Anxiety as an Enemy: A Failed Strategy

The Wrong Paradigm of Fighting

The best advice you can receive about anxiety is that you should never make it your personal enemy.

Most of us believe that if we fight anxiety to eliminate or reduce it, we will eventually feel better.

However, this fighting strategy is not the solution to the problem; it is actually the problem itself.

This confrontational approach is counterproductive and only results in you becoming even more entangled in the anxiety cycle.

Turning Anxiety into Your Enemy

When you choose to treat anxiety as your enemy, you also make enemies of all its internal components.

If anxiety is the enemy, then your own feelings also become the enemy to be suppressed.

In the same way, your memories and your own personal history become an adversary to be avoided.

Even the sensations in your own body become enemies, as they are a fundamental part of anxiety.

The Quicksand Metaphor

Fighting anxiety is like being trapped in quicksand and desperately struggling to get out.

In quicksand, the instinct to fight your way out is a very bad idea and only makes the situation worse.

The more you fight and move, the deeper you sink, as all your weight becomes concentrated and the suction increases.

In the same way, the more you fight your anxious thoughts and feelings, the deeper you sink into them.

A Half Life. The High Cost of Avoidance

When you make anxiety your enemy, it becomes very difficult to function normally in your everyday life.

To avoid feeling it, you start avoiding the people and places that might trigger your emotional distress.

As a result of this constant avoidance, you end up living a half-life, limited by the fear of feeling anxiety.

You may also end up turning to other forms of avoidance that don't help, such as alcohol, drugs, or food.

Adding Suffering to Pain

Rejecting the reality that anxiety has affected your social life or career doesn't change that reality at all.

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