Deal with Anxiety like an Ancient Stoic
Many of us think we suffer from anxiety. What we really suffer from is our thoughts about people, events, conversations, and problems; not the actual things themselves. The Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus tells us “What upsets people is not things themselves, but their judgement about these things”. Most of our worry comes from the anticipation of something happening. If we’re going to meet new people; we might be anxious about how we’ll come across, how we dress, how we laugh, how we make conversation, how we respond, etc. As a matter of experience, the initial anxieties that hold us back don’t exist anywhere besides our own head. They haven’t happened yet and they aren’t guaranteed to happen. What’s here, right now, as a matter of experience is just our thoughts about what might happen, and these thoughts are manageable with the use of a few simple stoic techniques: Name it. Observe it. Test it.
Name it.
The simple act of naming and recognizing what you are anxious about has a surprisingly calming effect, but we don’t often take the time to name our anxieties. Naming our anxiety tends to diffuse the charge and lessen the emotional weight of the experience. If we have any chance at reducing our anxiety, we need to know what we are anxious about; and the first step is naming the anxiety. This gives us the power to step back and make a clear choice about what we are going to do next. This small, brief window is where behavior change occurs. Emotions tend to build up in the body when we don’t express them; verbalizing what we feel in simple terms aids in containing and managing even the most complex emotions. It also helps us realize that we may not be anxious about what we think we are anxious about. Taking our earlier analogy about going out with people we don’t know well. Let’s say we’re about to leave the house to meet new people and we feel anxious. We have the butterflies in our stomach, thoughts and images flashing of people’s faces looking at us, the feeling of being judged, maybe we rehearse our first line “hey so good to see you” and we imagine the right way to hold our face while we say it and right way to intonate our voice. This is the time to pause and name the anxiety. “I’m anxious to go out and meet new people.” We named it, so what next?
Observe it.
After we named the anxiety, we watch the anxiety. Take a breath and look at the anxiety. What is it? Where is it? Typically, its bits of language, flashing images of an imagined future, or somatic sensations in the body. The goal is to slow down and watch what is happening in your mind and body with a bit of non-judgmental distance. The less we identify with the feeling of anxiety, the less anxious we are. A regular mindfulness practice can be a great tool for moments like this. The stoic Seneca says “True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing.” As we watch our thoughts and observe what’s inside, we notice the fear is in the future, not here. More accurately the fear is in our imaginings of the future, not the actual future we are going to live through.
Test it.
The third thing we should try is thought testing, which is an ancient stoic technique that was adopted and is used by cognitive behavior therapists like myself in modern psychotherapeutic contexts. Let’s take the thought we identified earlier: “I’m anxious to go out and meet new people”. What are we anxious about here? Are we anxious about leaving the front door? Anxious about saying hello? Anxious about a slight pause in conversation? We’ve all had the feeling of going to do something scary, doing it and then realizing that it wasn’t so bad. There is no single moment in a social interaction that is so unbearable that it causes us to spontaneously combust from anxiety. Our anxiety is self-made and usually only exists between our ears and not in the world around us. During anxious moments, some of us will notice thoughts like “I’m going to embarrass myself when I start talking”. Using the Socratic method let’s ask ourselves a few simple questions to test the validity of this thought. Question 1. Can I provide actual evidence that supports the thought “I’m going to embarrass myself when I start talking”? Question 2. Have there been times when I haven’t embarrassed myself when I started talking? Question 3. What do I mean by “embarrass myself”? Question 4. If I do embarrass myself, is that something that I can handle? Question 5. How will I feel if I don’t go out because of a set of false beliefs I have about myself and the world around me? Keep asking questions and testing the thought until it dissolves, it typically will.
So, if you want to deal with anxiety like a stoic. Name it. Observe it. Test it.
Matthew Kijak, Psychotherapist | LCSW