Why I Wish My Patients Were More Anxious

Stress and anxiety—the very words can fill us with loathing and dread. This is a shame, since, after years of clinical work and research, I’ve come to believe that these emotions can enrich our lives and help us adapt creatively to an ever-changing world (when properly understood and managed).

Understanding stress

Let’s focus on stress. Stress can help us recognize when we are running low on resources, thus serving as a proverbial canary in the coalmine that allows us to rebalance before things get worse. Those who recalibrate in times of stress end up living healthier, stronger, more connected lives.

Jenn is a mother of three young children who also holds down a full-time job as a family law paralegal. Her husband’s work requires frequent travel, which makes caring for their kids very challenging. Jenn is grateful for her healthy family and stable income, but her tears start flowing quickly once she sits down in my office.

“I'm feeling a lot of panic, including difficulty catching my breath and heart palpitations. I'm having mood swings. Sometimes I get all angry, and then I get afraid I can't control myself, which makes me feel really anxious about everything," she says.

She keeps speaking, and I patiently wait for her to finish. I then smile and say, “Jenn, I have good news for you, and bad news for you.”

She asks for the bad news first.

“You’re so stressed out that you’ve become a bundle of nerves!” I say.

“So, what’s the good news?” Jenn asks.

“The good news is that stress is actually very simple to treat,” I respond.

I go on to explain that the overwhelming feelings of stress follow an almost mathematical formula: The amount of demand being placed on your system (e.g., having work responsibilities, dealing with a sick child at school, emotional strain), minus the amount of resources you have to draw on (e.g., family, friends, time, money), equals the level of stress you will experience at any given moment.

I then explain that there are two, and only two, potential solutions to stress. One: You can increase your resources. Or two: You can reduce the demands you are facing. Ideally, you should do both.

“So, what should I do?” Jenn asks.

“Well, you could increase your resources by getting more sleep and bolstering your child-care supports. As for decreasing demands, perhaps reduce your work hours or practice saying no at work a bit more?”

Jenn looks stunned. It hadn’t occurred to her that the solution could be so basic.

Two weeks later, Jenn came back for a follow-up appointment, having tried a few of these strategies–and a few more of her own. She reported feeling a ton better and said something truly profound: “I didn't realize the blessing of feeling stressed. If I hadn’t started to feel so uncomfortable, I would have just sucked it up and soldiered on. Now I feel like I have the beginning of a plan going forward.”

Stress can save your life

I would go as far as to say that stress—if you listen to it and make key changes—can save your life. Cardiac heart disease is the number one killer in America^[i], but it often goes undetected. Having high blood pressure can be fatal over time^[ii], but that’s also often unnoticeable. Similarly, cancer is often treatable and non-fatal but only when detected and treated early, before it can develop and spread^[iii].

In the exact same vein, when people have anxiety-like symptoms due to stress, their body is alerting them to the fact that something needs to change. If we attend to the discomfort—by bolstering resources and decreasing demands—we can turn our lives around and get back on track.

By contrast, those who ignore stress typically get into serious trouble. First, there are often physical health consequences of long-term stress, which can include cardiac disease^[iv], high blood pressure^[v], cancer^[vi], autoimmune diseases^[vii], metabolic syndromes^[viii], postoperative medical complications^[ix], and general all-cause mortality^[x]. More immediately though, many people turn to maladaptive behaviors when suffering from stress, such as alcohol, substances, and overeating.

For these reasons, I sometimes wish that my patients would be more anxious! This is because anxiety-like symptoms can increase our motivation to get help sooner. In these regards, the discomfort from anxiety is often a catalyst to recognizing that something is out of balance, thereby giving us a chance to rectify the situation while we still can.