why anxiety is bad?

One of the most common myths about anxiety is that it is, overall, bad.  Of course, we know there are consequences to experiencing too much anxiety, including feeling overwhelmed, out of control, uncomfortable bodily sensations, physical issues, avoidance of feared situations, etc.  While these repercussions can be unhelpful and even miserable, they usually originate from how we respond to anxiety.

Anxiety is an emotion that has been manufactured via evolution to keep us safe from danger and threats in our environment.  For example, if you’re driving and the person in front of you slams on their brakes, your body will respond with physical sensations of anxiety within milliseconds to propel the action you need to take at that moment—whether that’s slamming on your brakes, swerving to avoid hitting them, etc.  It works to keep you alive.

However, sometimes our anxiety isn’t the best at responding with the appropriate intensity or in the appropriate moments.  A helpful metaphor to understand this is imagining a watchdog in the brain as our alarm to danger—sometimes that watchdog, which continually scans our environment for threats, operates on overdrive or sends out false alarms.  We may know logically that the anxiety at the moment isn’t warranted, but we respond with great fear. 

When we label these responses or alerts as bad, we often follow that with attempts to ban the emotion and escape our feelings.  Most of the time, this only works to either heighten the fear at that moment and/or create larger responses to unresolved fear in the future.  Anxiety wants to be heard, so it tends to turn up the volume if we refuse to listen to its messages.  That doesn’t necessarily mean we have to believe its messages or take it at face value, but we acknowledge what it’s trying to communicate and then respond intentionally.

Here’s an example scenario: you have a work-related deadline approaching, and you start to feel the anxiety building.  Ask yourself: what is the message of this anxiety?  What is its function right now?  The answer may be that this task is important enough to warrant anxiety—the kind to put your work into action.   Or the answer may be that you are worried about pleasing your boss, about failing the task, about having time to complete the job, etc.  Once you identify the reason(s) for its presence, you can start to piece apart what amount of anxiety is helpful vs. what is unhelpful.  That doesn’t always mean the anxiety disappears, but that you can learn to operate despite or even because of that anxiety. 

If anxiety feels difficult for you to sit through, take time to remind yourself that you can sit through it and give yourself the chance to do so.  It’s built to be on your team; it is not your enemy.  Befriend it, learn about it, then let it know you will make the decisions and run the show!