Who Are You Without The Anxiety?

What's left when the anxiety finally subsides? In this episode I talk about a part of recovery I LOVE: when anxiety has been part of you for years, you get to actually rediscover who you are without it. I share how anxiety became the center of my own identity, why losing it can feel disorienting, and the practical work of reclaiming the person underneath the fear. Plus - a few things I discovered I love on the other side of the fear. If you've ever wondered who you'd be without anxiety making your decisions, this one's for you!

SOURCES: 
-https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25547522/ (ACT is effective across anxiety, depression, and other problems, and is roughly comparable to established treatments like CBT.)
-https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11837766/ (Valued action and psychological flexibility are linked to better wellbeing.)
-https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352250X15001062 (The role of values and committed action in ACT.)

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Welcome back to the 18 Minutes Podcast. I'm Amanda, and this is the show where we take everything that is scary, isolating, confusing about disordered anxiety, and we turn it into something you can actually work with. I want to start today with a question. Here it is. If I took away your anxiety tomorrow completely, who would be left? What do you actually like? What would you do with your day? What would you go after? A lot of us don't really know. And I just want to say right off the bat, that's okay. It's not a sign that you're shallow or that something is wrong with you. It's just what happens when anxiety has been making your decisions for you for a really long time. When anxiety has been with you for years, it stops being something that you have and it starts feeling like someone you are. And then, if at some point it starts to lift, you're left with this kind of strange question: who am I without it? That's what we're talking about today. This is a part of anxiety recovery that I love to talk about. When the constant anxiety disorder starts to settle and dissipate, and we get to find out what has been going on underneath this whole time. We're going to talk about how anxiety becomes part of your identity, why losing that part of your identity can feel a little bit disorienting, if not like grief, why that anxious version of you was never the real you, and how to start finding and building the version of you without all the fear. As a reminder, I am not a therapist or a medical professional. Everything I share on this show is based on my own personal experience with disordered anxiety, my recovery journey, and the research I do for the show. This is not a replacement for therapy. Please take only what's helpful to you, leave what isn't, and listen to your medical and mental health professionals first. If you're new here, welcome. Go hit follow or subscribe wherever you're listening because a new episode drops every Friday morning, and I would hate for you to miss the next one. If you're a regular listener, welcome back. If you are someone who's really trying to dig into this anxiety problem and recover, I do have a free recovery guide on my website that you can go grab right now. Grabbing that guide just takes a second and it also uh subscribes you to my weekly newsletter. I send one email a week. It comes out every Monday morning. Um, there's encouragement or sometimes tips or a heads up on what the podcast episode is gonna be about the following Friday, so you can start thinking about it. And it's generally just a great weekly check-in for all of us. Okay, that being said, let's talk about who you are without the anxiety. I want to start with how this even happens because I think it's really helpful to understand the mechanism before we dive into what to do about it. When you live with disordered anxiety long enough, it stops being just a thing that you experience and it starts being the lens through which you see everything else. It becomes an explanation. I'm too anxious, I can't do that. It can become a personality trait, like a way you would describe yourself if somebody asked you what you're like. It can even become somewhat of a social role. You're the friend who has to leave the party early, who needs the aisle seat, who has to know the whole plan before we even leave the house. And there's a part of this that actually feels protective. If I tell myself I'm an anxious person, then I'm braced against threats. I'm not gonna get caught off guard. So the identity sticks around partly because, in a strange way, it feels safer to wear it than to take it off. I know this really well because I lived it for years. For most of my life, I saw myself as an anxious person. And it wasn't a small side thing. It was a huge part of my identity, maybe even the biggest part. And it ran my life in a lot of ways that I didn't even question at the time. I didn't try new things because I was an anxious person. I didn't speak up because I was an anxious person. I didn't travel because I was an anxious person. It became an explanation for everything that I didn't do. And to be honest, looking back, it breaks my heart a little bit. I really believed that I had a disorder that was keeping me from living the life I wanted to live. And I saw myself as someone who was permanently limited. And a lot of times I saw myself as broken. I remember feeling that way as a kid and as a teenager and as a young adult and well into adulthood. Not just a person who's having a hard