For many of us, anxiety is a constant presence. You know the pattern, you’re already worried about the presentation, the relationship, the family event, when suddenly a switch is tripped, your nervous system becomes hot-wired to the national grid, and you become paralyzed by fear and dread.
Anxiety, as with so many aspects of our personality, developed at some point in our life in response to the surroundings in which we found ourselves. In our early years, our anxiety was an adaptive biological function that was trying to alert us to get out of a perceived dangerous situation and to get to safety. The feelings and emotions that anxiety provokes in us are grounded in fear and dread, so it is perfectly understandable that our instincts are to run away from them. But what if we become curious to understand the role it tries to play in our lives, to understand its purpose? This approach involves gently looking into the heart of our anxiety, figuring out where it comes from, and developing the skill of using anxious energies as fuel for our goals.
Under this approach you will set aside around 30 minutes to write down a dialogue with your anxiety. You (the adult) are the interviewer, and your anxiety is the interviewee. What would you like to ask it and what would you like it to know? Be curious, be creative, be bold, but be respectful. People commonly ask where the anxiety came from, what purpose it serves in their lives or why its rules are so strict, why the voice needs to be so loud, or why it fixates on terrible outcomes that probably will never happen. Whatever you want to know just write down the question and then write the answer that flows into your mind. Don’t critically analyze it, don’t edit, and don’t judge it. You don’t have to show this to anyone, and it doesn’t need to be pretty or logical. I have seen people ask their anxiety why is it so intense, why does it need to take control, why does it struggle to co-exist with other parts of themselves.
The exercise, if repeated over time, may well help you integrate your anxiety into your life in a way that allows you to continue to stay alert and take advantage early warning signals that anxiety gives you that something is amiss, while diminishing the intensity of the anxiety by sitting with it instead of running from it. The exercise is deepening your ability to co-exist with your anxiety, to acknowledge it, and understand it's origins. The interesting paradox here is that when we sit and look at strong emotions like fear or anxiety, instead of trying to outrun them, they actually lose potentcy over time.
There is nothing new in this technique, it is actually a (very) old school technique developed by the Athenian philosopher Socrates in the 4th Century BC of creating a questioning dialogue of two parts as a means of confirming or denying or putting context around an assumed truth. Psychoanalyst, Carl Jung then adapted this approach to shed light on the unconscious parts of ourselves (i.e., the parts that function on autopilot), by structuring the two parts of the dialogue as between the conscious, adult ‘you’ the protagonist, and your sub-conscious (in this case your anxiety). The psychological objective is to reconcile the sub-conscious roots of your anxiety with your conscious mind, or at least to take gentle steps along that road. As with most all effective interventions, its beauty lies in its simplicity, and its impact lies in gentle repetition and expansion of the exercise.
This approach tends to work particularly well for people with a creative or imaginative streak and it takes patience, but for the sake of a modest investment of your time set against a lifetime of navigating anxiety, it offers a compelling return on investment.
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