5 Signs You Are Making Your Anxiety Worse

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Does this sound familiar? To help bring calm to your busy mind, you practice mindfulness and use meditation apps; in the moment, they do seem to help. That’s also when the trouble starts: the more you believe you can control your anxiety, the more anxiety you seem to get. What’s going on?

Making Room for Discomfort

Mindfulness-based practices like the ones included in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy share a key component—making room for difficulty in our lives. This can be a difficult concept to buy into, but it is a necessary and powerful paradigm shift. In essence, the more willing we are to experience difficult thoughts and feelings, the less power they have over our lives.

Here is the strange reality about acceptance. When we make room in our lives for difficulty—when we willingly accept its appearance—we change our relationship with the thoughts and feelings that cause distress. Rather than turning away from pain or anxiety as an enemy to our well-being, we can learn to turn toward our distress—even invite it into our lives.

When we willingly turn toward difficulty, our brain does not view our distress as a threat. If you struggle with physical pain, the brain might turn down the dial as you start pursuing what is important to you despite it. If anxiety is your issue, acceptance can shift your focus from it, so that you can show up and be present in your life.

Acceptance Is a Decision

The biggest struggle we have with acceptance is that it requires an absolute commitment to fully experience whatever comes our way. We either accept our distress, 100%, or we do not accept distress at all. There is no middle ground here. An “I’ll just see if it works for me” attitude won't fly. Acceptance of difficult thoughts and emotions is like jumping off a high cliff into the ocean. Anything less than a full leap into the air and away from the cliff is dangerous.

Dangerous, you say?

Yes, dangerous. When we start to bargain with our mind that we will accept difficulty only under certain conditions, we set our mind on a course to outsmart us. In a sense, we invite the very thing we resist accepting to come to fruition. If you say, “I will accept the anxiety I feel about attending meetings so long as I don’t have to say very much,” you have just put a laser focus on the possibility that someone will ask you a detailed question, which you have decided you cannot accept. This mindset cues a heightened level of anxiety about attending meetings. Remember, when it comes to anxiety, what you don’t want is what you get.

When we fail to practice acceptance, we can make our anxiety worse. Here are five ways half-hearted acceptance shows up:

1. We try to tolerate anxiety. Tolerating distress is to put up with it, not accept it. (If you are not sure about this, just try telling your loved one that you tolerate them and see what kind of reaction you get.) Tolerating is not welcoming or accepting. You're merely waiting for the first chance to escape.
2. We try to endure anxiety. Enduring anxiety is not embracing anxiety. When we accept, we actively make room in our lives by inviting difficulty and distress to move in and stay as long as it wants.
3. We put the focus on trying rather than doing. To cite our previous example, there is no trying to jump off a cliff. A person either jumps or they don’t. Likewise, acceptance is a yes or no commitment. The danger of "trying" is that it implies a withholding. By not embracing whatever happens next—as in, “I will try to go to the store and shop if it is not too hard for me to handle”—you steer your mind to worry about your anxiety levels and if they are too much to handle.
4. We rely on “positive thinking” rather than acceptance. Acceptance is not a belief in our ability to handle anxiety, but a willingness to experience our distress. Using positive affirmations is a misguided way to convince ourselves that we can control anxiety.
5. We try to gain control of anxiety through acceptance. This is by far the most nuanced and difficult misconception to catch. Oftentimes, we are led to believe that mindfulness tools allow us to control what we do not like. But genuine acceptance is not about gaining control. Acceptance means that you have given up your war with anxiety—you are now focused on living your life, come what may.

Acceptance does not mean we look forward to distress, anxiety, or pain in our lives. Acceptance means to make space for all that we will experience. In time, we can welcome difficulty into our lives and learn from it what we can.

Are you ready to change your perspective on anxiety? Try this thought exercise. Picture your distress as a crying infant, wrapped in a blanket and left on your doorstep. How would you hold that infant? More than likely with great compassion, concern, and kindness. In the same way, embrace your anxiety; listen to it, walk with it like you would a hurting friend, and see what happens next. Acceptance can be pleasantly surprising.

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