Worry Is As Worry Does: Making Peace with Anxiety
A few years ago and for the first time in my life, someone looked me in my eyes and told me that I was displaying signs of anxiety. I was incensed to say the least. I repeatedly replayed the incident in my head, attempting to decipher at just what point she had me confused with someone else. Every day for the next seven days, I looped over and over again into various crevices of this rupture of our relationship. I heavily weighed the idea of no longer sharing intimate details about my plans for the future or dating or grief about my mother. I reimagined every conversation that I had had with her to find evidence of her predetermined plot to diagnosis me. I planned out tactfully how to address yet another microaggression. The day I saw her again, I climbed atop my soapbox and threw down all the reasons that it was misinformed to attribute anxiety to Black folks who have legitimate reasons to be more than cautious, that we had suffered enough mislabeling and marginalization to gather yet another label, and that I was worried, not anxious. Not only did I have no idea that the signs I was experiencing were anxiety, I was even more clueless that the very process that I had crawled through to invalidate her label of anxiety for me was, in fact, the quintessence of it.
It is easy to think that what you’re experiencing is a normal thing or the way everybody does it, and worry is easily one of those parts of life that can fall into one of those categories. Maybe yours looks like replaying each of your social interactions to assess where you could have acted differently. Maybe it’s to-do lists and color-coded calendars and Apple watch notifications, or maybe you’re up at three a.m. working most nights because the ideas and the plans and the hopes and the dreams will not rest. While these instances and many more can start off harmless and as natural worries and defenses against danger, the slope from worry to anxiety is a slippery one, tattered with days and weeks of ruminating and distress in other areas of your life, such as work, school, your relationships, and the like. Now, let me be clear: this is not meant to diagnosis you or for you to diagnosis someone else. The tools below are meant to support all of us in taking better care of our worries BEFORE they start taking from you.
Say (and See) the Words Out Loud
For both your self-critique and your self-compassion, there is power in talking to yourself out loud (you know, that thing we all do already). In fact, when you speak all those thoughts and feelings that run on loop in your head, they lose some of their power because your brain just realizes, “Oh! This actually doesn’t make any sense,” or your heart says, “Nope. We’ve done that work already. This just simply isn’t true.” By speaking the compassion to yourself out loud, such as “You did the best you could today” and “You really are great out here and taking care of yourself and loving on you”, you emPOWER yourself. Journal if that’s better for you. Simple activities, such as stream of consciousness writing where you literally write down everything that comes to mind, can have a big impact in showing you what really may be causing your anxiousness. You will be able to see these very real thoughts of yours on paper and can make better connections about what is really going on for you.
Track Your Thoughts
Connecting situations to their subsequent thoughts and emotions can help you replace those negative thoughts. By inserting more realistic and informed reflections, you place yourself on the road to literally rebuilding the way you think about yourself, others, and the world. The process of completing a thought record (found here) has the potential to become a mental exercise that you do when worry begins to creep into your life. You’re welcome to try this tool on your own, and if you have questions, I definitely suggest getting connected to a professional for more guidance (reach out to me, and I’d love to connect you with some good healers).
Soothe, Don’t Distract
Binging shows, reading, making wigs, playing 2K, baking… no matter the tool, the wealth is in HOW you actually use them versus what the activity really is. If you say to yourself (out loud, don’t forget), “I’m going to go home, and I’m going to watch four episodes of my favorite show because my mind is racing and I want to relax,” you are using your tool to soothe. If your favorite streaming service’s infamous “Are You Still Watching?” screen pops up for the fifth time and after 10 episodes of your show, you could be distracting. Have you ever been aimlessly scrolling Twitter, check your feelings temperature, and realize you are feeling emotions that you are not sure of the origin? You could be distracting. Is it after work and you say “Hmm… I’m going to check my Instagram feed for 30 minutes, see what happened in the world today, have a few laughs?” This is more soothing. You set a time. You set an intention.
Anxiety is a very real phenomenon and can be debilitating, if left denied, unchecked, and unacknowledged. We deserve to speak life to our experiences so that we can both connect with others and get the help that we need. If you are losing sleep, fatigued often, restless, having difficulty concentrating, constantly overthinking situations or perceiving wrongdoings, AND all of these symptoms are causing some actual real deal stress in showing up to your life, I am proud of you for getting this far. You deserve to show up for what you are feeling, call it by name, and learn to manage. We need you, and we need your mind. Take care of you. Anxiety truly does happen to the best of us.
