My son and daughter have started to become fond of dogs, and the “when are we going to get a dog” conversation has started. We’re not quite ready for a dog, but it brough to mind the following Acceptance and Commitment Therapy metaphor. Imagine that you’re going to a pet store to buy a puppy. As you approach the store, you see a large sign advertising baby tigers (cubs) for sale. You didn’t think it was legal to own a cub, but you begin to think about the cool Instagram posts you could make with a cub. You enter the store and ask the employees a few questions. They assure you that ownership of tigers is now legal. You decide to spend a few minutes playing with a cub, and you fall in love. You purchase the cub, certain that your kids and your significant other will support such a wise decision.
You bring the cub home and have fun wrestling and playing with the newest member of your family. However, after a few minutes this cute little cub becomes hungry, and begins to growl. It’s in that moment you realize this is no ordinary kitten, this is a tiger. You have a fleeting thought, “maybe I made the wrong decision buying a tiger,” but you ignore that thought and quickly get the tiger some food. The tiger is satisfied, and you breathe a sigh of relief.
The next day the pattern repeats itself. Except the next day, the tiger has grown, and now you must feed it more food. On and on the pattern continues, until you’re now working at a butcher’s shop to feed your full-grown tiger.
You probably don’t own a tiger (it’s obviously not legal!), but I think this story is more relatable than it first appears. Because although you’re not dealing with a real tiger, you may be dealing with the anxiety tiger. And the anxiety tiger works much like a real tiger. It’s loud and scary, and we work really hard to quiet it down by feeding it. But instead of feeding anxiety food, we feed it avoidance. We turn our lives over to anxiety. We avoid situations that make us anxious. We procrastinate. We seek perfection. We worry. We seek reassurance. We check for certainty. All of these efforts are our attempts to lessen our anxiety, but ironically in the long run they cause the anxiety to grow. What’s the alternative?
What if instead of fighting against our anxiety, we learned how to embrace it. It’s important to note that embrace anxiety is not the same thing as liking anxiety. No one wants anxiety. I’ve never had a client come to my office and say, “I’m here because I’m not anxious enough. I need more stress!” Instead, embrace anxiety means that we learn how to be with our anxiety, rather than fighting it. Our efforts to fight away anxiety are often the fuel that causes our anxiety to intensify.
What would life be like if anxiety wasn’t an enemy? There can be something powerful and freeing when we realize that we don’t have to first solve or fix our anxiety to live our life. When anxiety is no longer an enemy, it gives us the freedom and energy to focus on the things that matter most to us in life. We can stop feeding the anxiety monster and start feeding our lives.
In the next couple of blogs, I’ll talk more about what it means to embrace anxiety. Embrace anxiety is one of the five RELAX steps, which are ideas and steps for learning how to master stress and anxiety. In previous blogs we discussed the first step, Reengage your relationships.
Anxiety can certainly be intense and daunting, but it doesn’t have to determine what you do or who you are.