What if your anxiety was a friend rather than an enemy?
Imagine if the anxiety you feel wasn’t an adversary but a companion guiding you through life’s challenges. This perspective shift can transform how you interact with your emotions, offering a path to understanding and growth. By viewing anxiety as a friend, you open the door to deeper self-awareness and resilience. Let’s explore how this mindset can empower you to navigate your emotional landscape with compassion and curiosity.
Guest blog by Georgina Sturner
Seeing Anxiety as a Protector
What If Your Anxiety Was a Friend, Not an Enemy?
Anxiety lands in many different ways. Far more than a dictionary definition would have us believe. It affects how we feel, how we behave, what we think, and our bodily sensations. And for many of us, there’s a real drive to just shut it down. To ignore it and hope that it will go away. But this rarely works. And maybe it’s time to think about our anxiety a little differently. Instead of imagining our anxiety as an enemy, what if we thought about it as a friend? A protector. Something that has formed as a defensive strategy. I’m going to explore how we can get to know our anxiety, understand why it’s here, and develop ways to soothe our anxious thoughts and feelings.
A Friend in Anxiety: Understanding Where It All Began
Befriending our anxiety – going back to where it all began
Anxious feelings often feel like they are ‘about’ what’s right in front of us. That driving lesson, that exam, that first date, that plane journey. But anxiety is rarely ‘about’ what it’s about. And that’s why we need to go back in time to have a little root around. If you experience anxiety, can you cast your mind back in time. Can you be a bit curious about when this friendship began? Can you remember a time when you first felt anxious, or a time before your anxiety settled in? These earlier memories can start to build an understanding of this pattern. And crucially, the reasons why anxiety might have felt like a useful defence mechanism. Maybe it was to keep you on high alert so that you could be safe from danger? Perhaps it was to keep you focused on revision so that you didn’t fail that important exam? Or maybe it was part of a family narrative – that being anxious was a normal way to ‘be’.
Embracing Anxiety with Compassion
How to Befriend Anxiety When It Enters the Room
Befriending Anxiety by Listening With Curiosity
Welcoming an old friend – when anxiety enters the room
So we have had a think about where our anxious feelings might come. Now, let’s consider what happens when our anxiety starts rising, when our old friend comes back to look after us, when our alarm system becomes activated. We might notice tension or heat growing within our body. We might experience anxious or critical thoughts. But this won’t be the same for all of us. Anxiety – like any good friend – is personal, and attuned to our body and our state of mind. Noticing how anxiety shows up can help us to consider how to soothe it. Do we need to proactively think about calming or soothing our breath, or a certain part of our body? Can we tune into the anxious thoughts and notice if they sound familiar?
Building Independence from Anxiety
Empowering Yourself Through Mindfulness
Exploring our anxiety – building the friendship
If you’ve seen the film ‘Inside Out 2’, then you’ll have seen the depiction of Anxiety as one of the emotions (or perhaps, friends) that lives inside Riley’s mind. And when we think about anxiety as being a separate creature or friend, it helps us to disentangle ourselves from it. Rather than just believing that we are an anxious person – or that we are controlled by anxiety – we can start to think that sometimes we are visited by anxiety when we feel under threat and in need of protection. This is where the friendship really comes in. What would it be like to ask this friend, our anxiety, why it’s really here? This is something that we often explore in therapy. We can consider the reasons why our friend has come to join us. It might be to keep us alert, secure, and safe from rejection or embarrassment. When we have these answers, we can start to gently challenge this. Do we really need to rely on our anxiety to keep us safe? Or can we consider letting go and finding other ways to keep ourselves feeling secure?
In-the-Moment, Pre-Emptive, and Long-Term Strategies for Managing Anxiety
Growing our independence
So if our anxiety is a friend, albeit sometimes an unwelcome one, what we really want to think about is how we grow our independence. How can we find alternative strategies to cope when we are feeling under threat? I like to think of these in three different ways:
‘In the moment’ – Grounding and breathing exercises to help us to calm our nervous system. Removing ourselves from a stressful situation. Noticing our anxious thoughts and being curious about them rather than being overwhelmed
Pre-emptive strikes – Practices for our mind and body before anxiety enters the room. Thinking about regular mindfulness practice, looking after our body, and beginning and ending our days with a sense of calm. This is often linked with setting boundaries around trigger activities (hello doomscrolling).
Longer term – Getting to grips with where our friend comes from. I’ve done my best to tie this up in a neat little bow of a blog post. But the truth is that this can all be part of a longer term process that really involves examining where our friendship with anxiety truly began. In order for us to think about letting go if it.
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Georgina Sturmer
This guest blog post was written by Georgina Sturmer. Georgina is a registered member of the BACP, and specialises in working with women. She helps women to navigate anxiety, loss, relationship challenges, and life transitions in order to become more confident and resilient. In addition to her private practice, she is a Lecturer in Counselling and regularly comments for the press on matters relating to mental health, counselling and anxiety. You can learn more about her at www.georginasturmer.co.uk or contact her on hello@georginasturmer.co.uk
