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Understanding Anxiety: Are We Addressing the Symptoms or Targeting the Root Cause?
Your smartwatch can tell you're anxious, but can it tell you why?
Sol TV
January 21, 2025
Smart watches are made to do a lot of things: Tell time, alert us to calls and messages, measure our heart rates and sleep patterns, and even tell us when we're feeling anxious—as if anyone needs to be notified about that. These days, we're so mindful of stress and triggers that we’ve developed what psychologists now call... "anxiety about anxiety"—a meta-worry that transforms natural stress responses into perceived crises. Every moment of uncertainty triggers a need for immediate resolution.
What got us here? Because so many people have been treating anxiety as a problem that needs to be eliminated, we've become intolerant of uncertainty. Our attempts to control and eradicate anxiety are making it worse. Data backs this up: Despite a sharp increase in anti-anxiety medication prescriptions over the past four decades, anxiety rates continue to soar. The more tools we develop to fight anxiety, the more anxious we seem to become.
The solution isn't another breathing app or grounding technique. It's recognizing that maybe, just maybe, anxiety isn't always the enemy.
One of the kindest things we can do for ourselves is to simply let anxiety be without judgment or the need to fix it immediately. Feeling uneasy sometimes is okay—it's part of being human. Kindness also extends to understanding why we feel anxious, gently unearthing the roots of those feelings with compassion, not condemnation.
Unpacking the Roots of Anxiety
The physical sensations of anxiety—a racing heart, shallow breaths, knots in your stomach—are rarely just about the present moment. They are often the body's way of remembering or expressing the pain of old wounds from your past. These wounds might stem from:
Childhood Experiences
Imagine a child repeatedly criticized for expressing their emotions, learning to suppress their feelings to avoid disapproval. As an adult, that individual might experience intense anxiety in situations where they feel vulnerable or judged. They also may avoid commitment altogether due to a lack of love or affection received as a child.
Unresolved Conflicts
A past betrayal, a significant loss, or a long-held resentment can simmer beneath the surface, manifesting as generalized anxiety.
Attachment Patterns
Early relationships, particularly with primary caregivers, shape people’s "attachment style"—how we relate to others and manage intimacy. An insecure attachment style, formed in response to inconsistent or unreliable caregiving, can lead to persistent anxiety in adult relationships. For instance, someone with an anxious attachment style might constantly fear abandonment, leading to clinginess and anxiety in their romantic partnerships.
The Avoidance Trap
Knowing the source of your anxiety is a start, but it's not the whole solution. We often make things worse by avoiding what makes us anxious. We get good at dodging situations, people, or even thoughts that trigger our anxiety. More specifically, you become the friend who habitually calls off plans, the coworker who delegates presentations, or someone who overloads their schedule to avoid being alone with their thoughts. By avoiding triggers, we never learn that our fears are often exaggerated or baseless and that avoidance prevents us from building resilience and discovering our strengths.
Rethinking Anxiety: Two Methods You Haven't Tried
This may sound counterintuitive, but if you genuinely want to manage your anxiety, you need to sit with it, look at it, and even come back to it. Here are two tips that will help you unlock a new perspective on what stresses you out—and why:
1) Make an Anxiety "Time Capsule"
When experiencing a wave of anxiety, take a moment to write down or record a detailed account of the thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations you’re having at that moment. Also, try to answer these two questions: What triggered it? And what stories are you telling yourself that are making things worse? When you’re done, file away what you wrote, digitally or physically, but give it a specific “open date,” such as one month or six months. When the time comes, revisit your record.
This exercise lets you gain perspective on how your anxiety changes over time. Often, the intensity and perceived severity of anxious moments are less significant in hindsight. You might even notice patterns in your triggers or thought processes.
2) Create an "Observer Self" Journal
If you’re not into self-reflection, practice writing about yourself in the third person as a detached observer. When you're feeling anxious, describe the thoughts, feelings, and sensations without judgment, as if they're happening to a character in a movie.
For example, instead of writing, "I'm so anxious about this presentation, I can't breathe," try "He is experiencing a rapid heartbeat and shallow breathing. He's thinking about the upcoming presentation and imagining negative outcomes." This technique creates psychological distance, allowing you to examine your anxiety without getting swept away by it.
Along the Same Lines…
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Mona & The Sol TV Team ❤️
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