The Insidious, Oppressive Power of Anxiety
For some, it seems like a giant leap to say. For others, it’s an obvious statement of fact that, fundamentally, anxiety is fear.
To worry about what might happen, to feel anxious over how things are going or where things seem to be going means, at the root, to fear what might or might not happen. Be it anxiety regarding family, money, politics, AI, parenthood, climate/environment, job, relationships/love, society, friendships, the state of the world, or anything else, it is fear about how this or that thing might negatively impact me and/or those I care about.
On one hand, there’s nothing wrong with anxiety. We all feel it. It’s a perfectly normal human feeling to have. In fact, in certain situations and amounts anxiety and fear keep us safe from eventualities that might cause us harm. A father watching his five-year-old boldly wade into the waves on the beach feels a very smart anxiety born of the realization that the ocean, even on a pretty beach, is an unpredictable and dangerous force that could put that child into an instant life-threatening situation. So, the father watches keenly, as does the lifeguard in the tower. Anxiety can be a very helpful human emotion – heightening our senses, and putting us into a state of alertness and readiness to act.
But, what most of us struggle with on a regular and sometimes daily, even hourly, basis is anxiety that not only rises up to seize our attention in a heightened moment, but throbs forever in the background of our lives. There is a seemingly never-ending cacophony of crud to worry about and fear happening.
The truth of this is found in the mere fact that:
Mental health issues in North America have massively increased, to the point where systems are overtaxed, and people cannot get help;
There is a palpable spiritual longing as people seek something – some bigger power or tools – to assuage their lack of inner peace, even as the rolls of religious institutions, which were traditionally in the business of this very thing, in the US and Canada continue their 50-year decline;
Drug and alcohol usage is prevalent and in many ways and places seeing steady growth;
Escapism through consumerism, social media, gaming, gambling, virtual reality, eating, and relationship infidelity continue to grow;
The proliferation of even healthy means of calming the mind and spirit also continues, as the wellness and fitness industries grow.
Every single one of these is a testament to how bad our problems, specifically those in the sector of anxiety/fear have become and how powerfully they impact our own sense of happiness and inner peace. We can see the size of a problem by looking at the size and breadth of the apparent antidotes. If the problem were small or even medium, it would not birth so many and such large efforts to make it go away.
Yep, Houston, we have a(N Anxiety) problem.
Briefly: October, 2024, Presidential Election
Any discussion of the larger issue of anxiety, particularly at this precise moment in time, would be negligent if it did not give at least a cursory look at the US Presidential election barreling down on us in just a couple of weeks. Much hangs in the balance for America and the world. Regardless of who your candidate is, there is great anxiety in a large amount of people. Issues such as immigration, abortion, the economy and cost of living, climate change, the Middle East, Ukraine, and health care worry many, if not most of us. And, with each new election these issues seem more dire and the election outcome seems scarier.
And, as we’ve seen in previous elections, this anxiety is so insidious and powerful that it has split many families and plundered even the longest-time friends, such that they remain broken to this day as a direct result of it. Anxiety and fear can so effortlessly birth anger and even hate that then get turned onto one another, even between those with the formerly tightest of bonds. These hurtful feelings and actions have themselves become so exhausting that there is among many a longing for civility, reconnection, and some new peace and kindness.
Sadly, the election stuff is all on top of the significant everyday anxieties we each live with. What was already bad is exacerbated in this long season of waiting for November 6th, when the 2024 election is over.
Coping with vs. Healing Your anxiety
I’m not here to teach you how to cope with anxiety, stress, worry, or really any other powerful human emotional state.
For the most part, I don’t care about coping. Further, there are a million other therapists, clergy, shamans, yoga teachers, and helpful uncles/aunts who can teach you how to cope with an anxiety-producing situation or ongoing state.
What I care about is actually healing the root of the problem driving the symptoms.
