Make friends WITH YOUR anxiety beast
Your anxiety means well; it is trying to help you. You don’t need to fight it, says clinical psychologist and author Eric Goodman.
Eric Goodman treats anxiety disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and integrates compassion focused therapy into his clinical work.
His book, Your Anxiety
Beast and You, is a guide to living in an increasingly anxious world.
Using the term ‘beast’ to describe ‘anxiety’ may initially sound antagonistic, but it was taken from the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast where superficial looks can be greatly deceiving, says Goodman.
“Anxiety feels beastly at times, roaring loudly in your mind and through your body, but it is also greatly misunderstood. In the end, your anxiety beast is designed to help and protect you,” he says.
“Anxiety is necessary for human survival,” says Goodman. “Rather than jumping on the cultural bandwagon that you can and must vanquish this normal and necessary emotion, my book focuses on changing your relationship with your inner anxiety beast. Rather than treating anxiety like your enemy you’ll learn to see it as your inner hero – your loud, smelly, hyperactive, not-too-bright, hero – who always means well.”
Responding to anxious thoughts
How to talk so your beast will listen
Your anxiety beast likes to blabber on about some danger or another. That’s its job. There are no limits to the kinds of things it will warn you about, such as:
Contamination You might catch a fatal illness! You might contaminate someone else – you could kill them!
Body sensations You might be having a heart attack! You could lose control and they’ll have to lock you up! If you have a panic attack, you’ll die!
Uncertainty What if something bad happens? What if you’re with the wrong partner?
“If you understand that your beast is trying to help, you can accept these thoughts in the spirit with which they are being offered,” says Goodman. “Rather than clutching your head and internally screaming at your beast to just shut up, or behaving as if the anxious thoughts were facts, you can change how you relate to these thoughts.
After all, anxiety thoughts are a normal and persistent part of life for most of us.” Rather than taking these thoughts at face value ... you can learn to respond to them in a more adaptive way.
This involves:
Accepting your noisy beast Come to terms with what you experience inside your own skin, at least for the moment.
Adopting a more compassionate inner tone Talk to yourself in a way that is compassionate and supportive. It is the hallmark of compassion-focused therapy.
Shifting your perspective Seeing things in a new light. It is also called ‘cognitive reappraisal’.
Defusion This involves detaching from a thought or refusing to even dignify it with an analysis. It is something Buddhists have been prescribing for 2500 years and is now a staple of mindfulness and acceptance-based psychotherapies, such as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).
Accepting your noisy beast
You are a member of an elite class of worriers – the human being.
This doesn’t mean that you are destined to suffer every time your beast is acting up. You can choose to behave in ways that decrease suffering in the short-term, while cultivating a betterbehaved beast in the long-term.
“‘Anxiety-free’ is a fairy tale created to sell books and hock various snake oils,” says Goodman. “Study after study shows that even the best and most effective treatments still leave residual anxiety intact.”
Problems arise, explains Goodman, when we teach our inner bodyguards that feeling anxious is a threat. If anxiety itself is a threat, when life naturally brings you stress and worry, your beast will cry, “Danger!” in response – bringing the full weight of your powerful fight-or-flight-or-freeze response to counter the ‘threat’. This results in feeling anxious about feeling anxious.
“If you teach your beast that anxiety is a normal part of life it is less likely to throw anxiety on top of your anxiety heap. And, you will be less likely to suffer from the anxiety that inevitably shows up.”