Anxiety & Tools, what may be useful for you to know…

In my previous blog post, I wrote about how in archaeology tools are what help us uncover something, but the tool itself isn’t the end, rather the means for discovery.

I’ve been thinking about the inordinate focus I see on tools, and I think a lot of times it comes from a desire for mastery over our experience. We want to feel like we have a way to subdue our difficulties, our anxieties. And to be sure, if we are in a full blown panic attack, having a tool can be useful. But I also think that often what motivates the desire for a tool is some other version of anxiety.

Unfortunately, very often what I see is folks who want to get rid of the anxiety— or any other emotional experience— actually make it worse. Why is that? Well one of the theories here is that if we tag sensations and experiences associated with anxiety as ‘bad’ or a ‘threatening’ our brains respond by amplifying signals in our threat response system. Which means, we get more symptoms of hyperarousal. It can create a feedback loop.

So we have to understand that anxiety is a paradoxical condition. The more we try to control it, we risk actually making it worse. So if we want to tool to make our anxiety stop, well unfortunately that approach risks reinforcing the anxiety-loop-system. This is talked about very clearly in the book What every therapist needs to know about anxiety disorders (2014):

Techniques themselves are neither a help nor a hindrance, and are trivial compared with the knowledge required to use them properly. A technique is merely a tool, and the real work is learning how to use it to ensure an optimal outcome…

An essential point is that anxiety symptoms can not be vanquished with effort. Anything—no matter how calming it may seem to be— if done to suppress or fight, counteract or distract, analyze or get rid of, keep at bay or otherwise avoid these feelings will ultimately fall short of ending anxiety.Anything done with urgency and intensity will fall prey to the paradoxical nature of the symptoms. Anxiety is best embraced and allowed (p. 5-6).

This is not an easy thing to embrace for most people. Why? Well anxiety at panic levels feels very urgent; life-threatening even. Anxiety at slightly lower levels than panic feels intensely uncomfortable physically as well as mentally. So when these authors talk about the paradoxical nature of the symptoms, they are referring to how when we experience anxiety, our natural inclination is to try to move away from it. If we were in the jungle and we thought we heard a predator in the bushes 100 ft away from us, we would probably feel anxious and respond in a way that minimized the potential for harm to ourselves.

Avoidance in this circumstance makes sense for our survival. However, for most of us, this hardware interfaces with a different reality than our ancestors who lived in the jungle. The perceived threat is often more diffuse, unclear, symbolic and yet it pulls on the same hardware. Anxiety is unavoidable in life because of the equipment we have. However, the secondary amplification of anxiety is very workable. The challenge is that it requires us to recognize these patterns and instead of trying to fight them, to begin to make room for them “embrace and allow” and trust they will pass. It’s counter-intuitive, but the alternative doesn’t seem to work often enough- otherwise most people would not end up getting stuck in anxious loops.

There are a couple of analogies I’ve been thinking about that I think are useful pertaining to tools, anxiety, and the practice of therapy itself. I am sure you may have heard of the golfer who always blames their clubs. If they only had the new, shiny, nice club, their golf game would be much better. They want the perfect tool, and assume that will make them into the golfer they want to be.

Well, I am willing to bet that any pro will tell you that’s not how it works. Sure, pros have very expensive golf clubs, but they also have put in tremendous work into their swings, their approach, the mental side of their game. A golfer with a nice club and no skills is not going to be able to play a good golf game.

We could also use guitar as an example. Guitarists are notorious for a condition called GAS- guitar acquisition syndrome. There is always another guitar that will help them get a new and desired sound… that will bring out their creativity. And usually they are the nicest, expensive kinds of guitars that are most desirable.

And while professionals may use different guitars for different sounds, the guitar itself is not the most important element to what makes the music sound good. Furthermore, the price of the guitar doesn’t guarantee that just any player is going to sound great. You can watch a truly masterful guitarist play on a 150$ instrument (or close to that) and make it sound amazing. There are YouTube videos of it. How do they do that? Because the tool itself is much less important than the guitarists skill, their fingers and feel for music itself.

So when we need help with our anxiety or really any emotional condition or challenge, I think it’s helpful to know that the tool isn’t as important as how we use it. If you want to get good at golf, or guitar you need to practice. Similarly, if you want to change how you relate to yourself and others, you probably can’t just rely on the fantasy of the silver bullet tool. Sure, some tools may move the needle for you more than others. However, it is your dedication and willingness to feel and know your own automatic responses, where they come from from the inside out that over time can help foster change. This is a process-based understanding in which we are active participants, and can develop the skills and ability to observe our habitual reactions without reinforcing them.

So the moral of the story here is:

1. Tools can be helpful, but they probably aren’t going to be helpful the way that you think

2. Tools can be risky and reinforce anxiety if we are using them to try and suppress our experience

3. Ultimately with anxiety we are moving towards embracing the experience, allowing it, and not adding additional secondary reactions that paradoxically reinforce it.

4. How we utilize the tool is probably more important than the tool itself.

5. I need more guitars.

Reference

Seifm, M.N. & Winston, S. (2014). What every therapist needs to know about anxiety

disorders: Key concepts, insights and interventions. Routledge. NY & London.