Below anxiety and fear is a belief, and it’s nothing complex. In fact, it’s quite simple. The belief is that if this thing happens (or doesn’t happen), I won’t be okay. It will hurt, cost me (time, money, energy, life, love, comfort, security, or something else I treasure), or just be unbearable. And I’m not going to dispute you by saying that all of those things that you fear happening wouldn’t suck. Of course they would. Duh! You wouldn’t fear them if they wouldn’t suck bad, should they came to pass.
But something sucking, hurting badly, being a pain in the ass, or causing even immense grief is very different from me, in the end, not being okay, at all. My having to go through a period of hardship, even a long period, is one thing. But, very often in life we live as though that which we are anxious about would bring about a permanent, irretrievable state that I would not survive. In other words, the deep fear underneath anxiety is that if this thing comes to pass, I won’t be okay, and I won’t ever be okay. The greater that belief, then, obviously, the far greater the anxiety accompanying it.
What if your worst fear were to happen?
One of the exercises I go through with my clients as we discuss their great anxieties, whether regarding the election, their finances, an abusive relationship they fear leaving, oppressive family dynamics, or the state of the world, is that I ask them, “If this grand anxiety-producing thing were to come to pass, would you put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger, yes or no? Would you kill yourself?”
Well, that’s a bit extreme, Sven, don’t you think?
No, I don’t think so. See, the amount of terror in people as they consider x, y, or z things happening is often equivalent to the belief that it would be a fate worse than death. Because people often lack the ability to drill down to the root of their fears, and thereby defuse them, the emotions expand, to the point of consuming the host, blowing up everything into the realm of epic proportions. And, if you’ve ever been consumed by fears and worries, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
So, I reverse-engineer it. Let’s assume your worst fear in this situation were to happen. Would you then kill yourself?
98% of the time the answer, after some coaxing to engage the question and go deeper, is ‘no.’ (If the answer is ‘yes,’ we explore that. And more often than not, by deeper excavating, we discover they wouldn’t actually do that, but it just feels that way.) So, after that is acknowledged, I plainly state the obvious, “So, you would survive. Life goes on. You would make the conscious choice to live. You want to live, even if that bad thing happened. By admitting that, you’re admitting that this giant thing you fear, while legitimately scary, is actually not as big as you’ve made it out to be. In other words, it is manageable.”
So, then the question becomes, if you want to live then it’s a very reasonable assumption that you actually want to be happy and have peace inside while you live out this existence that you’ve now chosen. I mean, if you’re choosing to live, do you really want to spend the next 10, 25, or 60 years you have remaining on this earth miserable? Obviously, the answer is a resounding ‘No!’ Otherwise, you wouldn’t be spending all this money on counseling or all of this energy doing self-help work if you actually wanted to be unhappy, anxiety-ridden, and full of anger and bitterness.
Can you let go of that anxiety belief system?
But, what if creating happiness in this new existence demands letting go of what you wanted to happen, letting go of the belief system that you could ONLY be happy with the old way or ONLY be happy if things went the way you wanted them to go?
See, your existing belief is that you cannot be happy without x, y, or z happening or staying the same. Thus, to be happy in any new reality demands that belief change. But, you don’t want it to change. So, you cling to the old belief. That’s where your inner pain comes from – not having what you want to have or want to have happen.
As those darn Buddhists like to remind us, so much suffering, if not all of it, is the result of clinging. In this case, and really in nearly all cases, suffering is the result of clinging to the belief that I won’t be okay with a new belief system, letting go of the old one.
And that, my friend, is where you’re at, right now.
Your anxiety, your worry, your fears are, at their root, cemented in the belief – the untruth, really – that you cannot survive and/or cannot be happy, or you’ll refuse to be happy, in any reality that isn’t the way you want it. Yet, if you’re choosing to live, even if the worst happens, then you have no choice but to accept the possibility that you can be happy. Otherwise, you’re just choosing to stay stuck in misery. Truth is, you can make that choice. It’s your life. Spend it your way. But why would you want to?
So, you have this thing, person, path, idea, or reality that you clearly don’t want to let go of, because you believe you can’t, or you simply won’t. If you’re gonna be happy in this lifetime, you have no choice but to let go of the belief that you cannot be happy without this thing, person, etc. The price of happiness is changing your belief system.
