Repurposing Anxiety

I’ve spent most of my life living with anxiety.

I was first diagnosed with anxiety at age 5 and was promptly prescribed liquid Prozac that would be added to my morning YooHoo before school. Doused in DSM IV labels, designated the patient of the family, and left without any useful tools to cope with my anxiety, my childhood was not something I particularly enjoyed.

But, oddly, I found a lot of comfort in the future. Yes, there was the usual fixations on natural disasters and feelings of danger that were hard to shake, but I found respite in imagining my future. A future that didn’t include the fear and chaos that made my day-to-day so difficult.

I remember the first time a psychiatrist told me she was surprised that I thought about the future so positively. I would lose myself in the fantasy of what could be, using my mind’s eye to craft something so real that I could feel its edges. Supposedly, a depressed, anxious person is not supposed to be thinking about the future in that way. But I never really gave up hope of something better.

It was an odd duality. Fearing the“what ifs” in one moment, and trying to soothe my nervous system with my imagination in the next. Eventually the medications got sorted out, a new mental health team was pulled together and I started to experience a life not dictated by anxiety and depression.

Reflecting on it, the longest relationship I’ve ever had is with my anxiety. With the right systems of support in place, I began to take charge of our relationship. Instead of a harbinger of doom, I repurposed my anxiety into something better. Something more practical.

I made anxiety an instrument for positive imagination.

Each time that “what if” took over my thoughts, I wrangled it to the ground and pulled it apart. I took that “what if” and repurposed it for the complete opposite.

What if it all goes horribly wrong? Became what if it all goes wonderfully right?

Something that always struck me about anxiety and fear is how much of it can be a closed loop. If you’re in an environment where the dominant feelings and beliefs are perpetuated by fear, it’s hard to see any alternatives. We keep spinning round and round, the anxiety growing into a mass that seems unsurmountable. We can’t possibly fathom anything else besides an existence plagued by dread.

But when there are alternatives, that doom loop can start to break. I think my childhood anxiety would have been a lot less damaging if I wasn’t fed a constant diet of fear and danger.

We live in systems that are fueled by fear. Fear of scarcity. Fear of suffering. Fear of the unknown. And pulling apart that fear on a strictly intellectual/mental/conceptual basis is all well and good, but it doesn’t change the feelings we have. We’re living in these systems. We’re feeling in these systems.

But what if we felt into better futures? What if we felt into those alternatives? Just as younger me used to embed myself in imaginary sensations of a hoped-for future, I find myself putting on the feelings from the future that I want to embrace right now. Feelings of joy, awe, humor. It may feel inaccessible in the moment when anxiety is holding me hostage, but with some practice, I can take that anxiety off like an old t-shirt and put on something a little more suitable, like a cashmere sweater.

We’re living in anxious times. Our world is full of fears. And that’s totally valid. But I wonder if it’s possible to repurpose our anxieties into tools for possibilities. If we can exercise our imaginations in search of alternatives, and experiment with the sensations we want to feel, perhaps we can stop the doom loop. Perhaps our reptilian brains will retire and we can leverage our most amazing human capability of imagination for something a lot more fun.

I’m going to keep working at it. Here’s to making the doom loop obsolete and letting ourselves embrace feelings from the future.

Ari Mostov is a narrative strategist. She works with innovators to craft irresistible futures. Learn more www.wellplay.world