Will I Ever Stop Feeling Anxious?

There’s anxiety and then there’s anxiety. Which is to say, there’s the day-to-day anxiety before a big presentation or party, but then there’s the existential anxiety about whether you and your friends and family are going to survive the coming years. You know this as well as I do.  

And if you’re a part of the queer and trans community, it’s an even more anxious time for a lot of people, on both levels. Life continues to throw plenty of day-to-day anxiety your way, because that’s how life is. But on top of that, there are national politics and funding decisions related to gender-affirming care and other issues, as well as state and local policies related to ongoing book bans and sports participation among other things. All told, there’s a lot to feel anxious about, especially as everything continues to change at a pace that feels overwhelming. 

While other therapy approaches might view your anxiety as a negative thought pattern, trying to work with you to change your thoughts, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) focuses on helping you change your relationship to your anxiety and other thoughts through work to clarify your personal values and priorities and to support your engagement in values-consistent action as a way to co-exist with the anxiety. 

Because at the end of the day, it’s impossible to live an anxiety-free life but there are ways to live within an anxious world without having it feel like you’re drowning under the weight of it all, or like you’re so stressed out that you can’t sleep or eat or hang out with friends. And it’s true, right? When you’re feeling anxious, it’s easy to feel detached from what truly matters and to feel distant from your own life as you get fused with a really rigid and judgemental thought process about your thoughts and yourself. 

If you have a pen and paper, or just want to add some thoughts to your Notes app, it can be helpful to do some journaling about your anxiety, as a first step to better understanding your thoughts so that you can change your relationship to them. Here are some questions to get you started: 

• What are you feeling anxious about? Make a list of everything, from little things to the big, overwhelming ones. 

• How have you tried to solve your anxiety in the past? Think about the ways that you’ve tried to avoid the problems or distract yourself from them as a way to “fix” your anxious thoughts. Write down some examples of those attempts.

• What problem-solving strategies have worked to address your anxiety in the past? These can be short-term or long-term successes, or it’s okay if nothing has worked in the past and you just feel like nothing ever will. Write it down. 

• What is your anxiety keeping you from being able to enjoy in your life? Again, this can be anything from getting to hang out with friends to pursuing gender-affirming care, and everything in between. 

• Now, think about what your anxiety might be trying to do for you. For example, anxiety about a big presentation might be trying to motivate you to prepare more fully, or social anxiety might be trying to protect you from the discomfort of talking with strangers. Write down a couple examples of how your anxiety might be trying to help. 

• What are the core values that drive your life and how might those be in alignment with or in conflict with what your anxiety is trying to do? Values are the core beliefs that we hold as guiding forces for how we live our individual lives. Your values could include creativity, honesty, dependability, compassion, leisure, security, or any other number of guiding concepts. Write down at least 6 values that you feel are important and how they relate to your anxiety. 

As you spend some time getting to know your anxiety more deeply, think about what it feels like to spend time confronting this feeling that you want to stop feeling. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the process, take your time and make space for taking breaks to breathe deeply or go outside to spend some time in nature.

You. might also want to experiment with a mindfulness exercise like this one, known as Leaves on a Stream:

1. Set a timer for 3-4 minutes and find a comfortable place to sit. 

2. Imagine yourself sitting on the bank of a stream, with leaves floating downstream, carried by the current. Maybe there are rapids upstream but by the time the water reaches you, it's calmly flowing along.

3. As you feel an anxious thought come into your mind, imagine it’s on one of the leaves, floating past. Let it drift by. 

4. Allow your thoughts to move at their own pace and continue to place your thoughts on leaves as they pass by. 

5. Notice if your thoughts get stuck or stay in a loop, and continue to place them on different leaves that lazily float down the stream. 

6. As you wrap up, think about what it felt like to acknowledge your thoughts and then simply let them drift away downstream. Think about how you might be able to make space for this kind of visualization in the future, to allow yourself to let go of unhelpful thoughts like anxiety. 

At the end of the day, it takes a lot of energy to try to control or change your anxious thoughts. Journaling and exercises like Leaves on a Stream can help you embrace a different approach through processes that are informed by ACT.    

The six core processes of ACT focus on skills to help you develop psychological flexibility, or “the ability to contact the present moment more fully as a conscious human being, and to change or persist in behavior when doing so serves valued ends.” By developing these skills, you can learn new ways of transforming your relationship to anxiety and other feelings. 

1. Experiential Acceptance involves the active acceptance of your own thoughts and feelings without trying to change their frequency or form.

2. Cognitive Defusion attempts to change the way you interact with or relate to thoughts by creating contexts in which their unhelpful functions are diminished, decreasing the believability of your own unhelpful thoughts, which allows you to witness them without getting stuck in them. 

3. Contact with the Present Moment supports ongoing non-judgmental contact with your thoughts, feelings, and experiences as they happen so that you can experience the world more flexibly in order to take actions that are more grounded and consistent with your values.

4. Self-as-Context empowers you to be aware of your own thoughts, feelings, and experiences without being attached to them.

5. Values are qualities of living that can’t be definitively obtained but serve as a guiding force for your moment-to-moment decisions. 

6. Committed Action empowers you to develop patterns of effective action that support your values. 

If you’re interested in taking further steps to address your anxiety through ACT, working with an experienced therapist can help. At a time when there’s so much happening in the world that are cause for anxiety, it’s critical to change our relationship to anxiety in order to save our energy for making a difference.

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Sarah Lawson

Clinical social work intern

Student therapist at Divergent Path Wellness

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