Anxiety? Helpful? Huh? We hear you. The contradiction is unnerving and discomforting. It’s like boiling ice cream or dry water. If something is unhelpful, hurtful, and dysfunctional we’d obviously identify swiftly and resolve it. Right?
More often than not, with irrational creatures like us homo sapiens, that is not the case. The intense experience of anxiety is very real and may also feel like it is out of our control. We subconsciously keep ourselves in familiar settings, even if they’re unhelpful. Let’s find out more about it!
Anxiety sucks. 88% of Indians suffer from it. Where’s the benefit in that? There are some and they’re as follows:
Space and attention: When we feel anxiety, people tend to give us space, attention, and care. They ask about our well-being, give us reassurances, and validate us. All helpful things when we’re feeling down, but when we start feeling down just to be able to experience those helpful things, it may become problematic.
Comfort Zone: Anxiety relieves us of the very thing that provokes our anxiety thereby safeguarding our comfort zone. It may feel shitty, horrible, and suffocating (among other unique experiences of anxiety) too, no doubt about that. But we also indirectly gain some things that aren’t necessarily helpful but they help us deal with reality. So if we feel anxious about driving a vehicle, that anxiety can keep us in a state of disempowerment. We would never learn to drive! The experience of anxiety is excruciating, and no one consciously aims to make these incidental gains. But they’re there, and they end up reinforcing our behavioral responses. Anxiety begets anxiety.
Safety: Anxiety creates an unhelpful blanket of safety and comfort that simultaneously hurts us, yet also weirdly helps us. It is sometimes the best way we can manage to cope emotionally with the resources we have to create safety. Since anxiety kind of helps us and creates safety for us, we may discount the idea of seeking help. Help and change may become scary and alien notions but our current patterns, they’re known, they’re comfortable, and they’ve got us so far, so why not a little further?
That being said, it doesn’t mean we can’t strive to find a healthier way to cope. It would allow us to feel anxiety but also work through that anxiety to reach our goal. A way so that we can feel AND function. Maybe not simultaneously, but chronologically. No feeling is wrong and no feeling is final.
Anxiety may become a loop that creates inertia. It may keep us arrested in a place, situation, or experience that is not healthy or helpful. If anxiety was completely bad and had no benefits whatsoever, we’d have eradicated it with no problem. It is the sneaky benefits that we don’t realize we get from it that may reinforce and strengthen the very thing that hurts us.
It can be scary and overwhelming to realize this, but it may also set you free. Merely realizing that sneaky benefits exist can take away the power from them. We all deserve to lead healthier and sustainable lives. We all deserve support, professional and otherwise. Feeling anxious is as human as it gets, so reach out to a mental health professional. There’s always a way forward. Always! And it’s okay if you don’t see that at the moment. At the peak of COVID-19, we never thought we would step out again, but look at where we are today!