How Perfectionists Use Anxiety to Cope with Depression

A sense of hopelessness can be a coping mechanism for anxiety and anxiety a balm for hopelessness. We don't always know which we prefer.

Perfectionists tend to fluctuate between feeling an inordinate amount of control and feeling completely despondent. They go from the mindset of "I can do anything" to "I'm completely useless," from taking on too much responsibility to taking on none.

It may be challenging to think of anxiety as a way to cope, as most of us search for ways to manage our anxiety rather than increase it. But with anxiety, itself the fear of the unknown and unpredictable, there can also be a great deal of hope.

Some even continually find reasons to be anxious, stoking the flames of their worries as they perpetuate their sense of control. Worrying only matters, and makes sense (due to how much energy it extracts), if one feels as though it's practical, even if the belief is more unconscious. Worrying is energizing, firing up the fight or flight system to facilitate decision-making. Again, the antithesis of anxiety tends to be hopelessness, which was indicated by two prominent psychologists.

Charlotte Nickerson writes, "Martin Seligman and Steven F. Maier first identified learned helplessness as a phenomenon in the 1960s. These psychologists conducted experiments on dogs, finding that, when exposed to repeated shocks that they could not control, the animals refrained from taking action when they could prevent the shocks." Rather than worried, after repeated threats, the pups appeared depressed, becoming completely passive and seemingly numb. Their bodies discontinued exerting the energy needed to survive. In some sense, the dogs realized that worrying was a waste of effort.

Many of the patients I've encountered over the years would almost do anything, no matter how absurd, to prevent boredom (refusing to even engage in non-goal-directed activities), because, to them, boredom signified the beginnings of depressive episodes. So, some of them were, one can say, preoccupied or obsessed with anxiety, which was the precursor of activity and purpose, no matter how trivial the worries or frenzied pursuits.

Framing anxiety as a compulsive (or soothing) activity can be helpful because it allows patients to accept some degree of responsibility in the maintenance of their worries. They come to realize that their worries help them feel important, effective, and in control, even if the aspects of their lives that they chronically worry about are, in reality, mostly outside of their control.

Worrying can be an insidious drug, which needs a higher dosage with each problem you fix. You may worry about your mother's depression, so you resolve to make her happy. But, the personal effect of each new cultivated moment of joy is slowly diminished as you accept how helpless you are in actually curing her.

Therefore, becoming resentful at your mild influence on her well-being, you instead seek out a grander problem, whether it's solving your dysfunctional family dynamics or tackling climate change. Each disappointment becomes the basis of a new grander vision.

So, when the final fix doesn't occur, which it hardly ever does, the perfectionist is left with her sense of hopelessness and lack of importance. This is where the most difficult part of treatment tends to begin.

If you've acknowledged how and why you've used worrying to cope with existential and personal grief, you can now explore and attempt to learn to sit with those relentlessly bubbling feelings. At this stage, the fixer, more often than not, is exposed to her existential circumstances and personal shame.

She's faced with the reality of not being special and the disappointment she's brought to those who purportedly love her. She may have achieved, but it was never enough. She may have cared enough to worry, but was still too selfish because she didn't worry enough. She did everything right, yet her life, somehow, turned out completely wrong. Her seeming addiction to worrying betrayed her belief that while wasn't special just yet, she neared approval.

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Letting go of some of the excessive worry entails discarding your need to be special, or better yet, your need to be perfect. This may also mean your need to be loved by someone who couldn't.