some children are more cautious or worried than others, or they have a harder time being calmed and soothed. If you’re constitutionally predisposed to being anxious, you’re not going to become like someone who rarely experiences anxiety; however, you can certainly learn to reduce your anxiety and to manage it so it doesn’t take over your life.What can you do to manage your anxiety? The first thing you can do is let yourself off the hook. Our culture places a very high premium on looking confident and unflappable. As a result, people who struggle with anxiety often feel embarrassed, or ashamed of their anxiety, and go to great lengths to try to hide it. If you’re constitutionally predisposed to anxiety, I think it’s important to cut yourself a lot of slack and not expect yourself to always be cool, calm and collected. When you remove that pressure, it becomes easier to learn how to manage your anxiety because you’re not setting the bar impossibly high.It’s also important to remember that anxiety can play a very useful role in our lives. Anxiety alerts us to potential dangers. If we didn’t experience any anxiety, we would take all kinds of risks that could put us in harm’s way. The crucial thing is to be able to distinguish between the “good” anxiety that alerts you to real dangers, like the drunk driver who’s swerving into your lane, and the “bad” anxiety that’s making you feel like things are dangerous when they aren’t. For example, the kind of anxiety that tells you that something terrible is going to happen to you if you don’t do things perfectly isn’t alerting you to a real danger. It’s creating a false sense of danger that can be paralyzing. That’s the kind of anxiety that therapy can help you overcome.What are some major obstacles to overcoming anxiety? One of the biggest obstacles is feeling that the dangers your anxiety is warning you about are real. If you feel this way, you may feel that you can never afford to relax—if you give up your hyper-vigilance for even an instant, something bad will happen to you. Giving up the idea that the dangers your anxiety is warning you about are real is much easier said than done. Therapy can help you understand that your anxieties aren’t “irrational,” and that they don’t mean there’s something wrong with you.In other words, most people who suffer from anxiety come by it honestly. If you had a parent who became very upset if you didn’t get perfect grades or keep your room spotless, you could easily come to believe something bad will happen if you don’t do everything perfectly. If you had anxious parents, you may have learned from them that the world is a dangerous place that demands that you constantly anticipate danger so you can prevent it. There are many reasons that people become anxious. The more you can understand the sources of your particular anxiety, the easier it will be to experience relief from it.How else can therapy help? One of the biggest ways therapy can help is by bringing into relief the high emotional price that you pay for your anxiety. When you’re experiencing high levels of anxiety, you’re usually focused either on avoiding the things that make you anxious, or on trying to fix them. You procrastinate about finishing a project at work, or you work on it day and night, because you feel it has to be perfect. Procrastination doesn’t relieve you of your anxiety because, even though you’re not doing your work, it’s constantly on your mind. Working non-stop exhausts you and, once your project is finished, you don’t experience relief from your anxiety because you immediately start worrying about the next thing you have to do.Therapy can help you break this cycle. Once you’re able to understand and accept that your anxiety originated in circumstances that made sense at the time, you can stop blaming yourself for it and fighting against it. As you realize that most of the dangers you’re anticipating have more to do with what you’ve experienced in the past, than with anything that’s actually going to happen to you now or in the future, anxiety will release its grip on you and you’ll have a calmer, more relaxed and more satisfying life.Click to learn more about anxiety therapy and treatment with Dr. Jane Rubin.
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