If you have anxiety, you will likely find this excerpt from Dr Toni Lindsay’s book, Everything Anxiety Ever Told You Is a Lie *Well, almost everything!) speaks to you. I know it did for me! The excerpt offers insights into coping with the uncomfortableness of anxiety and includes an exercise to help to manage it. The clinical psychologist’s compassionate approach extends throughout the book. Let me know your thoughts!
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Book excerpt from Everything Anxiety Ever Told You Is a Lie (*Well, almost everything!)
This excerpt is from Dr Toni Lindsay’s Everything Anxiety Ever Told You Is a Lie *Well, almost everything! Reprinted with permission from Exisle Publishing.
Getting comfortable with discomfort
There are lots of reasons why people don’t like anxiety, but the main one is that it feels really uncomfortable. It might be hard to be in your body when anxiety is around, and the noise in your head might feel too much to bear.
Sometimes we aren’t very good at realizing that we are uncomfortable. Think about the last time you got really hot — my guess is that you got grumpy, and probably felt a bit jumpy or agitated in your body. Usually, we don’t recognize that this is happening until after it has already happened. The idea of being ‘hangry’ is a good way of thinking about this stuff!
Do you know how you would know if you’re uncomfortable? What might be some of your early warning signs?
But we are clever creatures, so when discomfort arrives for us we usually have a plan!
As humans, when we bump into stuff that feels hard, our instinct is to try to come up with ways to get rid of the hardness. This is one of the reasons why we aren’t living in caves anymore. It was a tough life and so we put our brains to solving problems so we could move out … We started making fire. Then we could cook stuff and warm ourselves. Then we made tools in the fire. Now we could build some more stuff. Then we built better houses, etc. (Actual historical facts may vary. I’m a psychologist, not a historian, after all.) You get the idea.
And this is the same thing we do now.
If we’re cold, we put on a jumper. If we have a headache, we drink some water and take some painkillers. And when we’re anxious, we work hard to make the anxiety stop.
The difficulty is, though, that getting rid of that discomfort is really hard. And often in trying to get rid of the discomfort we get more uncomfortable.
I want you to try an exercise (read through the whole thing, and then give it a crack!).
Sit down on the floor cross-legged (if this isn’t possible, you could do the same thing standing up, or lying down). Set a timer on your phone for 5 minutes.
For those 5 minutes I want you to stay completely still. No movement at all (except breathing!!!). Notice what happens in your body, but also what happens in your brain. When the timer goes off, get up and go for a little walk around the room, then come back to the book.
How did you go?
My guess is that a few things happened. Possibly:
» you noticed that it was really hard to stay still
» your nose got itchy — like, really itchy
» you noticed parts of your body being really uncomfortable and you found it hard to think about other things
» your brain started to really notice the things that felt uncomfortable and then got really focused on them, and when you dialed in on them the discomfort got worse.
Any of those close? You might have had some other stuff show up; that’s okay too!
How you thought the exercise would go might, I guess, impact how you felt about it when the discomfort showed up. If you thought it was going to be really easy, then when the discomfort showed up it probably felt really different than if you were expecting it.
The discomfort that shows up alongside anxiety is kind of the same.
If, when anxiety shows up, you are constantly trying to get rid of the discomfort, my bet is that it will be really present and it’s going to be hard to focus on anything else. But if you recognize that it’s okay for it to show up, you might not get so caught up in it.
Let’s do an experiment.
When the discomfort shows up, I want you to say to yourself, ‘Ah. Discomfort! I’ve been expecting you. Nice to see you again. I know this is going to feel hard, but that’s okay.’
How did that feel?
Nothing has changed, right? The anxiety is still there. The discomfort is still there. But you are less focused on it. And when you are less focused on the anxiety, you can focus on other stuff. You know — the stuff that matters.
About author Dr. Toni Lindsay
Dr Toni Lindsay is a qualified clinical psychologist who has been working with both adults and adolescents for over 10 years. She works at Chris O’Brien Lifehouse, a cancer treatment center in New South Wales, Australia, in the Oncology and Hematology departments and has a special interest in the care of adolescents and young adults with cancer. She is an AHPRA approved supervisor and works predominately from an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy framework.
Her books include The Cancer Companion and The Certainty Myth, published by Exisle Publishing. During more than fifteen years spent working clinically with adolescents and young adults (primarily in the health context) Dr Lindsay has developed a unique perspective and understanding of the challenges of managing anxiety.
Get your copy of Dr Toni Lindsay’s Everything Anxiety Ever Told You Is a Lie (*Well, almost everything!) on Amazon or from the publisher Exile Publishing‘s website today.
Thanks for introducing us to this most interesting book. I’m going to add it to my TBR. <3
I’m so glad you are going to read this one, Debby ~ I find myself pulled to books that help me learn more about myself and others ~ It’s like we’re constantly in self-discovery mode. HUGS
Hi Christy, thank for this interesting and enlightening article.
You’re so kind, Robbie