Anxiety is the most common clinical word that people use when calling me for help. Sometimes it is anxiety over spiders. Sometimes it is anxiety about death. Sometimes it is the dreaded “fear of impending doom” that has no specific name. What anxiety generally has in common is that it is fear-based and that it is future based. Anxiety is kind of like a rope that goes off into a fog. The harder we pull it the harder it pulls on us. We don’t realize that the rope circles back around and is tied around our waist until much later. We are really pulling on ourselves. The tension we create amps up the anxiety and causes the fears to spiral out of control and often leaves us in a state of frozen or fleeing fear.
The trick with anxiety is to let go of the rope. It feels, sometimes, like giving up control. If we accept that we cannot control the future anymore than we can hop in a time machine to change the past, many times the relief is very quick to come. There is a famous psychologist named Albert Ellis. He came up with an idea called “Acting As If” in modern days this phrase has a catcher rhyme “Fake it till you make it.” I know. I used to hate this phrase too. It felt not authentic. It felt like I was trying to be something I wasn’t. But I realized that many times this is the only way to step forward. When a big spider comes your way, sometimes acting as if you are not afraid and smacking that thing with a shoe is the only thing that will end the standoff. Sometimes acting as if you are OK to get out of bed, take a shower, get dressed, and go to the store, is the only way that there will be food in the fridge. And that’s OK. You don’t have to feel brave to be brave. You just have to act on it. But don’t worry. I won’t ask you to take leaps and bounds.
Let’s take tiny turtle steps together. Finding that when we are faking it – we are actually DOING it (whatever “it” may be)!
