ESCAPE the Comfort Trap: Learning to Use Anxiety as Fuel
I frequently will work with athletes and high-performing individuals who share with me their crippling anxieties that they think keep them from being their best. Whether deliberately or not, their discomfort with these anxieties, leads them to become trapped in a cycle of avoiding what makes them anxious by seeking out things of comfort and ease. They want to operate in a space where they feel able and competent to tackle the task at hand. On the surface, this may seem fine, preferred even. What could be so bad about navigating the world with a sense of ease? But when you dig a bit deeper, we begin to see how staying in this “comfort zone” keeps us from pushing the limits that are necessary for growth, learning, and frankly, any real impact, whether in sport or life.
The emotional counter to comfort is anxiety, and as a result of this, we internally code anxiety as something bad, something to be avoided. But anxiety is a normal and healthy emotion that all humans experience. It’s a way to signal to our brain and body that we should prepare for action. This reaction is actually part of what contributes to peak performance and sustained attention. As a result, we don’t need to get rid of our anxiety; we just need to learn how to respond to it differently. Not by seeking the immediate relief through what gives us a sense of comfort, but rather by using it as fuel.
“But my anxiety is just too much. It’s not something I can use to help because it is a problem. And don’t I need to fix this problem?” I hear some version of this response all the time when I encourage folks to start to see their anxiety as fuel for tackling the stressor in front of them as opposed to getting rid of it. Anxiety becomes disordered when its intensity is disproportionate to the anxiety-provoking event. With this heightened response, we move quickly into flight, fight or freeze mode, mechanisms of our evolved biology to keep us safe from danger – to keep us alive. But the anxiety-provoking events we experience in today’s world, though they trigger the same physiological response whether we’re in a stressful situation or a life or death situation– increased heart rate, sweaty palms, intensified breathing – are usually not matters of survival. Your ego may be at stake, but your life isn’t.
Consequently, our strategies of escape and avoidance in response to anxiety aren’t effective like they once were for us when we needed to regularly ensure physical safety. In fact, they tend to reinforce the innate messaging that those behaviors – escaping or avoiding – are what is keeping us safe and therefore, are necessary to keep doing. So, we cancel our public speaking events, we avoid taking the big shot at the end of the game, we delay that difficult conversation with a friend or partner, or we don’t take calculated risks at work because we may be seen as a failure. These avoidant behaviors only reinforce our body and brain’s belief that these scenarios are truly dangerous and that we can’t handle them, creating a feedback loop of a heightened anxiety response when these situations inevitably show up again.
Instead of perpetuating our anxiety by avoiding these stressful situations and seeking a more comfortable out, we need to find useful ways to move through our anxiety and use it as fuel for our performance.
Connect with a values-aligned action that matters more than the discomfort you’ll experience from anxiety. Write that down and keep it somewhere you can see as a reminder in the moments when you feel your anxiety coming on.
Shift your perspective of anxiety from something that you dread or even fear to a mechanism that is preparing your body and mind for optimal performance.
Change your rules around anxiety from: I’ll do this until I feel too overwhelmed to I will do these even when I feel anxiety. Find grounding and relaxation techniques to help you manage this (more on this coming in a later post).
Build emotional muscles the same way you build physical strength: the more you practice something the stronger the wiring in your brain will become. You can do hard things and withstand discomfort but this takes practice and time!
Let go of perfection – develop a growth mindset by asking yourself what skills or supports you may need to acquire to address this problem differently, more effectively.
Let go of the belief that when life doesn’t go smoothly or isn’t easy then it’s bad and time to quit.
Change how you perceive situations by noticing what distorted thoughts you may have and countering it with evidence. This strategy is not functional in the time of heightened stress and anxiety so it will be necessary for you to have awareness of your automatic negative thoughts and the narratives that effectively combat those in your particular situation.
Expose yourself to anxiety-provoking situations in small steps. Build a hierarchy of tolerance, starting first with the small stressors and building up to the stressors you tend to avoid all together.
Write down goals that are connected to moving through your anxiety. Start small and make them realistic. Remember to take note of your accomplishments and growth along the way.
Practice patience and compassion with yourself in this process. And remember, you aren’t alone in this!