Freedom from anxiety addiction
When adverse feelings feel more right to us
Dr. Judson Brewer is brilliant. But he said something I dismissed as dumb. Who would you listen to?
Before you decide, let me tell you one of us has degrees from Princeton and Yale Universities, has a successful clinical research lab, and has devoted their career to addiction and craving, and one of us hasn’t. Because I know which one is which, I gave what he said a second hearing. And it turns out he’s right.
What he said is people can be addicted to anxiety. Immediately I thought no. Listen, dumb dumb. You can’t be talking about that thing that makes people’s lives hell. Mine included. The experience people worldwide are medicated for and spend millions on counseling to disentangle from. Yeah, I don’t think so, Brewer.
It’s not like anxiety is drugs or something that creates euphoria, like chocolate cake. No one is selling anxiety on any street corner. That is unless you count every single newscast, newsfeed, and a ton of advertising for home protection systems and insurance.
What’s Brewer about?
I will try to explain what his book, app, Tedtalks and seemingly endless podcast appearances say about anxiety addiction. Of course, I’m not him, but if my hack explantation interests you, I can introduce you to the source.
Anxiety is an emotion felt in the body. A chest tightness, a brow furrow, and shortness of breath. It’s also felt in our brains. It has a neurochemical component and, therefore, a physiological side. And our minds can settle into an experience with anxiety that creates our normal. We can suffer in this normal for many years. It becomes our resting state. Are we resting in anxiety? What a conundrum.
Now, when we do things to lessen anxiety’s influence, our body which has become used to its presence at a certain level might resist the change. So we lessen anxiety, and the new feeling in our now less anxious body can feel wrong or amiss.
What’s more, we have a mental attachment to anxiety as somehow helpful. Feral Soul readers can think anxiety is a sign of a high standard, diligence, the result of properly estimating the high stakes we think all our actions possess. We have nearly sanctified anxiety’s value to our journey. It’s a sign we care.
So physically, we’re used to anxiety’s presence, and mentally (if not spiritually), presuming it’s doing something for us, we have a deep, multi-layered abiding relationship with anxiety.
What now?
Using Brewer’s Unwinding Anxiety app and putting in the work, and believe me, it’s work, to lessen the grip of anxiety can deliver results. But in my experience, our bodies can revolt. Something feels out of balance without a grinding pervasive fear filling our minds and trickling into our physical sensations.
Brewer has an app with regular exercises that invite awareness of bodily sensations. These routine ways to be present with those sensations become a way to, as he puts it, update the reward we imagine anxiety gives us. It’s a whole way of addressing anxiety addiction the way he’s given help to smokers, alcoholics, and food and shopping addicts in his earlier work, The Craving Mind.
My experience
I’ve been using his stuff for a season and what I noted is that as the influence of anxiety weakened, I started to instigate anxiety. It sounds nutty, but I started perseverating about potential concerns. As if life isn’t challenging enough, in reality, I was ruminating over imagined problems to recover the sensations of anxiety. Not having intense anxiety on board felt uneasy. I was addicted to anxiety.
The National song Sorrow I mentioned last week, again comes to mind. We might think he’s singing to a woman, but it’s to sorrow the he sings, “I don’t want to get over you”. Sometimes in life, the adverse feelings begin to feel right to us.
If you’ve come up in church, you’ve been told the body is sinful in every way and is more something to control, negate and deny. Talk about a great disconnect. We’ve been discipled to think the body is an enemy instead of a giant radar to inform us of anything. So is it any wonder that pain pill addiction has quickly crept into most churches for this and a host of other reasons?
We dismiss the body’s signals because not all of those signals are perfect. Is the body bad? Is that right? You mean the magnum opus of God’s creation he spoke over as being ‘very good’ is broken to its depth and not to be listened to for any information. I think we’re missing the point. Although the temple, and the dwelling place of the incarnate Christ, we’re to ignore all that comes to us from it?
Grace for you
Maybe you’ve stared into the face of anxiety and decided to untangle from it and failed. Let me say proceed with grace toward yourself. Grace on grace. This runs deep. The pervasive idea that anxiety should never exist in a Christian isn’t a biblical idea and has done great harm. It’s an emotion, and like all of them, they WILL be in a car; it simply doesn’t get to drive.
Be well Feral Souls.