Getting Comfortable with Discomfort

Extracted from Everything Anxiety Ever Told You Is a Lie (*Well, almost everything!) by Dr Toni Lindsay, published by Exisle Publishing, RRP: $37.99.

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.* 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 dialled 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.

Avoidance Trap

The tricky thing about anxiety is it doesn’t ever really let you win.

A good example of this might be when you want to go to a party. You might be really keen, but anxiety will show up and start chatting away. It might tell you that no one will talk to you, or that you will be really awkward and not able to keep a conversation going.

There is probably a conversation that shows up … maybe something like this.

Anxiety: You will be terrible at that party, you can’t hold a conversation. Remember what happened last time?
You: Fine. I won’t go then.
Anxiety: Ah. Excellent.
You: Happy now?
Anxiety: Of course, I’ll leave you to go back to your book.

When you give in to the anxiety it seems like the thoughts quieten down a bit, or it might even feel as if they’ve gone away. You’ll text your friend and tell them you aren’t coming (you might even have had to make something up). You know that your friend is bummed.

And you’re bummed too — but the anxiety makes it feel too hard to do it.

So you sit in your room reading your book, trying not to scroll to see what’s happening at the party.

And then another guy shows up …

Guilt: I can’t believe you didn’t go to that party.
This is the kind of thing you always do.

And another one.

Shame: You can’t even manage a party — you are so hopeless.

And another one.

Sadness: You’ve missed out on all these awesome things. Look how happy everyone looks.

And probably a million more.

That’s what I mean about not being able to win with anxiety. There will always be something else show up.

But that’s not all.

You know how we were talking about the wave before? Well, what happens when you avoid something is that, the next time you go to do it, it feels even bigger than before.

Say you are due to give a speech about something. You are prepared, but you feel uber anxious before it. It’s at 10 a.m., and you realize that if you just go home sick you won’t have to do it. The anxiety has probably even made you feel sick — lots of butterflies and nausea, maybe even a headache.

You feel sick, and it’s legit to go home. So that’s what you do.

The second you walk out the door, you notice the anxiety feels better. By the time you get home, you don’t feel anxious at all.

But then, later that night, you realize you will have to give the speech the next morning. And that sick feeling comes back. Even worse than before.

When you wake up the next morning the anxiety feels so out of control you can’t possibly go in to do the talk.

And when you make the decision not to go, the anxiety goes away again.

Until later that night … you get where I am going here, don’t you?

See, the anxiety is being tricky — but it is a false economy.** Because if you’d just done the speech then and there, you would have been anxious, sure. But then you would have done it, and felt awesome for doing it!

And just like with our wave, when you go home sick, you’re getting off the anxiety wave at the time when it is at its worst. So you never get to see that it improves if you sit with it (even though it feels gross) and eventually will dissipate.

If you aren’t going to win, then it makes more sense not to play the game, right? Anxiety will constantly try to trick you into doing the thing that it wants, and then it will turn it around and make it feel like it’s your fault. That’s like playing a game of Monopoly with that cousin who was always the banker and somehow always won … (geez, I wonder how?).

To not play the anxiety game we have to take the harder path — not the one that seems like the easy path (the avoidance path). Instead, we have to go bush bashing! (This will make sense in the next chapter, I promise.)

*Actual historical facts may vary. I’m a psychologist, not a historian, after all.

**A false economy is something that seems like it makes sense, but it doesn’t if you really think about it.

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