You know when you’ve had a perfectly ordinary conversation and then spend the next three hours wondering whether you said something wrong?
Or when someone seems a bit off with you and your brain immediately starts putting together a list of all the possible reasons, most of which involve something you’ve done?
Or when you finally get into bed, exhausted, and your brain decides that NOW is the ideal time to revisit every embarrassing thing you’ve ever said, every decision you’ve ever made and every possible disaster that might happen tomorrow?
That’s anxiety.
Anxiety can be absolutely exhausting. And one of the most frustrating things about it is that you can KNOW you’re overthinking. You can know that the thing you’re worrying about is unlikely to happen. You can tell yourself you’re being unreasonable.
And still not be able to stop.
Because anxiety isn’t always something you can reason your way out of. If it were, most of us would have sorted it out years ago. Sometimes your brain is trying to protect you. It’s looking for problems before they happen, preparing you for the worst and trying to make sure nothing catches you off guard.
The trouble is, you can end up spending your entire life preparing for things that never happen, while missing out on the life that’s actually happening.
And that’s a lot of energy to spend on a future that hasn’t arrived.
But what if there’s a reason you do this?
I’m not going to tell you that all anxiety comes from your childhood, or that every anxious person has experienced trauma. That absolutely can be true. But, sometimes, the way we respond to things now makes a little more sense when we understand what we’ve experienced before.
Perhaps you’ve learnt that people can change their minds about you without warning. You’ve spent years trying to keep everyone happy because other people’s reactions have never felt particularly safe, or you’ve had experiences that have left you feeling as though you need to be prepared for the worst.
You might be dealing with a lot right now, and your mind genuinely hasn’t had a chance to catch up.
There isn’t one explanation that fits everyone. But I think it’s worth being curious about your anxiety rather than treating it as another thing about yourself that needs fixing.
Because there’s a difference between asking yourself, Why am I like this? and asking, What might be going on for me?
One tends to end in criticism. The other leaves a little room for understanding. And if you’re already giving yourself a hard enough time, you probably don’t need another reason to feel like you’re getting things wrong.
You don’t have to earn the right to switch off
Something I think we underestimate is just how much of our lives can become organised around anxiety.
We overthink decisions. We avoid things that feel uncomfortable. We seek reassurance. We try to get everything right and take responsibility for things that aren’t ours to carry.
Sometimes, we become so good at managing everything that nobody realises how hard we’re working just to feel okay.
You might be the person everyone else relies on, holding down a job, raising children, looking after other people or dealing with circumstances that would leave anyone feeling overwhelmed.
You might also be doing absolutely everything you can to keep your own head above water. All can be true.
You don’t have to wait until you fall apart before you acknowledge that something is difficult. You don’t have to prove that things are bad enough to deserve support.
And you don’t have to turn your recovery into another project where you set yourself impossible expectations and then feel rubbish when you can’t meet them.
Sometimes, the starting point is simply recognising that you’re struggling. Not fixing it. Not explaining it away. Not telling yourself that other people have it worse. Just being honest about where you are.
So, where does counselling come into this?
Counselling isn’t going to give you a guarantee that nothing bad will ever happen. Nobody can offer you that.
I’m not going to pretend that a few conversations will magically stop your brain from doing the thing it’s been doing for years. But counselling can give you somewhere to start making sense of it all.
Somewhere you don’t have to keep everything together for someone else and you can say the thing you’ve been going over in your head for weeks, without worrying about how it’s going to sound.
You can explore what’s happening for you, what you’re feeling and what you need, without someone immediately jumping in to tell you what you should do about it. You might just need the space to understand yourself. And maybe, over time, to stop treating every anxious thought as something you have to act on, solve or get rid of.
You don’t have to become someone who never worries. You don’t have to get to a place where nothing bothers you. You’re a human being. Things are going to affect you.
But you can get to a place where anxiety doesn’t get quite so much say in how you live your life.
And that seems like a worthwhile place to start. If anxiety is taking up more space in your life than you’d like, you don’t have to figure it all out before asking for support.
I offer counselling in Norwich and online across the UK.