Stress, worry, and anxiety are probably the internet’s most conflated buzzwords. And let me tell ya, they are hot tamales in the mental health world too! I’ve been a social worker, anxious schmuck, and a psychotherapist for years, and I often ask folks how much anxiety, worry, and stress they are willing to accept/live with, which often results in some blank, and/or p.o’ed stares looking back at me… No one really wants to hear that we sometimes need to experience at least some of these elements in order for us to function, learn, and even grow. We generally just want the quickest tools to get us away from feeling unpleasant.

Well, this is the fundamental paradox of anxiety and the problem with how it’s approached and, generally treated these days — You aren’t really anxious. The internet and media treat anxiety like its a skin rash…. mostly with topical ointment. Don’t get me wrong, things like Mindfulness, Breathing, Self-Care, & Exercise are all important and incredibly valuable strategies for tackling Anxiety in our lives, and I by no means am trying to push you away from those concepts. Quite the contrary, I often use them as well. But sometimes they are strategies that only help me to get from one moment to the next.

But the thoughts, sensations, and feelings you experience as anxiety, are generally all just related to the fact that we’re always trying to figure out how to feel about ourselves. If we feel generally decent, then we want to defend our decent…ness…. decency? … And if our decency feels threatened, we know that we have to defend it and we tend to freak out at the idea that we might not be able to. But its almost never the actual ‘trigger’ that we’re really reacting to… its something more personal.

‘Am I a failure?’
‘What if I look like a fool?’
‘Will I loose everything?’
‘Do I deserve this?’
‘What if I’m WAY behind my friends and peers in life?’

When I speak to folks about what themes are really at play throughout their anxious experiences, these are the kinds of worries that come up. And they’re the same themes that I’ve always struggled with myself…and still do.

Using Clinical Psychotherapeutic Concepts Towards a Guided Discovery Of Self….or: Why I Worry About Stupid Sh*t That Just Makes Me Feel Like A Jerk All The Time.

My parents used to say that I’ve been a social worker since I was 7 years old when my dad first started taking me down to the homeless shelters to volunteer. I became buds with some of the ‘local flavor’ in my painfully white, upper-middle class hometown and learned that not everyone lives a clean, cozy, decent life.

I spent most of my childhood and adolescence trying to get the hell out of that town, and I did. I enjoyed an intensely privileged existence throughout my entire cis, white life and you’re probably wondering “What does this idiot have to be anxious about”?

Well, I suppose I could point to being born with a degenerative spinal disease, my parent’s divorce when I was young, my mother’s coming-out at around the same time, not having my siblings around as they were both older, witnessing my first death at 12, or my father’s overt, over-the-top obsession with excessive exercise, masculinity, and running/biking as many miles as humanly possible in any given month, or year.

I can pretty easily acknowledge that these (and many other) factors likely helped to lay the foundation of what became a sort of baseline existential angst, or pressure to make sure that I made all the right decisions in life. As a young adult I thought I needed a six pack just to exist in the world of people. I thought I had to get good looking people to pay me attention. I was always chasing something and scared to death that I’d be called out at any moment for being a complete failure.

As I matured with a little age, so did my anxiety. It morphed into what I call ‘benchmark angst’ — anxiety that feeds itself by highlighting the absence of certain elements in my life:
Dollars in my bank account, engagement in high paying and deeply meaningful work, a bustling social life filled with social media friendly bodies. And these sorts of ‘benchmarks’ would spill out into specific situations. I wouldn’t want to spend time with people I knew/liked, out of fear that they would think I was stupid, lazy, a total looser, or that I would basically just look uncool.

I’d take on extra work, lift so hard and so often at the gym that I literally broke my back. I looked for side hustles, said yes to everything, dreaded confrontation or saying no out of fear that I’d hurt someone’s feelings or loose friends. I read countless self-help books and articles on productivity, life hacks, and success and became very distracted from what was actually present in my life and neglected my relationships.

Oh…. and I generally felt like a looser that just wasn’t getting… ‘it’. You know, that special ‘something’ that will make me feel like I made something of myself. This sentiment grew and intensified right into my thirties. Especially, when I became a father. That was the first time I realized that I’d become the worst kind of moron…..the Oxymoron. I now had this little person to nurture and care for, and I felt so much pressure, stress, and angst I wouldn’t be able to- that I frantically became obsessed with finding some way to ensure he’d be provided for, become the world’s greatest father, AND make something of myself…..forever.

Oxymoronically, as my energy became zapped more and more into these pursuits/behaviors, I naturally and progressively withdrew from being present and nurturing to my son, and my partner, and myself. I abandoned them for my anxiety, and at a time when my son needed little more than breastmilk, my partner needed little more than love and encouragement, and I only needed a bit of space in my day for just feeling decent.

And then, at some point I turned around and realized that I had gotten myself into a place where I only ever either felt like a looser, or a jerk…and that sure was an anxiety provoking realization!

All of this is to say that when you look at modern life, you realize that there is a lot of near constant pressure that people place on each other. Yes, it is external pressure created by parents, media, friends, gender norms, Capitalist Pigs/New World Order/Illuminati Overlords. But at some point the noise starts trickling inside and we take the reins for ourselves.
‘What are you going to be?’
‘Where are you going to go?’
‘What if you don’t?’
‘Who are you going to convince?’
‘How are you going to make that happen?’

These troubling, judgmental, archetypal thoughts begin pretty darn early in life wouldn’t you say? It’s a wonder why we’re all so bloody neurotic. We spend almost all of our lives like dogs chasing cars, or someone who just fell off a cruise ship in the middle of the night- frantic, terrified, swimming for their life. The Good life.

