While anxiety may feel like a problem, it is attempts to avoid anxiety that really create trouble. In desperately trying to avoid anxiety, we can create rigid patterns of behavior, miss out on important life experiences, and systematically reduce our ability to tolerate distress. Think about that for a moment. Anxiety is a typical part of the human experience, we all have it. The difference between one who suffers from anxiety, and one who does not is quite simple. The former tries to control, reduce, or eliminate it (often known as avoidance, escape, ruminations, compulsions). The latter simply accepts it as it is, without defense. If our choices are made by anxiety, anxiety will define our lives. If we learn to tolerate anxiety, we can define our lives ourselves.

Here’s an overly simple example (likely your struggle is more complex than this; the simplicity of this is just to show you how anxiety works): Emily is scared of spiders. If Emily sees a spider, she runs far away in the other direction. Soon enough, she avoids her basement because she saw a spider down there. She then becomes scared of going outside, because she’s seen spiders out there too. She stays indoors, and gets the exterminator to come out weekly to check for and spray for spiders.

In short,

1. Emily feels anxiety when faced with spiders, or faced with the possibility of encountering one. She has evaluated the spider as dangerous, and her brain uses anxiety to signal that danger.
2. When she does, she escapes or avoids the situation entirely, which brings immediate short-term relief.
3. The next time she encounters a spider or is in a situation where there might be one, she’ll be even more anxious because instead of learning how to cope with it, she avoided it. She got in the way of teaching herself that not only are spiders typically not dangerous, but she can handle the anxiety that comes with them.