time, but as someone who is wrong to their core, to my core, and like my anxiety was the proof of it. And my story is just an example of the real cost of anxiety becoming our identity. When anxious person is who you are, it starts to feel permanent. It doesn't feel like a pattern you're running or something that might change in the future. It feels like your personality, like a fact about you, the way your height is a fact about you. And you don't fight to change a fact. You just learn to live with it, which is why this is so important to pull apart. Okay, so let's say you do the work or you're well into recovery. You start to feel the anxiety lifting, the gaps get wider, like we talked about in the last episode, and you'd think this would be the part where you start to feel amazing, right? Free, relieved, incredible. And sometimes you do, but there's something else that can show up that I want to talk about because people don't often go into this when they're talking about anxiety recovery. And I want you to be aware of it so that when it happens to you, if it happens to you, you don't feel like something has gone wrong. When the anxiety starts to lift, you might feel lost, a little empty, or even a little bit of grief. You might catch yourself wondering, who am I now that I don't have this anxiety, and what are my preferences, and what do I like, and how do I feel? And what do I do with all this energy and empty space that I used to spend managing my anxious feelings? A lot of people feel anxious about not feeling anxious. Some people even miss the anxiety, and that can feel confusing and maybe even shameful to admit. If that's you, please hear me. This does not mean that you did recovery wrong. It does not mean that some part of you wants the anxiety disorder back. It makes complete sense. You spent a good amount of time, probably years for most of us, building your life around this thing and a whole sense of who you are. So when it goes, there's a gap where it used to be. Of course there is. And that new identity that we find and we build takes time. And I want to offer you a different way to see that gap. Because it's real, it's there, and we can feel it. But that empty feeling isn't loss, it's space. It's all of that room that fear used to take up sitting there empty now, waiting for you to put something of your own in it. The disorientation you feel alongside this is not a sign that something went wrong, but actually a sign that something went really well. So now I want to come back to something I said about myself earlier. I told you that I used to see myself as a broken person. And I want to say this both for you and for the version of me that used to believe this. That was never true. I was never broken, and you are not broken. The anxiety was never my personality. It was something that my nervous system was doing. A pattern, not a person. And I know it's hard to believe that or feel that way when you're in the middle of it. When you've felt anxious your whole life, it feels like it's woven into who you are. But it's not. It's a loud, exhausting pattern that is covering up who you really are. For all of those years that I experienced disordered anxiety, fear was making my choices for me. What I ate, where I went, who I spent time with, where I traveled, when to or to not speak up, those weren't really my choices. Those were my fears choices. I thought I was a person who didn't like to try new things. Turns out I was a person who was scared to. And those are very different things. So when I ask, who are you without the anxiety? It might sound like a scary, empty question. Like you might ask it and then there's nothing there. But that's not it at all. The person without the anxiety is the part of you that's been underneath all of this fear the whole time. Plus, and this is the exciting part, it's the person who you get to become now that you are making your own choices instead of fear making your choices for you. You are so much more than the anxiety. There are preferences and opinions and a sense of humor and dreams that you've talked yourself out of all sitting under there, waiting to come out. They didn't go anywhere. They just got buried under all of the fear managing. Alright, so how do you actually do this? Because go find out who you are is very beautiful and very eat prey love. But I want to get into some real practical ways you can find out who you are. In the recovery framework that I use, this is part of the reclaim phase. It's the fourth and final phase of the framework. But I don't want you to file this away as something to do later once you're recovered. You do not have to wait until you're fully recovered to start practicing this. You can start practicing it right alongside all the other work you're doing. And in fact, I think it's great to do in conjunction because it's a really good reminder of what all of this is for. So here's what reclaiming your identity looks like in real doable terms. First, start catching the decisions that fear is making and make the decision yourself. This is the big one. When you are about to do the thing you always do, the avoiding, the making yourself small, pause and ask yourself, what would I do here if I wasn't scared? And then when you can, go do that thing or even a small version of it as a baby step. You're literally taking the decision-making job away from the fear one decision at a time. Second, reconnect with the things you used to love before anxiety took over, and the things you've always avoided. Make a little list if it helps. The trip you never took, the class you wanted to