When curiosity meets anxiety
Have you ever decided you want to start something new, perhaps a new hobby. Maybe it’s salsa dancing, tennis, learning to play the guitar, or learning a new language…..But then you change your mind at the last minute.
Maybe you’ve felt determined to try something new for a while. There’s something that really grabs your interest and curiosity and something inside you would just love to give it a go. Just to see what it’s like. So, you sign up to a class and find out how you’re going to get there. Today is the day!
But there’s a nagging feeling inside, along with lots of unanswered questions. You start to wonder…..
What if I look silly?
What if everyone else knows what they’re doing and I don’t?
What if I’m wearing the wrong clothes?
What if everyone else knows each other and I don’t?
What if I should have chosen something else?
Does my partner think I’m doing the right thing?
What does my friend think?
My next door neighbour?
Their cat???
(Ok, maybe not…).
What if you trusted your own instincts?
You might tell yourself that you’ve just changed your mind, or didn’t really fancy it today. At face value, this may seem like no big deal. Nothing seems particularly ‘wrong’ on the surface. Of course, you can change your mind any time. That’s a perfectly healthy thing to do, right?
But if you notice something of yourself in this, or if it starts to become a pattern, it might be worth paying attention to.
Perhaps trying something new feels uncomfortable because somewhere along the way you’ve learned that it doesn’t feel safe to trust yourself and your own instincts. You might have discovered, somewhere, that everyone else’s opinion mattered more than yours. Or you might have got used to doing what everyone else wanted, following their wishes and wants. Or maybe, for all kinds of various reasons, you’ve not had the opportunity to listen to what you really want to do.
Learning to trust yourself, your own interests and instinct, can feel very different.
Because what if you did prioritise what you want to do? Trying something new means sitting with uncertainty of the unknown, and what might happen. And that takes courage.
When trusting yourself feels risky
Someone telling you to ‘just do it’ probably isn’t going to make much difference. You already know that’s an option.
The harder part is what trusting yourself in a new situation might mean.
Because trusting yourself means you might get it wrong. It might mean that maybe it doesn’t work out.
In my experience of working with clients, there is often something underneath the anxiety that is worth exploring. We’re all so wonderfully complex and unique, fairly often there isn’t just one reason.
But, often there are some common themes or threads. And for the sake of simplicity, here are just a few of the reasons why it can be so hard to trust ourselves….
It might be that growing up you had a parent who was anxious. And whilst uncertainty was a constant for those closest to you, it naturally may well have become a constant for you too.
Or perhaps something happened that shattered your sense of safety. It doesn’t matter whether anyone else thought it was important. What’s important is the impact it had on you. Of course it’s hard to trust ourselves when something happens which impacts the way we see the world, ourselves and our place in it.
Or maybe the way your parents responded to things repeatedly created stress rather than reduced it. When that’s our experience growing up, there’s nowhere to go where we can just relax and ‘be’. And that’s a tough gig.
It could also possibly be that somewhere along the way, you experienced shame in a way you have never forgotten. And this experience is following you, in the shadow of anxiety wherever you go.
Whether you recognise yourself in one of these or many of them, it can be hard to trust ourselves after these kinds of events.
Imagine if…..
Let’s go back to the beginning where we discussed a new hobby that you really wanted to try. But it means going to a new place with new people and you’re feeling out of your comfort zone.
Imagine if you listened to the part of you that really wanted to try something new. You’re still feeling anxious, and there’s still a part of you that wants to curl up on the sofa and watch TV rather than go out tonight. But you decide that you will go, even though you’re bricking it. Just once. You haven’t signed up to a week, just one evening. You tell yourself that if you hate it, you’ll never have to go again.
You’re still dreading it. That feeling hasn’t gone anywhere. And your mind is focussed on the moment in several hours when you get to come home again. But you decide to go anyway, just to see what it’s like.
What else might be possible?
Sometimes, when we’re living with anxiety, our world shrinks and becomes very small. The ‘what ifs’ of what might go wrong seem huge, and the possibility that something might go well, or even just ok, seems enormously unlikely from where we’re sitting.
Had you gone to try out that new hobby, it might be that you decided it wasn’t really for you. Maybe you got there and felt that actually you didn’t really enjoy it. Or the drive there was tricky. Or the people not really the kind you like to hang out with.
Going anyway, even when you’re feeling really anxious, creates space for other possibilities to emerge. It might be that you met someone who you got along well with. Or you did enjoy it afterall, and decide that it might be worth going back again.
Anxiety doesn’t have to make every decision
If you’ve spent years feeling anxious, it’s unlikely that you might wake up one morning and the feeling is just totally gone. Yippee, now you can get on with your life! That’s unlikely.
And that’s ok.
It could be that anxiety is still with you, even as you try something small that makes anxiety even worse for a while.
Anxiety doesn’t have to disappear before you start doing what you really want to do.
Maybe the first change isn’t suddenly trying lots of new things, or going to lots of new social events. It might be identifying when you’re thinking, ‘What if I get it wrong? What will that person think of me? What if I’m found out to be a fraud?’. When you’ve lived with anxiety for any length of time, these sorts of thoughts might be near-constant. Or they might seem so loud that any other possibilities are hard to see.
But instead of automatically accepting these thoughts as absolute reality, you could get curious about them.
What might go well, or even just ok? And if anyone really did think badly of you, what would be the worst that could happen? Sometimes the idea of something happening can feel worse than the actual event.
Change doesn’t have to mean waiting for the difficult feeling to disappear completely before you do something differently. Sometimes it’s noticing the fear is there and trying something slightly different anyway.
What if you didn’t have to wait for anxiety to disappear?
If you’re finding that your world feels small because you’re living constantly with anxiety that reminds you of everything that could possibly go wrong, that fear might have been with you a long time. There might be some very good reasons why anxious feelings still come up for you now.
Counselling can give you a place to explore patterns rather than just telling yourself you need to ‘get on with it’. You can explore when you first started to feel anxious, how it impacts your relationships now and what happens inside when you consider allowing curiosity to take the lead to new experiences instead.
You don’t have to become someone who just doesn’t feel anxious.
But imagine if, little by little, you could begin to listen to the part of you that is curious about life. The part that wants to try, explore and experience something new. And instead of automatically deciding what could go wrong, you could begin to leave a little room for the possibility that things might go right.
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