Anxiety & The Illusion of Control

As overly anxious people, we CLING to anything we can control, often to our own detriment. In this quick chat-style podcast I cover the topic of control, and why reaching for it could be hindering our recovery. Enjoy! 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Welcome to the 18 Minutes Podcast. Glad you're here today. Happy Friday. Also, happy spring equinox if you're in the northern hemisphere. Pretty exciting. I feel like that must mean that summer is coming soon, depending on where you live. It may not feel like it, but it is officially spring today, so I'm just gonna soak up that energy and let it carry me through the rest of winter, however long that is. I've had a really fun couple of weeks. I was recommended this book called Drunk, and it's about sort of the history of alcohol and how uh human civilizations have used alcohol basically since the beginning of humanity for our benefit, which is really fascinating. This book basically convinced me to spend more time drinking wine and beer out in public with other people. So I've been doing that more than I normally do, and it's actually been really fun. I am also more tired. Uh alcohol is bad for us as individuals, and that is made clear by the book. It does offer some interesting cultural and societal benefits. So I'm just kind of exploring that right now. I am recording this on St. Patrick's Day, so if I'm feeling a little crazy later, maybe I'll just go out and keep keep it rolling. But yeah, interesting to think of myself in this larger societal context. And I just love to read. So uh thank you, Nikhil, for the recommendation. And if I become a complete menace to society, I do think that's probably also a little bit your fault. This does actually relate to today's topic. Today we're talking about anxiety and the illusion of control. Alcohol dampens our prefrontal cortex activity and makes us less um concerned about being in control and less able to focus on future events and kind of locks us into the present, um, like children. So that's kind of something I'm just playing around with. Please don't judge me. But today I want to talk about control in the context of anxiety disorders. Before I get into that, just as a reminder, I do go live every Thursday on TikTok at 3 p.m. Central Time. In that time, I read through every comment, I try to answer everyone's questions. I usually have a topic that I want to talk about to kind of um get the discussion going, but you are free to pop in there whenever and um just say hi or ask me a question or start a discussion about something. Um, it's super fun. I love doing that a lot more than I thought I would. So that's every Thursday, 3 p.m. Also, as a reminder, my mini ebook is available on my website as well as the consolidated free version. You can get both of those at theatominutes.com. And if you've been enjoying this podcast, please consider leaving a review. It's very helpful in other people with disordered anxiety finding this resource. As always, I'm not a therapist or licensed medical professional. This podcast is based on my personal experiences with disordered anxiety. So please take what is helpful to you from this resource, leave what isn't, and heed any advice you get from your medical and mental health professionals. Okay, so it makes sense that a lot of us with disordered anxiety want this sense of control. And it makes sense that we try to get it. Whether you've been anxious since you were a kid or you just developed panic disorder two weeks ago, being anxious, feeling anxiety symptoms makes us feel out of control of our own bodies. And so it makes logical, intuitive sense that we would then reach for other ways of gaining some sense of control. The cruel irony of this whole thing is that the more we grasp for control, the more we crave and need the control to feel satisfied. And the more energy then we have to put into controlling everything around us just to be at our baseline comfortable level. So you can see how this is a problem. I've shared before that my avoidance and need for control started years and years and years ago, and I gradually made my world smaller and smaller by controlling every aspect of my life to the point where I only felt comfortable if I was at home in my own bed with no pressure to do anything at all. Not much of a life, if I'm being honest. So it makes sense that we do this because we feel out of control, but it causes this loop where we need more and more and more, and then we have this constant low-level mental stress because we're trying to control everything around us. There are a lot of different ways that we might do this. We can try to control how we feel by avoiding situations or places that we're unfamiliar with or situations and places that have made us feel anxious or uncomfortable in the past. If we avoid going to the grocery store because we had a panic attack there once, then we can never have a panic attack at the grocery store. We're controlling that variable. We might also try to control our health by taking a million supplements, taking no supplements and no medication, only eating certain foods, lying down anytime we feel off, and again, using avoidance to control our health. Not drinking and smoking is one way. I don't advocate that anybody start doing that, but um, it can be used as a means of controlling our health coming from a fearful and anxious place. We can try to control other people's perceptions of us by not talking in social situations or not talking very much, over-explaining ourselves so that we make it very clear exactly what our intentions are and how we feel and what we think, or just avoiding social situations altogether so that nobody can perceive us at all. Or maybe you even have a perfectly curated social media presence, but