So, what do you choose – happiness or your old belief system?
From being always anxious to aliveness
Let’s get this out of the way first: if you choose your old belief system (which is totally your choice and, god bless ya’, I support you 100%), you then have zero use for me and my work, as I’m in the business of helping people transition from old into new, from past beliefs to new beliefs, from unhappiness and unrest into peace, joy, love, and, ultimately, ALIVENESS!
I’m here not to get you what you want – i.e., this success, that person, this title, or that acquisition. I’m here to get you that feeling, or feelings, you most seek, and seek at your deepest, quietest place inside – those feelings of lasting peace, deep fulfillment, happiness that is more than just in the fleeting moment, and a sense of ALIVENESS that transcends this or that new high. I’m not here to convince you you should make this transformation, only to assist those who know they want it. So, if it is your desire to stay stuck, holding onto your old beliefs, I wish you well on your journey.
For those who do choose change and growth, those who do choose life and happiness, it is time to begin the grieving process now, before the thing you fear happening possibly happens, or the thing you want never comes. I mean, you can wait until after it happens, if you like. Nothing wrong with that. But the net effect of grieving the loss, in advance, is that you’ll live with radically less anxiety now. If you can begin the movement into the new belief system now, you can begin to mourn the loss of the old now, you will naturally have less fear, which means your movement to greater peace actually begins now, rather than later, if that dreaded thing does or does not happen.
You need to be welcoming all of your feelings of loss, sadness (over things not going the way you wanted), anger (over having to change and let go), disappointment, frustration, betrayal, disgust, rage, misery, and every other emotion on the feelings wheel. You need to begin thinking about the eventuality you’re not wanting and allow all of the feelings to rise up in you. Feel them. Allow your body to express them by screaming, crying, shaking, laughing, moving in ways that release energy for you (working out, running, yoga, biking, walking, stretching, etc). As you allow feelings up, the body naturally seeks to release the physical aspect of it through movement. In fact, you likely won’t even be able to sit still. You must give the body what it needs when inviting all of these feelings surrounding grief up from your soul.
Verbalize Your Anxieties
But, contrary to the belief of many people, the physical release is not enough. The soul release – the actual release of the emotional charge – only happens with words. Whether with that very patient and non-judgmental friend, the compassionate and calm clergyperson, the adept therapist, or even in your own journaling and writing of letters (that you do not send), you must begin to verbalize, or put into words, what you are going through. All of the thoughts, all of the feelings, all of the fear, all of the old beliefs, all of the anxieties must come out of you. All of it.
If you want peace and joy on the new path, you have to fully flush out the old. There is something quite natural in the human experience to do precisely this.
From a young age, we desire to tell mommy or daddy what happened when we scraped our knees or someone called us a bad word on the playground.
When we’ve had a hard day as adults, we desire to talk to our spouse or best friend.
When life has kicked our ass with some major tragedy, we seek out that kind, consoling oldest friend, or the cleric or therapist.
It is just a natural human instinct that wants to talk sh*t out, because it feels so good when we do. That is proof positive that what I’m talking about here works and is what we all seek. Of course, the problem is finding someone who can actually listen without judgment or fixing, someone who can help us skillfully and quickly get the pain out and give it words that maybe we, ourselves, struggle to find. So, there are tools that can help us do all of this on our own, which is precisely why I do what I do – to help you heal yourself quickly and effectively.
Use Words to purge anxiety from you
It is very important to remember one thing, above all else. It is not – I repeat, IT IS NOT! – enough to merely think about these things that afflict you, that hurt, that you worry about, that are attacking your sleep and sanity. Thinking solves nothing. In fact, thinking and thinking about them only makes them worse. Because, as long as you’re merely thinking about these things that cause you pain, these things are still in you. The goal is to get them out of you…with words. The more you do that, the more the memories/thoughts and the emotional charges attached to them radically decline in power, and eventually go away completely. Whereas, merely thinking about them only causes them to increase in power as they churn, over and over again, in the mind.
