Anxiety & The Impossible Task of Doing Nothing

By: Camden Baucke LLP

Anxiety demands a response, anytime and anywhere. It can be when you’re happy, like if you were enjoying a party to then receive a text that reads “we need to talk.” It can be when you’re focused on your work, and you receive an ambiguous email from your supervisor. No matter where you are, even the smallest notification can ignite an anxious response in your brain. Your environment fades to the background and your worry becomes all consuming. Once that happens, it’s difficult to do anything other than directly address the text or the email. Your brain is calling for action so you may find relief from the discomfort. This action might be dropping everything to answer your friend’s text, or try and ignore your supervisor’s email until you absolutely must address them in their office. However, there are consequences to doing exactly what anxiety wants. 

The Consequences of Doing Something

If you react out of anxiety, then you are likely stuck in a cycle of dependence on action to manage your emotions. In the field of psychology, we often study the science of connections. In this situation, it means learning a lesson from how we address distress. If we always stop everything to respond to that email or that text, and only after we can feel relief, we are only teaching our brains that we can feel okay if everything in our life is okay. However, life often doesn’t go our way, but it’s important that we find methods of managing our mental health. Not only when life goes smoothly, but in the midst of issues. As a disclaimer, there are plenty of situations that require an immediate response. However, those are important to discern from reactions to the experience of anxiety. The consequence of doing something is reliance on external factors to manage your emotions. You can answer that alarming text or distressing email, but you must learn to do so independently of feeling calmer. This means you must manage your emotions before you act. 

The Benefits of Doing Nothing

If you have experienced long-term anxiety, doing nothing may feel worse than being anxious. This is because you have always evaded the expected consequences by doing something. Thus, your safety has been created by your response to stressors, not by managing your emotions.

 Now, I charge you with the impossible task of doing nothing. 

This doesn’t mean forever, this means for stopping yourself 10-15 minutes whenever you feel that anxious drive to immediately address an issue. If you receive a text from your friend that says “we need to talk” this means setting a timer for 15 minutes on your phone, putting it down, and working through the emotion. This doesn’t mean doom-scrolling or ignoring the emotion, but looking at it, breathing deeply, and working through it. I know it sounds like torture, but it’s for the purpose of rewiring your brain. By taking this time to delay yourself from addressing a stressor, you give yourself two opportunities. The first opportunity is to give yourself a chance to accept, approach, and manage feelings of anxiety. The second is the opportunity to separate your actions from your feelings of alarm. 

Practice & Patience

This is naturally going to be difficult. Your brain is wired to believe that terrible things will occur and you can eliminate this distress by immediate action. Taking a 15 minute break will challenge this expectation, but for the better. In that 15 minutes, your alertness rises but then also falls before your timer ends. You may have attempts that only go five minutes, but that’s okay. Take this exercise at your pace. Be patient with yourself, and start the practice of looking your emotions in the eyes to manage them, not avoid them.

If you want to learn more, feel free to visit greatlakesmh.org to see more content or start a therapy journey of your own!

Thank you for reading, and good luck doing nothing!