in reality, you don't really socialize all that much at all because you want to control how people perceive you. We can also try to control our physical safety by avoiding things like driving, um, taking elevators, getting on an airplane or a train. The list of things that I used to avoid to control my physical safety was exhaustive. I wouldn't go in water, I wouldn't go on any rides, I wouldn't walk too fast, I wouldn't uh climb on anything, I wouldn't exercise very hard, I didn't travel at all. I was mostly just staying in my house because that's where I believed that I was the safest. There are so many things that we can choose not to participate in in the off chance, the highly unlikely situation that something goes disastrously wrong and it causes us physical harm. Control is an illusion because bad things are going to happen to us, and almost 100% of the time we get it wrong. We almost never correctly guess the negative situations or feelings that actually do happen to us. We just spend time worrying and planning for things that might happen, but the list of bad things that could potentially happen to us is literally infinite. There's no way for us to accurately predict exactly what negative situations we're gonna get ourselves into. We might constantly try to control our health by washing our hands, avoiding sick people, staying in bed if we feel a little bit off, and then end up with cancer. We can avoid driving, uh, elevators, taking a train, or anything that could crash with us inside of it, and still a tree could fall on our house while we're sleeping. No one and nothing can give us 100% certainty that something bad is not going to happen to us. Bad things do happen from time to time, and a huge part of recovering from disordered anxiety is coming to terms with and accepting that that is our reality. That's why I talk about reassurance so much and why it's really not good for us because it doesn't matter how many times someone, even someone with expertise, tells you that something is a certain way, like statistically, flying is a great example. The statistics on plane crashes is like so incredibly small, it's like hard to fathom how small. And yet almost half of people are nervous about flying on a plane because this isn't an issue of having enough information or enough reassurance, it's an anxiety problem. When we are able to accept that there is a level of uncertainty and risk in being alive, we're able to open up and create some more mental capacity to handle the bad negative things that actually do happen to us instead of putting all this mental energy into planning for theoretical things that almost definitely will never happen. Planning for what ifs and just in case is taking up so much of our mental energy when we have disordered anxiety that we don't have room to handle real stress. I remember when I was in the worst parts of my panic disorder, I was thinking so much about protecting myself at all costs from anything that I could think of. And when something slightly inconvenient happened to me, it felt like the end of the world because I was constantly at the end of my rope. We only have so much power in our brains. We cannot be thinking about everything all at once all the time. So grasping for control of situations we really don't have control over is a waste of energy. Here's the good news though. There are a lot of things we can control. We can control how we think and even speak about stressful situations. We could be having a full-blown panic attack, and we get to choose how we think about it and how we talk about it. That has a real effect on our overall mental health and especially the next panic attack we have. We can also control how we respond physically to anxiety-inducing events. Not necessarily our instinctual kind of first reaction, but we do get to decide what we do with that. If we're driving down the highway and all of a sudden we feel our heart starting to race and we're pretty sure we're gonna have a panic attack, our initial instinctual response is fear. And then we get to decide how we react. We can choose to eat sour candy and put a cold pack on our neck and sip cold water and blast the air conditioning to feel better. Or we can choose to sit with the anxiety and let it pass through us. That is in our control. We can control the habits that we build or break. We get to control whether or not we keep practicing exposure and response prevention even when we're tired and don't feel like doing it anymore. Practicing, accepting uncertainty, and allowing ourselves to move through the world without peering around every corner looking for danger is better for our mental wellness than trying to make sure that nothing bad happens ever. I believe that the most important part of recovering from disordered anxiety is practicing exposures with response prevention. But mindset shifts can help aid in doing that. Shifting our mindset can lift some of the burden of negativity and make practicing those exposures and response prevention easier. I hope that this short episode has offered a perspective shift for you that will make the burden of this process a little lighter, help give you a little bit of encouragement and empowerment and positivity as you move forward with whatever mental health practices that you're currently using. If you have questions about anxiety and control or any anxiety-related topics, I would love to chat with you. You can send me an email at amandathe18minutes.com or send me a message on any of my social channels. Reminder to leave a review if you like this podcast and also that I'll be going live on TikTok next Thursday at 3 p.m. So if you want to ask a specific question, uh you can do that there. That's where I'll be. Thank you so much for being here today, and we'll see you next time.