However, the opposite is true, too. Not thinking about them only stuffs them down deeper and they forever try to poke back up through the shield you daily work to maintain between your sanity and those stuffed-down memories, thoughts, and emotions. In fact, this is where most people have been taught to expend their energies – bottling up their thoughts and all the feelings that go with them. Taught it from childhood, most folks discover by their teens or twenties that they’re spending a whole lot of energy and effort trying to avoid those thoughts and feelings. All manner of distractions and self-medications get employed to make those dangerous thoughts stay packed down and bottled up. Over-working, gambling, boozing, smoking, popping pills, busyness, over-parenting, creating chaos, over-eating/eating obsession, over-exercising and more become ways to distract from all the memories and feelings inside that you claim to have stuffed down and not think about or feel. We spend our lives running, just a half-step ahead of all that crud biting at our ankles, seeming to want to drag us down.
Therefore, someone coming along and saying that you gotta turn around and face the very crap you’ve been running from sounds just mad. Crazy! It sounds far too scary.
Yet, welcoming the thoughts and feelings, feeling them, allowing them out through the physical release and giving them words, whether verbally or in writing, IS the grieving process. Then, going even deeper, as I teach in my method, to find the core beliefs in you created by those past memories and feelings heals even more and brings greater release and ALIVENESS.
This whole process ain’t pretty. In fact, it sucks…until it doesn’t. The more you do it, the more you actively draw up from within you all of the feelings you’d really rather not feel and give them a written or counseling avenue for expression, the lighter you’ll become. Not only will the emotional cloud lift, more and more, but you will literally begin to have more spontaneous physical energy. The whole system that is you works together in symbiosis.
And, the more you dive into discovering the core beliefs running your entire life (the beliefs you cannot see with the untrained eye), the more you move from not just healing to a state of thriving.
This is not coping.
(Sven, couldn’t it be argued you just laid out a whole bunch of coping mechanisms there? Nope. Coping is doing everything to basically allow the root problem to exist inside while dealing with symptoms. Healing means welcoming and releasing the feelings that naturally grow out of changing the core belief system. Those are two vastly different things.)
What issues create the most anxiety for you?
On a piece of paper, list the top ten things that are ongoing sources of anxiety in you, the ones that conjure the most worry, fear, pain, sadness, anger, or what have you. List them. Then, after each one, write about all of the feelings you feel regarding that one and why?
Write about when it started and the story of how it started. Write it all out.
Now, write about all you have done to try to make those thoughts and feelings go away.
Journal also about what you most desire to happen in this scenario and why. While you’re doing this, write down all of the feelings that are coming up inside of you. How does your gut feel? What about your chest and throat? Your skin? Your head? Your pits and hands? Write it all down.
Fully lay out on your pages all that you most want to NOT happen.
Write out what all of your greatest fears are.
Write down every possible scenario that could happen and every feeling it would or could bring with it that you fear.
Write down what is happening in your body as you think about these things.
If you need to get up and walk around while you’re doing this journaling exercise, do so. Maybe you want to do a bit of stretching. Maybe you want to lie flat on your back and simply lay there while you allow all of these thoughts and feelings up. Then roll over and journal some more. Then lay back and allow more up.
This is what I do. I toggle between simply laying down with my eyes closed, allowing up everything, and opening my eyes to journal on a pad of paper. I have always done so much journaling right before sleep, after sleep, or in the middle of the night. Find a rhythm that works for you.
One thing I recommend to people who might be bringing up thoughts, feelings, and memories that are particularly highly charged is to go into the gym and journal in between their sets of lifting weights. I have been doing this for decades. It enables me to bring up the choicest, most high-powered memories and feelings. I can immediately release the physical energy through lifting heavy weight (or less weight more times), while then release the emotional charge through journaling in between sets and doing so in the strongest language possible. It’s a profoundly effective combo tool for releasing the most venomous memories and charges inside.
