**Note: this post has been modified from its original version written in 2017. To view the original post, you may click here**
I’ve struggled with varying levels of anxiety for my whole life. In high school, it was more of a response to the series of “what if”s that the outside world presented, such as “What if I don’t get into a good college,” or “What if someone corners me in a dark alley and offers me drugs?” The former worked out, and the latter was never an issue, which makes me wonder whether they still teach the same curriculum in high school health classes. College presented an upgrade in the sophistication of my “what if”s, but with a fine-tuned eye, they were still relatively packaged and canned: “What if my major doesn’t lead to any promising work?” Studying abroad spiced up a few of my fears, such as What if this tourguide driving us around a bendy road just outside of a remote town isn’t actually a tourguide? Or What if this abrupt, eccentric, impatient French landlady that I just met twenty minutes ago and requested full rent up front actually ended up scamming us out of, well, hella euros?
Once I’d graduated college and moved to DC, society’s grand old “So what do you want to do with your life?” question that it so aptly hurtles at 22-year olds gave me tonsssss of anxiety to fuel on. The simultaneously soul-sucking and adrenaline-pumping sensation of early networking days on a diet of nonfat lattes over informational interviews and Stouffer’s lasagna at the end of the day kept me “what-if”ing for a while, as did a series of ill-fitting relationships and a MAJOR career change in my mid-twenties.
Towards the end of this “figuring it out” phase, (who am I kidding, we’re all still figuring it out) I realized that my anxiety had grown much bigger than the Chihuahua size I had always considered it to be. In 2015, I had moved back cross-country to my hometown of San Francisco, moved back in with my parents to get my teaching credential, began a bicoastal long-distance relationship, and tried to awkwardly “make myself relevant again” after four years of being gone.
In the midst of all this, my hormonal? biological? chemical? physiological? response was to be absolutely consumed by anxiety, and it’r real lovely sidekick “fear.” My fear and anxiety was beginning to frame my perception of my everyday experiences. I have too many blessings to count, and at that time in my life, intellectually I could identify that these “problems” I was obsessing over weren’t real problems. I wanted a healthy perspective back and I wanted to start enjoying my own experience of my own life without fear and anxiety hijacking it. My anxiety manifested itself as a series of small-to-gargantuan fears, on this kind of rotisserie rotation. I’m disappointed that I just pulled rotisserie into such a bummer metaphor, but what can you do.
So the following year, I went on a quest to combat this anxiety. I went to therapy, picked up a few books about the science of fear, got into yoga on a beginner level, hit the gym more, and started talking to my friends and family about it. The combined effect of all of these activities was immensely positive, but the three that I found most effective were talking about it, writing about it, and then actually learning about the science behind fear:
One of the trickiest and arguably most oppressive characteristics about fear and anxiety is that it happens on the inside. It’s not like a broken nose or a sprained ankle or a temporary cast around your wrist. There’s no blatantly visual indicator that you might be struggling a little bit—or that you’re smack dab in the middle of struggle city, for that matter. You especially can’t see anxiety on someone if they’ve become pro at covering it up. There’s no visual cue to prompt the outside world to go “hey, need a hand there?” while on the inside, the anxieties are just rotisserie-ing away. So talking about it and writing about it did wonders in terms of making it a little bit more tangible, something I could kind of massage and tweak and pull apart, the way you would putty or play-doh. It made it more digestable and less formidable.
Researching the science behind it totally tickled my inner psychology nerd, and blatantly underscored ways in which I could gradually take control over my own perspective. Simply put, if we tell ourselves something enough times, we begin to believe it. Not just on a self-talk level, but on a neurological pathway level, as well. So if we can conceivably re-train ourselves to think outside the parameters of catastrophizing, we can begin to frame a more positive (or at the very least realistic) outlook, and in turn, a more positive (or realistic) perception of reality.
So, what does daily bouts of anxiety and fear feel like? I have two metaphors that I frequently use to describe it:
- A phone being switched from “Airplane Mode” to “Cellular Mode” – This metaphor kind of mixes images because honestly, it works much better with a visual of cell phone screens circa earlier 2000s, when you’d turn phone screen on and you’d see the symbol indicating your phone was searching for a signal, and you’d see one, two, then three and four bars indicating that you had “full reception.” When I was in college, I once used this metaphor to draw a parallel to my mind in the morning. During my most anxious times, I’d have the sensation of waking up, and then my brain, without me asking it, would instantly start searching for a “What to worry about today” signal.
- 2 versions of walking down the same city block – I use this one a lot to describe fear, but it applies to anxiety too. The scenario is this: you’re walking down a city block, and the exact same traversing could go one of two ways: one, you could be ever-nervous of threats in the environment—you see a scaffold, you’re worried a hammer might fall from it, you see cracks in the sidewalk, you take extra precaution not to roll your ankle, you notice someone walking behind you, you’re worried they’re going to snatch your bag. It’s been a minute and a half and you reach the end of the city block, and literally nothing bad has happened to you. Situation two: You’re walking down that same city block, and you notice a love poem etched into the pavement, you see a café that you’ve never been into before, a stranger passes on your right hand side and you admire a really cool pattern on the back of their sweatshirt, after which you glance up and see the light hitting the buildings in a really stunning way. It’s been a minute and a half and you reach the end of that city block, and literally nothing bad has happened to you. Two identical routes, two starkly different experiences. The single changing variable is your perception when you take your first step.