At least that’s how I often felt, even until relatively recently. I mean, I had a partner who loved and supported me. I had a had a healthy young son who adored me, a good job, family and friends who thought the world of me. Why do I worry so much about this stupid shit? What a jerk!

Wait, Am I F*&%ng Anxious?
The existential anxiety that I have personally developed, lives to diversify itself into as many different parts of your life as it can. Do you experience chronic angst when making decisions? Even minor ones? What to eat for dinner? What to wear? How to ‘pitch’ yourself at parties, family reunions, or when meeting new people? These could be some ‘outer signs’.
Some anecdotal things I’ve come across from folks I’ve worked with over the years: Do you give great presents? But is the process/transition of choosing and gifting a gift to someone often feel harder than it should? Do you feel like everyone is relying on you all the time? Is money like really, really, REALLY stressful all the time? Even if you manage to pay most everything off most months? Struggle with sending food back to the kitchen at a restaurant? Even if its the wrong food, stone cold, or seriously botched? What about saying ‘no’, to your friends, parents, siblings, boss, or even to strangers?

Anxiety creeps, that’s for sure. But these are the symptoms, not really the causes. The thing is, after we develop these types of behaviors into habits, we mistake them for our personality traits. ‘Oh, I’m just the anxious type’. And once we identify as anxious, it sets us up to just prove ourselves right, and to be harsh all over ourselves when it gets in the way, or when it fully messes things up for us.

You Aren’t F*&%ing Anxious.
At a time when I can safely say I was experiencing my worst anxiety infused existential crisis, one particular evening, between a couple of rum and cokes to help me sleep, I began spiraling. And man, do I love spiraling. I can be so good at it that I can get others to spiral with me, like the good Chicken Little that I am. I was spiraling on money of course, but then…it wasn’t just money-it was the cost of inflation, housing prices, daycare costs, my aging parents, nuclear war, the environment, Donald Duck, and whatever other countless doomsday signs from above that my Amygdala could pull out of the air. I was lying in bed with my partner, while my 15 month old baby boy was sleeping soundly in his crib above my head and I could literally feel my eyeballs bouncing off both sides of my head…I was panicked.
I tried my breathing techniques, I tried meridian tapping, journaling, meditation, and my partner, sitting there watching me, realized exactly what I needed to hear in that moment.

She grabbed my by the damn face, looked right into my eyes and said “You aren’t F*&%ing anxious!”

I looked at her in disbelief.

“We’re not going to survive unless I can figure a way out of this hell storm for us, and you’re telling me that I’m not anxious?”

She then said “Seth, everything you’re feeling right now is more about how you feel about yourself, than what you’re freaking out about. You’re alright.
In most areas in your life. You’re alright”.

I asked her what she meant.

“You’re freaking out about money because you’ve always been worried you won’t make something of yourself. You’re freaking out about everything else because you’ve always been worried people won’t love you. But you never stop to really just appreciate yourself.
You’ve gone through some tough things in your life. They didn’t happen to you because something’s wrong with you, you got through them because something’s right with you. Because of who you are. And these things you’re panicking over right now, they’re not really here in your life. But your feelings about yourself are.”

Then she said something that completely glitched my brain for a few minutes, and that I’ll never forget….

“You’re NOT anxious, you’re totally decent. So just shut the hell up.”

Then…I cried. I cried like Tom cried for Wilson in Castaway. I cried like a moose would cry. It was formidable, guttural, and mad ugly. And it was VERY cathartic.

After a few minutes I’d collected myself and realized that I actually felt decent. The heat from my anxious spiral seemed somehow much more distant and I’d become lighter.

The reason I’m telling you this story is because the stuff that I held onto which has continued to cause me so much grief and struggle, came to a head. It was interrupting my basic ability to function-eat, sleep, work, keep healthy, and engage with others-to such a degree that something had to give. And maybe you’re at the point where something has to give too, or maybe you just don’t want to have to get to that point. And I don’t want you to either.

So instead of (or maybe in addition to), reaching for a new app, a new breathing exercise, or just trying to walk/yoga/ caffeine enema it off, the next time you feel the heat of an anxious situation or thought, try slowing down to think about yourself and how the elements of the situation might be related to how you feel about yourself, and why.

Self Perception is probably the most important thing we walk around with. It’s like the skin we’re in. I use the term Self Perception rather than self esteem because self esteem to me feels like another media friendly buzzword, as well as a concept that can evoke the same frantic, validation seeking, cruise ship chasing pressure that I personally need less of in my life.

Unfortunately Self Perception isn’t media friendly. It can’t really fit into a 32 second tiktok video, or a 280 character tweet. I think this is why when we look for help, what we generally get misses the mark by only addressing (at most) half the problem.

Most anxiety strategies tend to just get us away from our unpleasant feelings. Don’t get me wrong, proving to yourself over and over that you are able to ‘get yourself away’ from unpleasant feelings and thoughts can, over time, have an impact on Self Perception. But it doesn’t make us bulletproof from that old anxious creep, it does nothing for destroying the social systems which affect our Self Perception, and it all but ensures that we will need to keep proving ourselves, to ourselves over and over again for the rest of our days.

But thinking about where my triggers have come from and realizing that those experiences, and realities could actually make me feel stronger, has made the difference for me. It’s a strategy I use that works. And maybe it will work for you too.

Maybe you’re NOT anxious, maybe you’re just totally decent.