Instead of seeing anxiety as a burden you’re forced to deal with, have you ever tried seeing it as an opponent? Or, as author Joseph Campbell would say, a call to adventure?
A common thread among anxiety sufferers is that they think there is some aspect of life that they simply cannot handle. If they ever encountered the source of their anxiety, they believe it would shatter them into a million pieces.
So naturally, they avoid the things that make them anxious. They spend their time performing rituals to try to prevent their imagined disaster, and they are constantly reassuring themselves that it will not happen.
Most often, this vigilance only leads them further into a prison of their own design. What they don’t realize is that they have the power to face what cages them. They just have to be willing to challenge it.
Attacking Anxiety: Training and Preparation
Exposure therapy is the gold standard for treating anxiety.
However, the therapists who perform it do not throw their clients into the deep end of their fears as soon as they walk in the door.
Instead, they create a game plan for fear-facing. Clients are asked to consider what scares them most and to create a hierarchy of fears.
This roadmap starts with what fears seem most “faceable” to you and leads up to the things that scare you most.
In addition, clients are given tools for coping with anxiety when they inevitably experience it. Here are some examples:
- You may be taught vipassana (mindfulness) meditation, which allows you to be present with your fear instead of letting it overwhelm you.
- You may be taught how to gauge your anxiety as you’re feeling it. For example, you might ask yourself: “On a scale of one to ten, one being perfectly calm, and ten being the worst fear of your life, what is your anxiety level right now?”
- You may be taught grounding activities such as counting as many objects as you can in the room that are a certain color. This anchors you in the moment and helps reduce anxiety.
These activities help you see that no matter how severe anxiety feels at the time, it eventually peaks, and then starts to dip back down. It behaves like a bell curve on a graph, and knowing this helps your ride the anxiety out, even if you do nothing else to manage it.
These are your weapons in your fight against anxiety. Next comes the battles.
Attacking Anxiety: Taking Licks
Once you have a game plan, you can start systematically putting yourself in situations that make you anxious.
These are the moments you turn toward your anxiety and approach it voluntarily. That’s how you start to build power against it.
The more consistently you face fears (in a manageable, step-by-step way), the more comfortable you’ll become with fear, and the more rewarding the process will start to feel.
Here are a few examples of doing this with different fears:
- Enroll in a class that forces you to practice public speaking.
- Commit to introducing yourself to a new person once per day.
- Look at pictures of spiders on the internet, then eventually, work your way up to letting a spider crawl on your arm.
- Delay your compulsion to clean your room for 20 minutes, then an hour, then a whole day.
- Practice swimming at the shallow end of the pool, then the following week, move forward 5 feet and keep repeating this process until you reach the deep end.
Fighters know how to take their licks, so sometimes, there will be setbacks. You might overwhelm yourself and go back to avoiding your fear. You might struggle with self-doubt. Or you might feel like what you’re doing isn’t worth it.
Just know that with every honest attempt, every time you step into the discomfort instead of away from it, you get stronger.
Even if there isn’t much you can do right now, just do what you can, until you become comfortable with it. Then, set your sights on the next milestone, no matter how small.
Attacking Anxiety: A Fighter Trusts Themselves
When you keep facing fears, you start to notice something.
You realize that you’re handling situations you thought you could never handle. You’re thinking more clearly under pressure, and you’re doing what you once thought was impossible.
What emerges from this is a deeper sense of self-trust. If anxiety is rooted in doubt, then trust is the remedy. Trust is freedom.
After you’ve seen that your fears will not annihilate you, you learn that you can handle uncertainty. You don’t have to obsess and try to prevent imagined disasters if you know you can deal with them, or at least the fear that comes with them.
A fighter knows that they are capable and adaptable. They believe in themselves when they chase goals. Put simply, they are confident.
This confidence is built through proving to themselves over and over again that they can face fear and thrive in it. It’s possible to get to this place. It just takes time, and a willingness to trust yourself.
Dive In and Embrace the Adventure
Go at your own pace with this process. There’s nothing easy about it, and it’s ok if it does not look perfect. You don’t need to become fearless. Becoming fearless isn’t a realistic goal for anyone.
What is possible is mastering fear and anxiety.
You can adopt the mindset that fear is to be moved toward, instead of avoided. You can look what makes you anxious in the eye. You can see fear as a call to grow and reach greater heights, an opportunity for glory even.
It’s also important to note that, in facing fear, you are meant to be empowering yourself, not destroying yourself.
You aren’t supposed to berate yourself if you “fail” to act against fear one day. You regroup, adjust your goals if needed, and congratulate yourself for going on this journey.
So, it’s ok to get a little aggressive toward fear, to beat your chest and call it out. Do what a fighter does…
- Prepare (Train).
- Execute (Act).
- Reflect (Appreciate your progress).
You don’t have to let anxiety gnaw at you constantly or limit what you do in life if you can take systematic steps to lean into it. Assert your right to live a free and fulfilled life and keep pushing your boundaries until you become who you want to be.