Lather, Rise, Repeat
Then, after using all of these tools, do as it used to say on the back of shampoo bottles, “Lather. Rinse. Repeat.” Keep doing this, in other words. The more you do this, the better you become at it. And, most importantly, the more and more quickly you begin to experience not just a big release in the moment, but a profound and enduring relief in your life. You begin to experience a physical sense of feeling lighter. You begin to experience more spontaneous energy.
Badass counseling anxiety Resources
But this whole discussion of anxiety, worry, fear leaves one unanswered question:
What about those core beliefs that I mentioned in the last section?
What do you do about those, especially if you cannot even see them?
And what’s the effect if you don’t even touch them?
What happens when we have an experience that hurts is that it not only conveys an emotional charge that attaches to the memory of that event, but it carries a charged meaning or message. It’s the underlying message. For example, if you bring up an idea at work for how to do something differently, and your coworkers or boss laugh at you and your idea, it conveys the underlying message, “You’re an idiot,” or something in that food group. There’s an underlying message that doesn’t have to be spoken. But, it’s very clear.
Well, that message imprints in you, to some greater or lesser degree.
As we age, we get better at blowing it off or letting it not stick. But, when we’re children and teens (and for some folks it never goes away), those messages imprint in us at a very deep level. As I discuss simply in my book, There’s a Hole in My Love Cup, it’s as if wet cement gets poured onto the bedrock of your little soul as a child. Then the words of those underlying messages get written into that wet cement, much like the neighborhood kids might write in the newly poured sidewalk cement with a stick after the city workers leave.
>> See What Makes “There’s a Hole In My Love Cup” So Badass Effective?
Those messages that get conveyed to the child not only get written into the very foundation of that child’s personhood, but they harden. They calcify. They concretize. And worst of all, like a virus, they infect the entire operating system of the machine that is you, remaining forever undetected. As you age, you just assume what you’ve been taught: Something is wrong with you. And, that belief causes you to act differently, think differently, socialize differently, dream of your future differently, aspire differently, speak differently, carry your body differently, and so much more.
But the truth is, there was never anything wrong with you. You were taught a lie, a lie (or lies) that you cannot even see. Those lies become the very foundation of your anxieties and fears. Fears of being found out to be bad inside. Fears of failing. Fears of succeeding. Fears of what people will say. Fears of never mattering. Fears of being left and being alone. Fears of putting your real self out there.
The fears and anxieties are seemingly endless. But, with the right tools you can go down to the very foundation of who you are, identify those messages written into you, and pull them out, so that you are finally, for the first time in your life, operating authentically and not operating from a place of deeply embedded worry and self-loathing.
This process, in conjunction with the work of welcoming and actively releasing all of the memories and thoughts with emotional charges, leads to a life of far greater happiness, peace and ALIVENESS! We go from merely surviving to finally THRIVING!
Are you ready to deal with your anxiety?
If you are, then go now and get the book, There’s a Hole in My Love Cup. Get the workbook that goes with it, full of journaling prompts (including additional content). Love Cup is available in Spanish, too.
Download the free podcast, The Badass Counseling Show! It’ll rock your world.
Get the DIY video courses here.
Join the free Badass Counseling Group on Facebook. Or simply enjoy the 1000+ free videos that I’ve made for you on TT, FB, IG, and YT to help you heal.
But dive into the work. Turn and face the crud you’ve been running from. Your best life awaits you!
Thanks for reading.
-- Sven Erlandson, MDiv, Is The Author Of Seven Books, Including 'Badass Jesus: The Serious Athlete And A Life Of Noble Purpose' And 'I Steal Wives: A Serial Adulterer Reveals The REAL Reasons More And More Happily Married Women Are Cheating.' He Has Been Called The Father Of The Spiritual But Not Religious Movement After His Seminal Book 'Spiritual But Not Religious' Came Out 15 Years Ago, Long Before The Phrase Became Part Of Common Parlance And Even Longer Before The Movement Hit Critical Mass. He Is Former Military, Clergy, And NCAA Head Coach For Strength And Conditioning; And Has A Global Counseling/Consulting Practice with offices In NYC, NJ, And Stamford, CT: BadassCounseling.com
