10 Unexpected Benefits of Anxiety: The Upside to Anxiety.

When Overwhelming Anxiety is Running Your Life It's Hard to See Any Benefits in the Experience.

When anxiety is running the show, it's tough to manage the rest of your life. Racing thoughts, heart palpitations, relationship and professional disruptions, sweaty palms, and life-restricting fear can all take their toll. Chances are, I don't have to tell you that. In fact, it's likely you or someone you know and love is struggling with managing out of hand anxiety right now. It's super common these days. When anxiety is running roughshod over our lives, we can fail to see the benefits of our experience.

The Upside to Anxiety.

Here's the deal. There's almost always an upside to anything. Even your anxious experience. Let's take a look.

1. Only The Smart Get Highly Anxious.

2. Anxiety is an Adaptive Behavior.

Over and over again Anxious Folk show up in my office telling me how stupid they feel to "feel this way." Or that no one feels the way they do. And they should be smart enough to handle this on their own. Anxious Folks are highly habituated to problem solving and may be the Go-To person for many of the people in their lives. They're used to thinking themselves out of whatever predicament they're in and very often, they're used to going it alone. They're smart.

In fact, high intelligence is such a strong marker in anxious experience that it's nearly always a given. You've got that nice juicy, big bright ol' frontal lobe and it's busy problem solving. When it runs out of problems to solve--no problem! Your Brilliant Mind will simply spin out some more problems and get busy trying to solve those. Super. In the Anxiety Reduction Biz we call that WORRY. Awesome. So, you're brilliant. Own it!

Anxiety is adaptive on both the micro and macro level. By and large, anxiety is a learned coping strategy. So, back in the day, likely in childhood, you developed an anxious coping style to navigate through life. The development of anxiety is not always the product of chaotic or unsafe childhoods--sometimes it's just a matter of over-anxious parenting. In any case, it's a brilliant strategy that worked a lot back better then than it does now. So, being vigilant, knowing when things were safe or not safe, people were chill or not chill, reducing risk, and following all the rules, even the silly ones, might have saved you then, but it can be overwhelming and life-restricting now. So, that's the Micro or personal level.

3. The Anxious Mind is a Detailed-Oriented, Even Artistic Mind.

There's also the Macro level. In this case I'm referring to the evolutionary benefits of anxious strategies or as I often quip to my clients, "The Anxious survived and we're the evolutionary byproduct." As a species we needed some super observant risk adverse folks around to temper the impact of the Let's Make Fire and Burn it All Down! adventurers. Or the Chase Down the Wooly Mammoth and Stone It Into Submission peeps. Someone had to survive all those shenanigans to tend the home fires, notice which plants were safe or unsafe, keep an eye on the cave door for the marauding hoards, notice the signs of inclement weather, predators, and water or lack of water, figure out what problems might come up before they come up, and keep the kiddos from tumbling off cliffs or drowning in the shallows. Anxious Folk. We're masters of survival, as our antennae are always up and hyper-vigilance is our home turf.

In fact, you can even say the human mind is designed to be negative. Negative and oriented towards problems and pain. That's what fosters survival in a hostile world. True story. The rest, the positivity, we may have to train ourselves to look for. What's going well in our bodies, minds, and lives, isn't nearly as loud as what is painful or problematic, so we might miss it if we're not looking for it.

Your anxious, detail-oriented mind can actually form the basis of many personal and professional strengths. I want an accountant who is a little tipped towards the obsessive side. Someone who not only has a head for numbers, but is checking it all over a couple of times. Heck! Even Santa is "...making a list and checking it twice, gonna find out who's naughty and nice." (Okay, okay, so maybe Anxious Folk CAN tend to be a little on the rules-oriented black and white thinking side of life. We can work to soften that a bit). 

Your detail-oriented mind and body will support your instincts as a graphic designer or interior decorator, because stuff will just feel "off" to you until you have it in just the right spot. It's a physical thing and not everyone has it. My guess is a lot of really good and creative computer programers fall into this category, as well: Needing things to be elegant and clean, even if they are behind the scenes.

The Anxious Mind is habituated to exploring dozens of potential negative outcomes to a situation. Just ask us. We always have a list of potential catastrophes we're tracking. Lots of fields of work benefit from this mindset, even if our personal lives don't.

4. Most Anxious Folks are Empathetic and Sensitive.

True, when we're really caught up in the midst of anxious spinning we're not going to have much attention left for anything  other than our intense experience, but barring those highly heated moments, Anxious Folk are some of the most sensitive and empathetic people around. Why? We've been there. We have a real handle on how uncomfortable the uncomfortable can be. Part of our anxious experience has us highly tuned to our environment and the people around us. Remember that Micro bit about surviving childhood through anxious coping strategies? A lot of that came down to learning to instantly read the mood of the people we interacted with and relied on the most.

Many of the Anxious Folk I work with are empathic to the point of intuitive. In fact, a couple of them make their living as psychics. When we're feeling others as keenly as we do, we can put that to work for ourselves and others in a variety of ways.