sign up for, the hobby that you dropped, the people that you don't see anymore, and go try them as the person you are now, not as the person you were when you quit. Which brings me to three. Give yourself full permission to be a beginner. This is so important. You are allowed to try things and be bad at them. You're allowed to not know what you like yet. You might find out that you are a completely different person than you were before disordered anxiety took over, and that is completely okay. Fourth, and this is the one that has some real science behind it, start living your life based around the values you hold instead of around avoiding things you're afraid of. I'm guessing that for a long time, the organizing question of your life has been something like, what is going to keep me safe and comfortable? I want you to trade that for a better question. What do I actually care about? And what would a life built around that look like? There's a whole evidence-based therapy built around this exact idea called acceptance and commitment therapy or act. The core of it is that a good life doesn't come from controlling anxiety. It comes from getting clear on the things that you value and then moving toward them even when fear tags along. I'll put links to the research on Act Therapy in the show notes in case you're curious. I do want to add a little bit of nuance here that I think is important and maybe a little bit ironic coming from me. But don't let recovery become your whole identity either. Because here's the truth about my own life. This work that I do, this podcast, the whole brand, is based around me being a formally anxious person. It is literally my job to be the anxiety girl. And I love it. But outside of work, that's not who I am. I'm not walking around thinking of myself as a person in recovery. I'm just living out my own values. I connect with people and art and I spend time in nature because those are the things that I value and care about the most. That's the difference I want for you too. There's a version of this where you trade anxious person for person in recovery and build a whole identity around that. And I don't want that for you either. Recovery is something you do, it's not who you are. As I reclaimed myself, my identity, I discovered some things that surprised me. I discovered that I love getting in my car and driving to a restaurant and sitting down at a table with a bunch of friends and spending hours eating and drinking delicious food and drinks. I really love it. I love trying new food, I love noticing the design of a space. I love sitting with people over food and drinks and just talking for hours. And none of that was available to me when I had panic disorder. I also love traveling. I love meeting new people, I love going on road trips, I love the ocean. I used to be terrified of the ocean. I feel the most like myself when I'm trying something new without preparing for the consequences. Wild. That is the real authentic version of me that was under all of that fear and anxiety and work and fighting the whole time. And you get to discover the real authentic you too. Okay, so a few things to take with you today. One, if you don't know who you are without the disordered anxiety, that's okay. Fear has just been making your decisions for you. And the point is that you get to take back that job. Two, if recovery leaves you feeling empty or disoriented, that's normal. And that feeling is space, not loss. It's room that you get to fill with whatever you want. And three, start small and start now. Reclaim is the final step of the recovery framework, but you don't have to wait until you're all better to get a start on this. I want you to try this week to catch one decision that fear is trying to make for you and make it yourself instead. That's how you start to meet the person underneath the fear. That's all for today's episode on who you are without the anxiety. And I want to leave you with this. For years, I thought that the goal of anxiety recovery was just to stop feeling anxious all the time. But that was never really the whole picture. This right here, what we talked about today, is what fear to freedom was always pointing at. Freedom was never just the absence of panic. Freedom is getting to be fully, authentically yourself. It's having your life and your choices back and getting to find out what you love when fear isn't in charge. The anxiety was never the main character of your story. You are, and you always were. And on that note, I want to give you a heads up on something I'm building for you. I'm putting together a small group program called Reclaim, named for this exact phase, for people who want to do this recovery and reclaiming work alongside people who get it. If listening to this podcast stirred something up and you're feeling like you want to find out who you are under all of that fear, that is exactly what this is for. Signups are going to be opening soon, so keep an eye on the newsletter and social media for more information. If you have questions about anything I covered today or you have a topic that you want me to dive into, you can send me an email at amanda at the18minutes.com or you can DM me on Instagram and TikTok at the18minutes. I read every single message and I respond to everything. So please feel free to message me anytime. If today's episode was helpful to you, make sure you hit subscribe or follow wherever you're listening. And if you have a second, please leave a rating or review so that other anxious people can find this show. Thank you so much for being here, and we'll see you next time.