Addicted to Anxiety summary

Anxiety isn’t just something that happens to you. In fact, you might even play a bigger role in generating your own anxiety than you realize. Okay, this might sound like a criticism, but we don’t mean it that way. In fact, it might just be that knowing this can help you regain power over your anxiety.

The first step in doing this is to meet what the author calls your anxious self. We’re not asking you to fight or flee from it right now, but we’d like you to get to know this side of yourself. To help you identify your anxious self, you need to remember the five distinct ways your anxiety shows up. Knowing these five faces of anxiety is the foundation of everything that follows.

First, there is anxiety in the body. You know this feeling – it’s the churning stomach, the tight chest and the tension you carry without quite knowing why. These feelings stem from anxiety informing you that a threat might be near, whether the threat is real or not. With this facet of anxiety, you need to pay attention to where in your body it tends to live. That’s where you’ll need to work first.

Second, there is anxiety in the mind. This is the relentless stream of “what if” thoughts like, What if I fail? What if it goes wrong? What if I can’t cope? The anxious mind generates thoughts like these constantly; unfortunately, the more you engage with them, the more it produces. To help manage this constant flow, try to notice how hooked you are on your anxious thoughts. The thoughts may feel urgent and true, but most of the time, they aren’t.

The third element is the feelings that accompany anxiety. When anxiety arrives, it rarely travels alone; with it often comes fear, dread, anger and overwhelm. When faced with these feelings, many people claim they’re “burnt out” or “stressed” rather than consider that it’s anxiety at play. Consider the feelings that you might name instead of identifying the anxiety underneath them.

Fourth, we have behaviors. We’re talking about when anxiety shows up as avoidance, reassurance-seeking, double-checking or canceling plans. Though these behaviors feel like coping strategies, they’re actually what keeps the anxiety cycle running. The short-term relief they provide often keeps anxiety coming back again and again.

Finally, there’s energy. With anxiety, you’re often being pushed between two opposite states. On the one hand, there’s the wired, hyper-vigilant high, but on the other, there’s the flat, depleted crash after the episode passes. Both states can become familiar enough to feel almost normal; unfortunately, that familiarity is a large part of what makes anxiety so hard to let go.

Now, we want you to consider how these five elements might apply to you. Rate yourself on how often you experience physical anxiety symptoms, overthinking, avoidance behaviors, a need for certainty or a sense that anxiety has become your identity. If your answers are mostly “always” or “sometimes,” then there’s a decent chance you have an addictive relationship with anxiety.

The good news is that once you can see anxiety clearly across all five areas, you’ve already taken the first step toward addressing it. The sections ahead will show you how to work with each area – and what recovery looks like on the other side.