It’s 5 a.m. and you haven’t slept at all. You’re questioning reality from a broken lens and a tainted conscience. Life just doesn’t make sense anymore. With a clenched jaw, sweaty palms, and a single tear running down your left cheek, you finally come to terms with the truth – you have to break up with your gym partner.
*Note: this happened to me when I had to leave for school. It was awful.
Anxiety: It can keep you up at night for hours on end, it can make your imagination run wild, and it can lead you to do unimaginable things. Things that you would never do if you were already happy.
All top performers understand the mechanics behind channeling anxiety, stress, misfortune, and pain into greatness. It’s no coincidence. We give pain and suffering a bad rep because, well, pain sucks. And yet it is imperative to success.
In this article, I’m going to talk about three ideas that will make you rethink the way you treat anxiety, and how you can channel it into strength.
1) Anxiety is Energy
Anxiety is energy – a very powerful energy. When you understand how energy works, you can understand how anxiety works.
There’s a very important distinction to make: energy cannot be destroyed nor created, it can only be transmuted. This is the first law of thermodynamics. It is also about the only thing I know about science.
So if anxiety is energy, and you can’t destroy energy… Does that mean you can’t destroy anxiety? Sorry.
However, this is the driving force behind anxiety. The fact that you will never be able to rid yourself of it makes it all the more potent. Therefore the goal is not to escape anxiety, it is to transfer it into something productive.
Think about it. How do you feel when you’re anxious? Your heart rate rises, your hands become clammy, and your thoughts swirl into a hurricane. There is just so much energy inside of you that you don’t know what to do with it. Naturally, you lose control.
Conquering anxiety is not about feeling calm or “just wishing I was normal”. No. It’s about regaining control. Anxiety is, in essence, a heightened state of awareness, intelligence, and creativity. There are large amounts of evidence that document this association (1, 2, 3).
Learning how to wield anxiety is just like learning how to wield your natural abilities. Take Frodo Baggins – a mere hobbit, who happened to be resistant to the ring, was dealt with the task to carry it through the black gates of Mordor! To be creative you need to be pushed to the brinks of anxiety. Writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky would blow all of his earnings at the casino after publishing a successful novel just to gain the motivation to write another.
Chaos is a dangerously powerful energy, and when wielded accordingly, it can attain incredible results. It’s true – the most pained are the most passionate.
2) Treat Anxiety as Excitement
This is wild: the nervous system cannot differentiate the difference between anxiety and excitement. They are both very similar emotional responses, as they exert the same neurological arousal: high cortisol, high blood pressure, high adrenaline, and sweat.
Anxiety reappraisal is the process of transforming your anxiety into excitement. It can be practiced by actively putting yourself in stressful situations while becoming convinced that they are exciting. Make it into a game and have fun with it. For instance, you can:
- Ask a stranger for $100
- Ask a stranger to marry you
- Ask for a free meal at a restaurant
- Yell “I am a virgin” in a crowded area
But it goes much deeper than this.
Those who are prone to high degrees of anxiety are indefinitely bound to their worry. For these individuals, stress is never confined to a particular situation – it’s life. That’s because the release of cortisol is so damn exhilarating that it can become addicting. That’s right, you can become addicted to feeling stressed.
But by practicing stress in a fun-like manner, you can actually change the neurological response in your brain from “flight” to “fight”. Eventually, the release of cortisol will no longer feel like stress – it will feel like pleasure, adventure, and excitement. The situations you once deemed stressful may begin to feel like fun.
Anxiety is like that little monkey inside of your head telling you what you must do to be happy; fear is what’s really holding you back. Let’s say you’re at a party and a gorgeous specimen walks in: anxiety is telling you “I should talk to him/her”, but fear is telling you “not a damn chance”. Fear usually wins, but courage always prospers.
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek” – Joseph Campbell
3) Find A Passion
The roots of anxiety are embedded deep down in the subconscious, and create a void that grows darker the more it is ignored. These insecurities are established during early childhood and strengthen with age. Those who seek power were once powerless; those who are shy were once shunned for speaking up, etc. Everyone has a void, but not all voids are created equal.
Whether your anxiety is genetically inherited or externally conditioned, the fact is you have a responsibility to fix it. If you do nothing, you are effectively letting your subconscious dictate your life. This alternative is never worthwhile.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – Carl Jung
There are 2 extremes to dealing with perpetual anxiety: the sloth and the work-a-holic.
The Sloth: Very lazy and unambitious.
The pain of anxiety has turned into depression. These types generally dissolve their pain in pleasures like food, alcohol, sex, or drugs. This is the worst way to handle anxiety because the method of escaping pain is through numbing it, which is like putting a Band-Aid on a flesh wound. We are all sloths once in a while, but beware, your inner sloth may vary.
The Work-A-Holic: Distracts themselves with endless unfulfilling work.
These types spend every second of their lives distracted by the next task. They neglect family, friends, and ultimately anything that doesn’t have to do with work. The problem with work-a-holics is that becoming so self-absorbed in your work never fills insecurity, it only adds to it. Think of the hamster running on the wheel: you are going fast, but you are going nowhere.
The best way to balance laziness versus overworking, I think, is to follow a passion.
A passion does not push you to your goals – it pulls you. You neither feel like you’re working too hard nor are you so self-absorbed that you distance yourself from reality. It can turn the lazy person efficient, and the work-a-holic self-aware. You may be working the same hours as the work-a-holic, but the work you’re doing is actually fulfilling. Though, there is a fine line – do not be the passionate person with the apathetic self-awareness of the work-h-holic.
Following your passion requires a level of humility that not everyone is willing to have. You have to drop your pride and humble your ego, telling yourself that no matter the result, you’ll be happy you tried. This mentality dissolves anxiety into strength since you care less about what others think.
If anxiety is an existential problem for you, maybe you just haven’t found an effective outlet to regulate it. Take a chance and do something you love doing. Don’t do for the sake of success; do it for the sake of doing. Suffering is inevitable, so you might as well pursue a life of meaning rather than a life of security.