In fall of 2016, I reached out to my brilliant and supportive friend who had organized a series of twelve personal growth and yoga sessions designed to create space for people to discuss meaningful and thought-provoking themes in life such as joy, success, values, and habits. When the workshop theme was going to be fear, I asked if I might be able to be a speaker that day. He generously welcomed me aboard, and that afternoon was one of my favorite memories of 2016. Speaking to a group of friends, acquaintances, and “strangers” about how I had interacted with fear in my life unlatched a strong passion that I had never before tapped into: sharing my own words in an effort for others to find some solace or inspiration in potential common ground or existing curiosity. I walked away from that day feeling lighter than air, feeling that even if my words had resonated with one person, that was good enough for me.
The below is an excerpt from the remarks I gave that afternoon:
Most stories have a beginning, and a middle, and an end. This story just has a beginning and a middle—because I think fear is an element that doesn’t necessary vanish from our plates. Rather, we learn how to stare it in the face. We develop tactics and we learn to re-frame our narratives so that we become protagonists of our journey, rather than victims of an oppressive fear.
So let’s rewind to last fall. It felt like I had been tasked with creating a brand new life for myself—including the adjustment of being a graduate student. Fear of the unknown was probably what took hold first. Instead of settling for a nicely sized portion of fear of the unknown, however, my mind decided to completely surrender itself to an onslaught of additional fears, culminating in this overwhelming state of anxiety. I was afraid of big things, little things, absurd things, national security threats, personal insecurity threats, you name it. Fear of failure. Fear of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fear of being out of shape. Fear of my technology accounts being hacked. Fear of being alone. Fear of getting poison oak on a camping trip. Fear of letting others down. Fear that I forgot to turn the stove off before I left the house. I basically could have been likened to a character you’d see on Seinfeld. Or a character Kristin Wiig should play on Saturday Night Live.
Finally it reached a point where I was getting annoyed with my own self. So I thought – alright—it’s time to stop letting fear win out every single day. I’m 27. I have amazing friends. I’m in great health. I live in one of the most tolerant and accepting cities in the whole world. Life is a gift and instead I am choosing to be held captive by all these “what-ifs”. Enough is enough. Time to change the tune.
So here is what worked for me: therapy. Reading articles about other people’s journey with anxiety. Talking to friends about it. Writing down what my actual fears are…And another powerful tool was using mindfulness to disarm this larger-than-life fear.
When I began researching the science of fear and anxiety, I learned that fear is actually a mindset that we ourselves are in control of engineering on a psychological level. Every time we tell our brains that something bad is going to happen, we actually create corresponding pathways in our brain. And the more we think it, the stronger those pathways become. On the flip side, if we think positive thoughts, if we approach new scenarios and new days with intentional positivity, we create pathways of positivity, which then directly inform our mindset and the way we perceive the state of things. So it all comes back to the very cool fact that we are in charge of our own mindset. We are far more powerful than our fear. We just have to grant ourselves permission to take the steering wheel. We have to make that commitment to push fear aside. The first step to dissolving the overwhelming burden of fear, like many other normal human emotions that can be hard to confront and process, is to recognize it. It’s to put a name to it, and to be like “HEY. I see you fear. I see you trying to take over, but this is my life, and I’m in charge” Once we identify where fear has seeped into our lives, or where fear has prevented us from living out our fullest dreams, we can then develop our own toolkits, our own mechanisms for standing up to it, for working through it, and for unpacking it and making it less of an obstacle.
I want to end on a quote by Cheryl Strayed, from her book Wild that details her journey hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. She writes “Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves”. In my experience, fear comes from a variety of different sources. We see terrifying things on the news, clickbait articles on social media, we’re warned of risks in the big outside world while we’re growing up. Sometimes fear comes from a voice inside. From a hiccup in self-esteem. Or from a fear of being insufficient, or not knowing what an impending change will bring. Or sometimes we’re afraid of our own talent- of what we actually are capable of doing when we set our mind to it. Sometimes that is super daunting. But it all comes back to the story that you tell yourself.
So I invite you to tell yourself a different story. A story that paints you as the navigator of your own life. And to start leaning into the notion that every day when you wake up, you are in charge. That boundless opportunities await and nothing—certainly not fear—can get in the way.
I, along with the rest of the world, have no idea what the future holds– but if we’re using that same metaphor of walking down a city street, I’d like to re-orient myself to begin noticing more of those love poems etched in the sidewalk and the light hitting the buildings in really stunning ways. And I hope the same for you, dear friend, as well.