Facing Anxiety with Chaos
Have you ever felt like life wouldn’t stop throwing punch after punch after punch? No matter how many steps you took, you would fall back three more. Or maybe you worry about the next thing that will happen because of this habitual routine that you have with life.
It’s time to step up and go toe to toe with life.
Okay. Okay. I don’t mean to honestly fight life. That would be counterproductive.
I mean to embrace the chaos that life graces us with.
There are plenty of good things that can come from anxiety. For example, anxiety can motivate us to put more effort into something that we want to accomplish. It’s a motivator, and a natural body response.
What I mean is EVERYBODY GETS ANXIOUS.
But it can also become overwhelming when it all comes at once as if it is piles of sand being dumped on top of us with no way to dig ourselves out. I found myself struggling with anxiety quite a bit. In fact, I was diagnosed just at the age of nine years old. As a child, it was a constant sense of overwhelming doom and that at any moment destruction would shred its way into my life.
As I got older, I tried to bury those feelings of anxiety. Or in my case layer over them. As a typical teenager, my anxiety continued to grow to now affect my self-esteem. I still had that feeling of impending doom, but now it was accompanied by the paranoid self-awareness of how I looked and what others might think.
I only continued to build coping skill after coping skill from my therapists and school counselors. Deep breath. Challenge the thoughts. Stop the thoughts. None of these seemed to be working. It was just another dump truck of sand being thrown on top of me.
As a young adult, although I still am in this category, it might be best to say in my college and post-grad days, the anxiety started to shift towards my career. Would I be good enough? Would my colleagues hate me? Was I being too annoying in the office? All of these thoughts were a revolving door inside my mind.
Following my divorce I began to feel overly anxious that people would judge me for being divorced by the age of twenty five. It took months but eventually, an overwhelming sensation shot through me. A scream that started to bubble in my stomach until it flowed through my lips.
“SCREW THIS!”
It was that primal scream that helped me walk through the doors of my church, my work, etc. without a care in the world about what others might say or think. It was the first time since my early teenage years that I felt this type of freedom. I wasn’t letting anxiety control me even when my life seemed chaotic.
Because I fought chaos with chaos.
You might think that sounds ridiculous. Why would I invite more chaos into my life?
To which I say when you welcome chaos into your home, you no longer have to worry about who’s at your door. Meaning that when you accept that chaos will be a part of your life it can no longer cause you the stress of when it will show up.
Your next question might be, ‘how do I even do that?’
Three unique ways to face anxiety
There are three ways I welcomed chaos which lowered my own personal anxiety.
Warning: doing some of these may have people wondering what in the world you are doing, but don’t let it stop you from facing your anxiety.
1. Primal Scream
As I mentioned earlier, it was that initial scream that pushed me to face anxiety head on, to open my doors to it instead of trying to force it away. It was the stress of the anxiety-provoking trigger that seemed to weigh me down. In fact, there are many benefits to screaming which includes the stress reduction that comes from the released tension in our muscles. I often pair this technique with progressive muscle relaxation tools to help target the muscles where anxiety might be affecting the most. (Spoiler alert: mine is almost always my shoulders.) By pairing the physical tensing of the muscles with the tension releasing benefits of screaming, it can add an increased result in the intensity of the effect of anxiety on the body. Also who doesn’t like a good scream to release the frustration. I find it best to do it in my car right before a big stressor such as a meeting, event, date, etc.
2. Write your anxiety a letter.
Pull out that pen and paper and address your anxiety directly. Curse it out, mark all over it, tell it exactly everything that you would want to if you could see it face to face. If it’s a specific event or situation that causes anxiety, write about that. If it’s a person that makes you anxious, address it in the letter. Now comes the chaotic part. Find a contained fire. (A SAFE ONE). And burn that letter up. Let the anxiety turn into ash with the words you wrote. Watch the anxiety transform into the smoke blowing around you and lift into the air no longer weighing you down. Then to add a little more chaos to the fire, make smores over those burned ash as if you never cared about those anxieties before.
3. Break Stuff
Now this suggestion should be accompanied by the appropriate warnings. WEAR PROPER PROTECTION AND CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF. Now that I’ve warned you, get a cheap glass plate. It can be any color as long as you can find a permanent marker that is visible on it. Write everything that is causing you anxiety down on the plate. You can do this in whatever manner you like. You can make it look neat and organized or you can be even more chaotic with things. It can be specific events that happened, fears of the future, or people that cause you anxiety. Whatever it is that makes you anxious, WRITE IT DOWN. After writing everything on the plate, take it to a safe area outside and throw it onto the ground. Let the anxiety shatter into shards with the plate. Just make sure to clean up the glass afterwards to not present any harm to the environment.
Try one or all three of these methods out and see where your anxiety is afterwards. Chaos can seem like a scary thing, but once you welcome it in, it loses that ability to cause you any additional stress. But when anxiety does come into our lives use one of these methods to watch it fade away into nothing that can control us anymore.
Remember, it is okay to reach out for help. Use the form below to schedule an appointment and let’s get you on the right track on your healing journey.
