What if You Embraced Your Anxiety & What Happened When I Did

What if you could embrace your anxiety instead of meeting it with resistance? What if instead of adding dread to the anxiety, you could add compassion? How would that change your mental state?

With rising anxiety and a strong desire to move into a more balanced mental state, I started asking myself these questions. I wasn’t sure if embracing my anxiety was the best choice, but I decided that I would experiment with this idea of embrace for a few weeks. In this article I’ll share the ups and downs of what that looked like, including the story about the panic attack that I embraced and it’s unexpected outcome.

If you’d rather watch than read, check out the YouTube video here.

Turning Anxiety into Excitement

Towards the beginning of this experiment I realized some anxiety that I was experiencing at spending time with a loved one in a new setting. I was anxious about letting them in on a process that felt very personal. As I started to feel into it though, I noticed something else - excitement! The same physiological response happens in the body when we’re excited and when we’re nervous. Our heart races and we start to think about the future. Only when we’re anxious we’re generally thinking about all the bad that could happen and when we’re excited we’re thinking about all the good things that could happen. 

If in this instance I had tried to resist my initial anxiety or push it away, I would have never realized that I was also excited. I would have just felt those initial body sensations and went on to try to convince myself to “be calm”, “just relax” which would have meant that I was trying to stop those bodily sensations in their tracks. Instead I allowed myself to feel the bodily sensations and it just so happens that I felt excited. 

The other thing that happened here is acceptance. I accepted what I was feeling as valid, I understood why it was happening, did the thing anyways, and ended up having a really great time.

Acceptance and embrace go hand in hand.

Relaxing Into What Is

Previously whenever anxious feelings would start to come up I would try to distract myself from them. And my anxiety wasn’t paralyzing. I could do things, but I would do them with tension.

Throughout the week whenever I was feeling anxious I tried to film and just talk openly about what I was feeling. Just taking this moment to acknowledge the feeling was so healing. It DID mean that I felt it more deeply and it did have more of a profound effect in the moment, but it also passed more quickly. 

Rather than trying to tell myself that I “should be” happy or trying to be positive, I tried to accept my anxieties and give them space to just be. A simple statement of “I accept that this is happening” can be enough to release some tension. It is important to note that I wasn’t allowing my anxiety to take over, I was simply allowing it to exist along with everything else. I didn’t allow myself to become all anxiety, but I met it with rationality and allowed it to exist along with calm, hope, and self-love. And that last part is really critical. When you start feeling anxious, are you meeting it with self-loathing; “I hate when I get this way” “why can’t I just be normal and happy?” or are you meeting it with love, 

“It makes sense that I feel this way” “what can I do to take care of myself in this moment?” “I love myself and just want what’s best for me”. The self-loathing and dread of anxiety only feeds it because we start to create a laundry list of all the things we don’t like about ourselves on top of it. While the self-love begins to soothe it and let’s ourselves know that we are safe.

Sometimes it helps to imagine that I’m talking to a child. How would I want to respond to my child if they were coming to me with anxiety?

Feeling It All

The act of embracing is one of openness and softness. It means that we’re meeting the moment with love. My typical response to anxiety is one of protection. And protection is a hardening act. It closes us off to the moment. It’s a response that says “I do not accept what is happening.” While protecting ourselves is necessary in moments where we’re truly in danger, if we’re living with constant anxiety, this energy of protection is going to keep us in fight or flight and make it really difficult to move out of anxiety. If we want to move from point A (anxiety) to point B (bliss), we first have to move into an energy of acceptance. We have to know and accept where we’re at currently, what is bringing us anxiety. Trying to find bliss all while rejecting what is truly occurring in the present moment is like using a map without knowing where you are on the map. 

This acceptance is a beautiful and often painful process. You’ll likely find that you have to accept circumstances, patterns, habits, and personality characteristics that you wish didn’t exist. Embracing anxiety isn’t a quick fix. It’s messy and vulnerable and it means that more of you will be available.Once I decided to embrace my anxiety, I started to feel everything more deeply. My desires, my frustrations, the noise of others got louder, my intuition got louder too. 

Coming Alive

One of the best side effects of embracing my anxiety is as I felt deeper, more of me came alive. Not only did I feel my anxieties deeper, I felt my joys deeper too. And I was able to find joy in the simplest of moments. New tomato seeds greeting the sun, the opportunity to dance in a rain shower, my lover's return from vacation. All of these moments became overwhelmingly joyous.

It’s Not All in Your Head

This experiment ended with a “panic attack.” Now, I use quotes here because of a very important realization I made through the power of embrace. I started to feel the anxiety kick in one night. My mind became racy, my body started to shake. “What now?” I thought to myself. “What on earth am I having anxiety about this time?” In the spirit of embrace I told myself “Go ahead, shake. Do whatever you gotta do to move through it.” 

And so I let my body shake, I let my body feel, and in that embrace I didn’t feel any anxious thoughts. Only my body kept shaking, my throat kept tightening, my nervous system felt on edge,and my heart kept racing. These physiological symptoms were starting to cause some anxiety as thoughts of confusion and fear about what was happening to me crept in, but I managed to come back to embrace again and again. Through this process I was able to feel into what was actually happening in my body… The answer: ALLERGIES. I was having a histamine response. I was experiencing inflammation in my airways, brain, and nerves.

I recalled the doctors, friends, and strangers who throughout time had responded to my physical ailments by saying that it was all in my head. And I had some remorse because over time I had started to believe them. 

I’ve meditated, done yoga, said my gratitudes, socialized more, spent more time alone, went to therapy, taken psychedelics, said my daily affirmations. I tried just about everything to “fix” my mind that was plagued with anxiety. And while I did grow a lot throughout that process, I didn’t fix my anxiety because the problem wasn’t all in my head. There was nothing wrong with me.

I just have chronic allergies and inflammation which can be triggered by stress and anxiety and which can also trigger stress and anxiety.

I’m really grateful to have realized this. And I can confidently say that I feel much less anxious. Since I experienced this last “panic attack” or should I say “allergy attack” I’ve still gotten racy thoughts and a quickened heart rate, but instead of asking myself what I’m anxious about I’ve been asking myself what could have triggered this inflammation? And then I make myself some tea, give my throat a massage, and try to get some rest. 

Embrace helped me to turn anxiety into excitement, to relax into the moment, to feel more of everything, to come alive, and… most importantly of all, embrace helped me to get out of my head by realizing that there’s nothing inherently wrong with my head.

Another thing I learned while painting during this experiment is that not everything that is ugly and anxiety-inducing needs to be embraced. Sometimes it’s better to just let go, like letting go of an old canvas filled with weird textures that’s been sitting in the corner of your studio for far too long.