When I started researching anxiety for my book Embracing Anxiety, I came up against a big problem: Everyone I talked to confused anxiety with panic!
Friends and family, therapists and counselors, doctors, books on anxiety, and everyone I asked was describing panic. Not anxiety, which is the emotion of motivation, getting things done, and meeting deadlines, but panic, which is the emotion that steps in to save your life when you’re in danger.
When I asked them about anxiety, people (and books) described sweaty palms, a sense of dread, increased heart rate, increased adrenaline, confusion, blankness, a gnawing sense of impending failure, feeling frozen and on fire at the same time, or needing to escape, etc. In other words, panic.
Panic is a marvelous, life-saving emotion that brings you the powerful energy you need to fight, flee, freeze, or flock to safety—but it’s not anxiety.
Earlier in my life, I was also ignorant about anxiety, and I, like most people, confused anxiety with panic. But in 2010, I heard psychologist Mary Lamia talking about anxiety on a radio show, and all of my lightbulbs went off at once!
In 2017, Mary wrote her own book about anxiety called What Motivates Getting Things Done (see below).
With Mary’s information, I was able to fit anxiety into my own model of emotions, Dynamic Emotional Integration, a unified theory of emotions that explores why emotions arise, how they work, and how to work directly with them. Anxiety was once a blank spot in my theory, but thankfully, anxiety is now featured as its own irreplaceable self.
Uncovering the secrets of anxiety
Anxiety is the emotion of motivation, planning, scheduling, and getting things done. Anxiety helps you gather your resources, complete your tasks, and meet your deadlines. In order to do that, anxiety needs to focus intently on the future, and on making sure that you have the skills, resources, tools, and support you need to do your best work and complete it on time.
Because of this, there are two aspects of anxiety that can make it feel uncomfortable. First, it’s a highly energetic emotion that keeps its eye on many things at once, and it tends to be hyper-focused. Second, your anxiety leads you into the future as you plan for what’s ahead. Increased energy and future focus can be—in and of themselves—unsettling and ungrounding, especially if you don’t realize that anxiety is trying to help you.
If you don’t know anxiety, you may mistake its energetic and forward-leaning intensity as a problem. And if you’ve got too many tasks to complete or too many deadlines to meet, your anxiety’s natural ramping-up behaviors may send you into a tailspin. Instead of grabbing onto anxiety’s intense task-completing and deadline-meeting energy, you may just get overwhelmed and lose your focus and motivation.
Panic may come to the rescue
When you lose hold of anxiety’s gifts and become unable to function, your panic may need to step forward to see what can be done. Though your physical life may not be endangered in this situation, your work life, school success, or relationships may be endangered if you blow a deadline or fail to complete your tasks. In a situation like this, panic may contribute its energy to help you!
However, if you don’t know that panic is responding to possible danger, you may drop into a tailspin. You may become filled with intensified anxiety that’s trying to help you get motivated, and intensified panic that’s trying to help save your job or your position in the world. It’s a lot, and I created a new word, panxiety (panic + anxiety), as a gently humorous way to help people identify these two powerhouse emotions when they partner up.
Each of these emotions has its own gifts and skills, and each can be worked with directly by asking questions that support its unique message and gifts.
The questions for panic
In Dynamic Emotional Integration, we work directly with emotions and enter into a dialogue with them by supporting what they’re already trying to do. This is very different from most emotion-management techniques, which tend to argue with the emotions, repress them in some way, or try to force a different emotion, such as happiness, into the situation. In this work, however, we focus on why the emotion is present, what the emotion does, and how we can work gracefully with our innate emotional genius.
When panic is present, I tend to focus on it first, because it’s a life-saving emotion that may be alerting me to real danger.
The questions for panic are:
- What is currently a threat?
- Please help me fight, flee, freeze, or flock to safety.
Often, in a panxiety situation, the panic will be there to help me avoid a possible future threat (the loss of my job, my income, or my social position), so it’s important to listen to what it’s saying, but also to reassure my panic that the threat isn’t happening right now. Knowing that, you and your anxiety can take a breath and refocus yourselves.
This reframing of emotions as supportive and valid helps people live more fully and reduce the unnecessary suffering they cause when they mistakenly treat their emotions as problems.
The questions for anxiety
Once panic’s needs have been met, I then move on to what anxiety is trying to do for me.
The questions for anxiety are:
- What brought this feeling forward?
- What truly needs to be done?
These questions can help you focus your anxiety on your most important tasks so you can zero in rather than spinning out. Notice that most suggestions for anxiety are to try to calm yourself down by doing deep breathing or repeating soothing affirmations to yourself. Those are nice things to do, but they actually move you away from the work of anxiety, which means that they can be repressive or emotion-avoidant. Your anxiety needs you to be back on your game, not merely calmed down.
The secret to working well with your emotions
Many people treat emotions as problems. They see anxiety and panic as disorders instead of understanding how and why they work as they do.
Each one of your emotions is an irreplaceable aspect of your basic cognition, your social intelligence, your ability to create meaning—and in the case of anxiety, your motivation.
Your emotions aren’t problems.
Your emotions don’t cause problems. They come to help you solve them.
Learn their language, and you can change your life.
To find a therapist near you, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.