5. Anxious Folk are Natural Care-takers.

Our anxious experience can mold us into Care-Takers. It's both a pitfall and a strength. One of the ways you may have learned to manage your anxious experience was by taking care of others. It can sound a little like this, "I can't feel happy, relaxed, and safe, when I know you don't feel happy, relaxed, and safe." It can even have the texture of, "If I'm not worrying about you, then I don't love you."

So, you may really know how to look after others and do it well. You might also drive your loved ones crazy with your stellar "management" skills. Or your controlling style. It happens. Anxious Folk are so great at taking care of others that they make awesome therapists (cough! cough!), great nurses, personal assistants, office managers, and are super in the hospitality industries. The challenge for Anxious Folks is rarely about being better at taking care of others, it's almost always around figuring out how not to move into an automatic codependent care-taking mode and how to learning to prioritize taking care of oneself.

6. Your Natural Empathic Gift Can Lead to Compassion and Even Activism.

Since Anxious Folks feel things and notice what's working and not working around them, they are sometimes driven to act. That super-responsible anxious thing (Oh! Have I failed to mention this? Anxious Folk are sometimes responsible to a fault) can be harnessed to create change in our communities and our world. Volunteerism and social activism can be a great place to point that "I can't be still, I must ACT now!" energy and really make a difference in the issues that matter most to you and those around you.

7. Your Drive for Excellence can be a Great Asset professionally.

As your therapist, do I want you to temper your perfectionism? Damned straight! Perfectionism is an unattainable and unhealthy standard. I'm all for categorizing it as a form of torture. Striving for perfection is one of our favorite defaults as Anxious Folk. So, for both balance and success, we want to ease that stuff over into something more akin to Excellence, which is healthy and very marketable. For one thing, perfectionism can trip you up in terms of productivity as you work and rework the deal trying to get it perfect. Excellence is achievable and the tribe of highly competent, conscientious Anxious Folk have that thing nailed as soon as they stop chasing perfection.

8. The Anxious are LifeTime Learners.

Those brilliant, restless, questing minds are rarely satisfied with sitting back on their laurels. Anxious Folk are lifetime learners. In the classroom and out. Some of this highly competent tribe are driven by a deep sense of inadequacy that drives them to seek more and more training in their fields. Some are simply primed to keep cultivating excellence in all areas of their experience. Anxious Folk are great readers and consumers of information and awesome at research. While our anxious stressing can take a toll on our overall health and well-being, if it isn't tempered, our questing minds can keep us young and engaged as we age.

9. Anxiety Can Be Your Key To Self-Knowledge.

Anxiety sets us up on the road for looking for answers. Why is this going on? What can I do to improve myself and my experience? How can I create change in life? Where can I find help?

There are Anxious Folk living within any belief system. Sometimes anxiety can actually form the basis of the beginning of a spiritual practice and a greater sense of self-knowledge as we seek to learn how to be still within, how to calm our minds, how to be present now. Be. Here. Now.

The pull of overwhelming anxiety is almost always towards a troubled past or an unknown fearful future. We can use the presence of anxious experience, the moment it comes to our awareness, as a reminder to Be Here Now. Be present now. We can use anxiety to help us be present now and remind ourselves not to be pulled out of the moment and thrown into a fearful place. In this way we can use the occurrence of anxiety as a key to developing a mindfulness approach to living life.

10. Anxious Folk Know Fear, and Therefore Courage, From the Inside Out.

Here's how I see it. Without my experience of fear I don't get to experience myself as courageous. If it doesn't involve overcoming fear then it isn't courage in the first place. Lucky for us, working through our experience of anxiety gives us daily practice at walking into our fear and thereby honing our courage. Anxious Folk are a courageous lot! More so than our families and friends would realize. Since so much of you anxiety is a hidden and interior experience, your loved ones may never see the effort and courage it's taken for you to manage your day.

If You're Feeling Just a Little Brave, We Can Find a Way to Help You Work Through Your Anxious Experience.

I specialize in holistic body/mind approaches to reducing anxiety and healing the activated nervous system that contributes to your anxious experience. Utilizing a combination of insight oriented and body-oriented psychotherapy, such as Somatic Experiencing, we can tame your anxiety and enhance your well-being. This is the work I do every day with men and women in my two Orange County offices.

There's a way to befriend your anxious experience, turn things around, and put yourself back in the driver's seat. I'm happy to discuss your anxious experience with you and help you expand more fully into the freedom and creativity you're designed to enjoy. There's no need to continue to suffer on your own. Call me today.

VICTORIA WALLACE SCHLICHT, MA, LMFT, SEP
3300 Irvine Ave., Ste. 111, Newport Beach, CA 92660
2030 East 4rth Street, Ste. 111 Santa Ana, CA 92705
In the beautiful Cabrillo Park area
[email protected]
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714.914.5565

"I help people who feel bad feel better."