What if Anxiety is the Wrong Word?

Over the last several years, I’ve noticed that anxiety is often worn as a badge of honor. It is a mental health diagnosis that has been fully adopted by the mainstream. A quick search of anxiety in Google news brought up no less than 3,070,000,000 hits. Apparently, there is much to feel anxious about. It is also a word that is accepted. If you say that you are feeling anxious, no one is going to shy away from you and accuse you of oversharing. It no longer holds the stigma of many other mental health diagnoses. Ultimately, this is great. We want to live in a world in which people can freely talk about mental health struggles. However, I have begun to wonder if as a society we use anxiety with so much freedom that it has become diluted. We live in an incredibly fast paced world. Being insanely busy and working too much is celebrated. Thus expressing feelings of anxiety is a natural extension of that kind of existence. We are pushed to constantly feel anxious because we exist in a world in which nothing is ever enough. By being constantly tied to email and texts we can never escape the demands of our work worlds. We need to be accessible 24 hours a day. Why wouldn’t this cause anxiety? And there are broader issues that fill us with dis-ease: climate, gun violence, a deeply broken political system, and recovering from a pandemic- to name a few. What does anxiety really mean though? If you say, “I’m feeling anxious about work,” what information does that actually provide? Let’s try a mental exercise here for a second. Think of something that is currently making you feel anxious. In your head say, “I’m feeling anxious about __________.” Now contemplate if you learned anything about how you are feeling. I’m guessing that you didn’t. Now try this. Use the same sentence, “I’m feeling anxious about _________ and then finish it with “because ______________.” What else came up for you? Were you more precise? Let me offer you an example of my own. I’ve made a huge life change recently. I left the world of public education to enter into being a therapist full time. This has been an incredibly hard and scary move to make. Even so, I have been pretty excited by this career change but as I have gotten closer to starting up my practice, I am feeling the familiar pangs of nerves in my stomach. Simply put, my anxiety is up. Let me also be really clear that I do believe strongly that anxiety is true, real, and can be incredibly debilitating. In no way do I want to minimize the impact that it has on millions of people. That said, let’s get back to my career change example. The last couple of mornings, I’ve woken up at around 3:45 am with my mind spinning and nerves gnawing at my gut. “I’m so anxious,” I said later in the day. I challenged myself even as I said it to be more precise with my language. “What other emotion is your anxiety masking?” When pushed to look more closely at what I was feeling I was able to come to this conclusion. “I’m anxious because I’m scared that I will fail. I’m afraid that I won’t be good enough to meet the expectations of others. What if I can’t be enough?” Whoa. There it was. Anxiety wasn’t the right word. On this occasion, the right word was scared. Deeper than that was the understanding that I was scared of failure. I was scared of failure not because I didn’t think that I would be an effective but that I wouldn’t be good enough for others. Why does it matter if anxiety isn’t the right word? Isn’t expressing anxious feelings enough? I’m going to argue that it isn’t. It is a start but just expressing that you feel anxious about something doesn’t shine light on what is really being experienced. It is hard to make anxiety feel manageable if it forever stays this vague feeling floating through your body. It’s too big of a word and thus it garners too much power. If I had simply accepted that I was feeling anxious about my career move, I would have spent the next week and a half filled with nervous energy without a clear sense of how to tame it. Now, having a deeper understanding that I am scared of failing I can challenge the thoughts instead of letting them run rampant. What would it be like if we all started being more authentic about our emotions by not using default words like anxious? It would make us more vulnerable but it would also allow us to more freely share ourselves with others. We all know what it feels like to be scared, sad, furious or elated. It is part of the human experience. Let’s practice the act of reminding each other of our humanity. Let’s meet each other with a preciseness of language that allows for deeper connection in our external and internal worlds. I’m going first… I feel anxious about publishing this article because I’m scared it won’t be well received. To hell with it though- moments of vulnerability are what bring the greatest change.