Anxiety and Acceptance

How did you respond to that title? Did you feel incredulous, even, perhaps, offended that you could be asked to accept your anxiety? Did it, maybe, create a small sense of anxiety inside you…

And yet, acceptance of our anxiety is really important if we want it to decrease and just become part of the background noise of our lives, and, in some cases, to disappear.

The anxiety tiger is a key metaphor in ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). I envisage this tiger as a bit like the one in The Tiger Who Came To Tea by Judith Kerr. Except, sadly, the anxiety tiger doesn’t normally go home, allowing you to ignore the mess left behind while your support system suggests you just go out for sausages and chips and ice cream (there’s a whole other story there, but that’s for another day…).

Instead, the anxiety tiger starts small, and it only needs a little bit of food, so what’s the harm in feeding it? Just this once… But now it’s learnt you’ll feed it, so it keeps turning up, often at really inconvenient times, and its portions are getting larger... Until finally, it’s fully grown, and there’s not really room in your house for yourself because everywhere you look, there’s this enormous tiger with an insatiable appetite and all your time and energy is spent feeding it.

And that’s anxiety. It really didn’t seem a big deal not to go to that social event or to put off making that work presentation, and it quietened down the anxiety nicely. But now it’s back, and again, and again, until your life is dominated by anxiety’s demands and you’re not sure where it ends and you begin.

So, what do you do about it? You accept it. ‘Yeah right’, I hear you say, ‘like that’s easy to do’. And it’s not. But feeding it isn’t working, so why not try another approach?

Try observing it as a detached third person. Not, ‘I’m anxious’, fusing you with anxiety, but instead, ‘Hmm, I seem to be feeling anxious’, defusing you from the emotion. Approach it with curiosity; how does anxiety manifest itself for you? Where in your body? Can you remember what you were thinking just before you started feeling it? And, if you can make yourself sit with it, how long before it passes? Because, like any emotion, it will.

And most of all, treat yourself with compassion: we’re all just humans trying to be the best we can with the cards we’ve been dealt and the tools we have.